Classical Chinese Language and Translation

The paper summarizes current knowledge on the paleographical evidence for rén 仁 and its earliest variants. It is argued that no reliable attestations of the character exist prior to the mid-Warring States period. The variants recently discovered in the Guōdiàn and Shàngbó corpuses and elsewhere are shown to be predominantly based on phonetic principles which can be explained in a systematic fashion using current models of reconstruction. Proceeding
from Baxter’s (1991) arguments for rén as a cognate of Written Tibetan snying (heart; mind) and extending it to Tibeto-Burman congeners, a final section speculates about a chain shift, which propelled rén from its Sino-Tibetan meanings to an ethical notion harnessed by early
Confucianism. This shift left a lexical gap which was quickly filled by xīn 心 and ài 愛.

This article investigates 所 suǒ character in Classical Chinese, attempting to provide a proper syntactic analysis of it and its countless usages through relevant quotations taken from Classical texts. The Classical 所suǒ, in a way similar to its counterpart in Modern Chinese, is a sort of clitic; for this reason, its position is always fixed with respect to other elements in the clause. It can be used as a substitute; to make the passive; for the nominalization of a verb, etc. Due to the numerous usages of this Chinese character, according to many Classical Chinese scholars, 所 suǒ is very difficult to understand. Therefore, I want to give a simple explanation of it, results from years of research and study.

Sutra of Miscellaneous Jewels which reads Za-Baozang-Jing (雜寳藏經) in Chinese, is a Buddhist Literature translated into Classical Chinese by Sramana Kekaya and Tanyao around 472 C.E. Chattopadhyaya (1977) suggested its original Sanskrit title Saṃyukta Ratnapiṭaka Sūtra. This voluminous literature contains detailed records of Sakyamuni Buddha's life stories in the past and present, as well those of his disciples. Events after the Buddha's parinirvana, and some scattered narratives which brings out Buddha's teachings are also documented, which made up the 121 chapters of the whole scripture. Teachings of karmic retribution, filial piety and generosity are among the main themes of the sutra, which are delivered through analogies and fables. The study of this Buddhist text, however, was long neglected by the modern scholarship in Buddhology. An English translation of this sutra is not available till now. Thus, my project will serve as the first-step to translate the whole volume of Sutra of Miscellaneous Jewels. This paper is my first attempt to the sutra translation, which contains my English translation of the seemingly important chapter of the literature, revolving around the alternate concept of 'generosity' or 'giving' (dana) in Buddhism.

Traducción académica comentada del libro clásico chino 'Lijing' (Tratado de los Ritos). En este primer volumen se encuentran los primero ocho libros de la obra, traducidos de la versión en inglés encontrada en 'Chinese Text Project'. Los comentarios y crítica histórica son referentes a algunos de los personajes del contexto literario de la China antigua: Kong Yingda, Lu Deming, Liu Xin, el rey Xian de Hejian o Dai Sheng entre otros.

Quotations from the Hanfeizi, ancient China's most prominent Legalist philosopher, mostly based on the W.K. Liao and Burton Watson translations of the work (although note that I convert W.K. Liao's romanization into pinyin). These quotes are pulled from a database I am building tracking all of the pre-Qin Chinese texts and therefore verse number notations may be different than those found in other versions of the text. Quotes are selected subjectively, but based on my focus studying warfare and statecraft in the Spring & Autumn and Warring States eras.

The Shījīng 詩經 (Classic of Poetry or Book of Odes) is the oldest Chinese poetic collection and plays a fundamental role in Chinese culture, in particular for the moral function which it has been ascribed by the most important Chinese thinkers. It is composed by 305 odes divided into 4 sections: Guofeng 國⾵ ('Arias of the States, 15 books, 160 odes), Xiaoya ⼩雅 (Minor Odes: 8 books, 74 odes), Daya ⼤雅 (Major Odes; 3 books , 31 odes) and Song 頌 (Hymns; 3 books, 31 odes). After a brief introduction of this masterpiece, this thesis will delve into the genesis of the character Shī in order to fully understand what Shījīng really is about; the meaning and the origin of this character  are absolutely unclear. Finally comes the translation of the "Hymns of Zhou", the first book of the "Hymns". Composed by 31 ancestral hymns, it represents the oldest part of the entire work since their composition can be dated between the 11th and the 9th centuries BC. These hymns are ritual eulogies dedicated to Zhou founders from which it’s possible to see a small part of Zhou court ritual life.

