Mail

The different subjective position of the British Imperialists in China did not create any practical necessity to translate in the Chinese context. And therefore, it did not lead to the translations of any such works of law or philosophy in the Western language. Apart from two translations of a romantic Chinese novel into English, an anonymous one in 1761, followed by that of J.E. Davis, the earliest translations from the Chinese were those of the religious texts, generally undertaken by the missionaries, who were almost always, the heralds of imperialism unlike the Indian counterparts where the translations undertaken were more secular in nature and had a greater political approach. We thus have James Medhurst's translation of The Shoo King or the Historical Classics (1846) and James Legge's (1814-97) complete translation of the Confucian Analects and of some of the texts of Taoism. Samuel Beale, a naval chaplain, in about the 1850s translated various Buddhist works from the Chinese. Another important translator was Herbert Giles (1845-1935). His translations encompassed a wider area, selecting texts from Philosophy (e.g. Chuen Tza Mystic, Moralist and Social Reformer), poetry (e.g. Chinese Poetry in English Verses) and classical prose (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Gems from Chinese Literature).

China was erased or suppressed in the Western consciousness up until Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound who come late in the History of British Imperialism, almost towards the decline of its colonial enterprise. But in the heydays of British colonialism, no parallel to, say, Arnold's engagement with India, in terms of a Western scholar's engagement with China could be found. It could be persuasively argued, then, that such erasure or suppression, almost a political parallel to that erasure of Annette Valon in The Prelude which Spivak has persuasively argued for in 'In Other Worlds', is a compensatory psychological mechanism for a repeated political and commercial failure to integrate China into the British Empire. Wolfgang Franke in his work China and the West reasons, "The West in the nineteenth and the twentieth century were lesser ready to understand China, than China was to understand the West" (Franke 1967: 140). This change in attitude came about more after the Treaty of Nankeen in which the balance tilted in West's favour and the Western missionaries got the protection from the Imperial masters. Since China was not a direct colony, the West was also saved from the administrative bothering, which was there in the case of India. Hence the English had absolutely no requirement to engage with Chinese language and culture. Though in the mid eighteenth century, Voltaire and some of his contemporaries had found a source of profound wisdom in China; this interest was really short lived. What is not translated is dismissed as trivial or unworthy. Paradoxically, however, this establishes a similarity also with India because what is conquered is equally dismissed as trivial or unworthy.

The fact that Chinese literature, in spite of having a long and rich history, remains for so long out of the reach of the West is as much a result of the West's failure to integrate it as a part of its colonial property, as also of China's xenophobic tendencies which isolated it from the rest of the world. Some Chinese policies like kowtowing before the Emperor were injurious to the British sense of dignity and this also forced these foreigners to remain away from China for quite a long time. Conversely then, the growing interest of the British in Indian philosophy and literature is closely related to the rise in the English colonial engagements in India.

A study of the English translations of both these countries reveal another major difference in the attitudes of both these countries - a profusion of attempts by the Indians to render their texts in English translations is starkly contrasted with an absence of any such endeavors in China. The response of the Indians to represent their works in English translation is an evidence of a complex psychology of the colonized. On the one hand there is obviously the desire to earn approbation from their Western masters by presenting their literature in English, but on the other hand, a xenophobic tendency can also be discerned which attempts to dislodge the Western notion of its superiority by giving them a taste of the Indian antiquities. China, not having a long colonial history at its back and being able to check Western invasion with considerable success was free from this muddling psychological complexity. Not only that, Western language, culture or literature was also largely ignored by the Chinese, because of the latter's contempt for Christianity and everything associated with it. Even after the May Fourth Movement, when they started translating the Western classics finally into English, the desire to render their own work into any European language is surprisingly absent.

Contrastingly, the desire amongst the Indians to translate their indigenous works into English marks the beginning of a new epoch of translation in India, which was preceded by an age of British, or European monopoly as translators of the Indian texts into Western languages. It was Tagore's winning of the Nobel Prize in 1913, which symbolised the recognition of the intellectual capacities of the East by the West, and which spurred the Indian efforts towards the renderings of their own texts in English.

