The influence of James Legge on later English translations of the Confucian classics

Abstract

To this day James Legge (1815-1897) remains the only person to translate all Four Books & Five Classics into English. The prefaces, notes, and indexes of these massive tomes continue to be praised and consulted by scholars over a century after the Oxford professor’s death. Despite there being dozens of newer renderings of parts of the canon, Legge’s is still generally considered the standard. How great, then, is Legge’s influence on other translators? How much of their work is original and how much is recasting of Legge? How much of our standard terminology do we owe to him? This thesis assesses the influence of James Legge on later translators from the perspectives of vocabulary, hermeneutics, and scholarship. In so doing it aims to create greater awareness of the debt owed by Chinese-English translators to Legge as well as to what extent modern translators might be trapped in unfortunate century-old conventions. It uncovers that Legge was instrumental in shaping the views of later translators regarding especially Chinese religion. His opinion that the entity Shangdi is the same being as the Christian God has been uncritically adopted by almost all translators under review. Furthermore, Legge also helped shape the modern conventions for translating ancient Chinese noble titles and posthumous epithets. In general, Legge popularized a domesticating approach to Chinese translation that seeks to reduce the cultural distance between East and West by keeping the number of borrowed Chinese words to a minimum. This contrasts markedly with conventions in translating from South Asian or Middle Eastern languages. However, it was also discovered that important Confucian concepts like benevolence (ren 仁), gentleman (junzi 君子), and rites (li 禮) were in fact not coined by Legge. While later translators self-admittedly have referred to Legge for their apprehension of the meaning of the source text, they seem to want to put their own mark on the finished product by not using the exact same words as Legge. His influence on later translators is therefore primarily as a semantic reference point rather than as a source of verbatim coinages.