This volume contains 81 carefully selected Chinese poems arranged in chronological order, from antiquity (c.2000 BCE) to the modern time (1972), though most of them are from the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, since these two eras were the climax of Chinese poetry creation and development. The selection was based on the popularity of the poems, and the common phrases taken from them in everyday usage. Pinyin has been added to help readers learn Mandarin while reading these poems, and feel the sense of poetics in them. The translator is a native Beijinger who has lived in China for over 20 years and in English-speaking countries for over 30 years. Her professional background is architectural humanities. She hopes to make an original contribution to the translation of Chinese poetry through her unique lenses. During the translation, she found it interesting and surprising that the rhythms in the classical Chinese poems were somewhat able to be transformed to follow certain rhythms in the English versions. Maybe there is a universal truth about composing poetry in a sense. Enjoy your reading if you are a lover of Chinese literature and culture, and learn the wisdom of life through your reading.

A number of different languages in outside of the Indo-European family were analyzed based on how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to learn them. They were then rated on a purely impressionistic 1-6 scale of easiest to most difficult. Extensive phonological, morphological, syntactic and even semantic analysis was done for many of these tongues to highlight areas of difficulty for English learners. Very long: 101 pages.

Traducción académica comentada del libro clásico chino 'Lijing' (Tratado de los Ritos). En este segundo volumen se encuentran desde el libro IX al XVIII de la obra, traducidos de la versión en inglés encontrada en 'Chinese Text Project'. Los comentarios y crítica histórica son referentes a algunos de los personajes del contexto literario de la China antigua: Kong Yingda, Lu Deming, Liu Xin, el rey Xian de Hejian o Dai Sheng entre otros.

Ханмун — традиционное корейское название древнего и средневекового литературного китайского языка, который исторически являлся официальным письменным языком Китая и многих сопредельных с ним стран, в том числе Кореи.
Данное пособие представляет собой базовый курс ханмуна, предназначенный для учащихся, которые не владеют современным разговорным китайским языком и ранее не изучали иероглифику. Пособие состоит из введения и пятидесяти пяти практических уроков, в которых поэтапно вводится лексика и грамматика ханмуна. Чтения иероглифов приводятся в традиционном кореизированном произношении. Материал для упражнений заимствован из оригинальных текстов на литературном китайском языке — как из произведений средневековых корейских авторов, так и из классических древнекитайских сочинений.
Пособие ориентировано на студентов и аспирантов-кореистов и может быть также использовано другими учащимися-некитаеведами, интересующимися литературным китайским языком.
Hanmun is a traditional Korean name for ancient and mediaeval classical Chinese language, which historically was the official written language of China and surrounding countries, including Korea.
This book is an introductory course in Hanmun intended for students who do not know modern spoken Chinese and cannot read Chinese characters. The textbook consists of Introduction and 55 lessons, consecutively introducing to students classical Chinese vocabulary and grammar. The readings of Chinese characters are given in accordance with the traditional Koreanized pronunciation. The material for exercises is taken from original texts in classical Chinese (literary works by mediaeval Korean authors as well as ancient Chinese texts).
The textbook is intended for undergraduate and graduate students majoring in Korean studies. It can be also used by other students interested in Classical Chinese language but not majoring in Chinese studies.