In spite of the difference in the terms of the texts translated from the Indian and the Chinese and in the quality and ideology of these translations, certain parallels can be drawn between the English translations from the literature of both these countries. Almost always, the colonialist's translations were from the texts belonging to the ancient past of the colonies - from which they could unearth gems of the ancient wisdom, for example, both Confucian texts as well as the Gita appealed to the West for their philosophies. This tendency amongst the early imperialists, to find seeds of wisdom in the texts of the past is a strategy to negate or suppress the 'present' in the colonies which is necessary to maintain the position of ideological supremacy and also to give validity to their self-constructed doctrine of the 'White man's burden'; their attitude being to restore the East from its current fallen state by the means of Western enlightenment. Contrastingly, however, the books translated from European to either Chinese or Indian languages are always those belonging to the contemporary period or otherwise, the Bible, further validating the notion of the enlightened West and the dark East. Robert Morrison in 1823 made the Bible available to the Chinese by translating it in their language and in the Indian context this task was undertaken much earlier, by William Carey, the missionary who tried to make the text available to the Indians in a number of regional languages and also helped in establishing The Bible Society of India in 1811. Some of the books that had been translated from English into Chinese by the native scholars in the early phase of such translations are Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (Trans. 1894-95), Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nation (Trans. 1897-1901, pub. 1901), John S. Mill's On Liberty (Trans. 1899, pub. 1903), etc. ¹

In both these countries, such translations as well as the study of the original Western classics had a great impact on the indigenous form, content and literature. One such example in the Indian context is the sonnet form introduced in Bengali literature by Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Indigenous Chinese literature too underwent a sea change in both form and content under the influence of the Western literature, though in their case, unlike their Indian counterpart, English was not the only dominating influence. Russian, German and other Western literature too asserted their own presence in form of the translated works. The introduction of English teaching in the Indian education system, which was actually done to cater to the ruling country's need for the English knowing native intelligentsia for the smooth running of the administrative machinery, equipped the Indians to read the English classics in their original forms though translations were also made available in a number of cases. China did not have any such direct access to the Western literature.

Wolfgang Franke says the following in his work China and the West:

"because of the exclusive orientation towards Europe of the Western academic study, Oriental civilizations were studied in the first instance purely on the basis of their importance for the civilization of the West"

(Franke 1967: 145)

Sanskrit, therefore, occupies an important place in Western scholarship by virtue of its being considered to be an Indo-European language by Europeans. Similarly Confucianism drew Western attention for the similarity that the West could trace between it and early Christianity. It is thus not just intercultural diversity but also a certain amount of cultural and morphological similarity is necessary to generate and sustain the interest in translation from one language to another.

This factor of diversity also worked as a hindrance to translation from Chinese to English, as the language itself appeared to be 'formidable' and 'bewildering' to the West, 'rendering the problems of equivalence among the languages almost absurd' (Schwab 1984: 6) The orientalist, E.D. Ross recommended the study of the Chinese language because 'it is fascinating to try and puzzle out, say the writing on… a Chinese tea-set' (Schwab 1984: 20). The written Chinese characters generally represented the meanings of the word rather than its pronunciation, while in the Roman as well as in the Indian scripts the characters represented sounds, which formed different combinations to make different words having particular meanings. Therefore translation of Chinese works, particularly poetry, became a matter of great difficulty. Much later when Arthur Waley took up the task of translating from Chinese, he had to find a way to deal with this problem. The solution that he arrived at was the use of sprung rhythm in the English versions of the poems. As the entry on Waley in the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English says,

"In the Chinese original, the rhythm in a given line is dependent on the alteration between syllables, each unit distinguished by a different 'tone' quality. English, on the other hand, is an accented language. To solve this problem, Waley adopted 'sprung rhythm'… he tried to have the number of stressed syllables per English lines equal to the number of syllables in a Chinese line, disregarding the number of unstressed syllables within."

(Classe 2000: 96) ²

Lack of any motive apart from the curiosity in the exoticism of the pictorial script of the Chinese led to a dearth of Western interest in the Chinese language. Curiosity formed a part of their engagement with Indian literature as well, as Warren Hastings wrote in the letter to the Chairman of the East India Company, forwarding Wilkins's translation of the Gita: "I presume to offer, and to recommend through you, for an offering to the public, a very curious specimen of the literature, the mythology, and the Morality of the ancient Hindus" (Wilkins 1785: 5). According to Sharpe, this introduction was particularly necessary because Hastings "knew very well that a philosophical discourse was unlikely to appeal to the hard-headed businessmen who administered 'John Company' ". (Sharpe, 6)

The politics of translation operating in the age of colonialism signals that cultural relativity is not the only factor that determines either quality or quantity of the texts translated. The position of the imperial power in the dominated countries and the extent of direct engagement with the colonies play an important role in determining its translational strategies. What gets translated and how is a result of the coloniser's need to represent, suppress, or erase the colonial presence in order to maintain its political, economic as well as ideological supremacy. On the other hand, translatability is also affected by the colonised's engagement with this act of translation itself and this is clearly reflected by the difference in attitudes of the Chinese and the Indians towards their translations of their literature into English or any other Western language. India was part of the Empire and China was beyond it; translation between English and Chinese languages (in either direction) and those between English and Indian languages are amply shaped by and reflects this empirical fact.

PREV | TOP | NEXT