西方學者的道家與道教研究起於十九世紀後半，當時大部分的功勞是翻譯［道德經］與［莊子］兩書。二十世紀初［正統道藏］問世後，學者不斷地鑽研不同的經典，保括［南華真經］的不同版本。二十世紀初到現在出現各種各樣的翻譯版本。西方學者的研究傾向於解說與分析［莊子］故事的寓意及其道德觀。明朝的注疏者程以寧，以內丹學解說［莊子］的短文，且證明［周易］所奠定的理論有著密切關聯。作者提出，翻譯［莊子］此類的書，得加上註解才能仔細地解釋文字隱涵之意，否則讀者難以深入理解。

In the West, studies on Taoism as a religious and cultural movement began with translations during the second half of the nineteenth century of the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi. After the Taoist Canon (Daozang) was made public between 1921 and 1923, scholars have pursued exegetical work of different scriptures contained in the Canon, including further versions of the Nanhua zhenjing or Zhuangzi. Different translations of this work have been published since the beginning of the twentieth century. In Spanish, there are three works directly translated from the original text in Chinese. Among them, the translations of Carmelo Elorduy S.J. and Iñaki Preciado Idoeta have used annotations and commentaries of Chinese authors from antiquity to modern times, contributing greatly to the field. This paper discusses the content of these two works, and analyses the translation of both authors. I propose that, when translating Zhuangzi and other Taoist works, it is necessary for the translator to include annotations in the translation, so as to clarify the meaning of obscure terms that would otherwise be ignored.

The claim that Chinese had neither unambiguous, nor obligatory syntactic or morphological markers of counterfactuality, which has loomed large with philosophers of language, sinologists, and cognitive psychologists during the better part of the 20th century, is reviewed here from a diachronic and typological perspective, focussing on Old Chinese (OC). In contradistinction from the cross-linguistically widespread use of past-tense morphology or, less commonly, of dissociative spatial markers, the predominant strategy to mark counterfactuals in OC was ‘direct’ assertion in the protasis. It made use of a non-indicative copula marked for stativity by prefixation, which acts as a complementizer vis-à-vis the dependent clause. Morphological analysis, building upon advances in the reconstruction of OC
phonology in Jacques (2000), suggests that OC combined this non-indicative copula with a causative morpheme (*s-) to encode concessives and with an existential negative (*ma-) to
express a non-facultative negative counterfactual, surfacing as wēi 微 (“if it be not that...”). Straightforward “positive” counterfactuality could also be expressed through conjunction
compounding in late Classical and Medieval Chinese, or by the use of simple superordinate verbs such as shǐ 使 or lìng 令. Morphologically, these share the property of being derived
from the underlying verb base by causative or deontic prefixes, but CF interpretation also depends on the interplay with schetic markers and pragmatic embedding in the remainder of the sentence. Non-obligatory marking of counterfactuals thus emerges as a preference,
not as a categorical incapacity, while the choice of ‘direct’ assertion, rather than temporal or distal implicatures to convey it, is unrelated to the richness of morphology in a given
language.

The language of pre-imperial China is usually presented as if it was an entity isolated from external influences, isolating in its morphological structure, monolithic in its geographical spread and petrified in its diachronic characteristics. Through the reductive lens of Early Imperial exegetes and lexicographers, idealized linguistic norms have been retroactively imposed onto the dim and distant past, more often than not tacitly serving the various ideological preferences of the present. While it is difficult to steer clear of the omnipresent " normative " pressure of Warring States and Western Han sociopolitical discourse, the talk will provide a few glimpses at linguistic variation in Early China. Looking both at transmitted and excavated texts, I will attempt to complicate narratives of unification, centralization and purity, which have quietly crept into the few available linguistic descriptions, and introduce some linguistic tools which may ultimately help us dig beyond the rhetoric and editorial tampering of the competing Han classicist guardians of the textual canon.

Este artigo objetiva instigar uma breve discussão e reflexão sobre a questão da (in)traduzibilidade da poe-sia chinesa ao português. Para isso, primeiramente serão feitas algumas considerações sobre as línguas chine-sas e a necessidade de situá-las em seus tempo-espaço adequados. Em se-guida, haverá uma pequena revisão do que tem sido discutido por alguns teó-ricos ocidentais e chineses acerca da tradução poética e da tradução da poe-sia chinesa para línguas ocidentais.

This article aims to initiate a discussion and reflection on the issue of (un)translatability of Chinese poetry into Portuguese. First, some considera-tion will be given to the Chinese lan-guages and the need to locate them in their appropriate context. That will be followed by a short review of some points of view presented by some Western and Chinese theoreticians on poetry translation and on the transla-tion of Chinese poetry into Western languages.

Following the translation of Scroll 6:76 Seven Kinds of Giving 七種施因緣 of Saṃyukta Ratnapiṭaka Sūtra, this current piece of translation of Scroll 9:105 discussed the true way of gaining wealth in Buddhism through a story of two brothers, and their encounter with a deva. This chapter revolved around the theme of karma-vipaka (action and reaction) or hetu-phala (cause and effect) and the value of the actions of oneself, negating reliance on worship and prayers to divine beings.

This paper takes another look at two sub-types of ditransitive clause in Late Zhou Chinese: the privative and the benefactive. Such clauses are composed of a Verb and three bare NPs:[NP1 V NP2 NP3]. A perennial question concerns the status of 'NP2'in this array. ...

This article compares several post-1950s translations of the Liezi, and examines the concept of originality, the degrees of closeness to the original text a modern translation can achieve, and how this “faithfulness” can be understood. I first discuss how the problem of the Liezi's originality has negatively influenced critics' and translators' perception of the text's significance, then compare its different translations to show their specific translational and interpretational problems. Finally, I reflect on the overarching methodological question that frames my comparisons of translations, namely, why compare? I argue that comparing translations cannot be a means to ascertain the best translation, because both concepts of originality and faithfulness are multiple in meaning rather than singularly defined. Instead of measuring translations in terms of “fidelity,” a more insightful practice would be discovering the insights different translations offer into the relationships between the original and translated texts, source and target languages, as well as questioning the construction of texts as “original source texts” through translation by recognizing the potential fluidity and multiplicity of the source text itself.

«Жизнеописания достойных монахов Страны, что к востоку от моря» (Хэдон косын чон), составленные в начале XIII в. монахом Какхуном, — древнейший сохранившийся до наших дней памятник корейской буддийской историографии. Из этого сочинения можно почерпнуть уникальные сведения о путях проникновения буддизма в Корею, способах адаптации этого учения к местной системе верований, а также об идеологии, государственном строе и международных связях раннесредневековых корейских государств. На русский язык этот памятник переводится впервые. Перевод снабжен вводной статьей и подробными комментариями.
“Lives of Eminent Korean Monks” (Haedong goseung jeon), composed in the beginning of the 13th century by Korean monk Gakhun, is the earliest preserved piece of Korean Buddhist historiography. It contains unique information on the spread of Buddhism to Korea, on the ways of its adaptation to the local beliefs, and on the ideology, social system and international relations of early Korean states. This is the first translation of this text into Russian. The translation is accompanied by introduction and detailed commentary.

В статье предпринята попытка классификации тибетских конструкций с падежной частицей ལ་ и ее синонимами согласно семантическому типу образующих эти конструкции глаголов. Параллельно рассматриваются аналогичные конструкции литературного китайского языка с участием предлога 於 и его синонимов.
The paper attempts to classify Tibetan grammatical structures with the particle ལ་ and its synonyms according to the semantic type of verbs forming these structures. Those are also compared with the Classical Chinese grammatical patterns with the preposition 於 and its synonyms.

The description of sound correlated figures of speech in early Chinese prose − where it was attempted since Jiāng Yŏugàos (d. 1851) trailblazing work on prose rhyming at all − typically did not go beyond the analysis of prosodic phenomena occuring in phrase or sentence edge positions, which
are moreover subject to relatively strict conditions of adjacency. After a short initial discussion of the problem of how to classify artfully crafted argumentative pre-imperial prose texts, the validity of approaching recurrences within Early Chinese prose in reconstructions, rather than through the intricate veil of its written representation, will be exemplified by looking at three repeatedly encountered phonological figures in Warring States-Han texts and the way the establish textual coherence. For lack of an established
terminology, these will be preliminarily be called “rhyme nets”, “assonance chains”, and “paronomastic cadences”. Consideration of the latter category leads to a discussion of its relationship with genuine figura etymologica, and
its role as a window on the self-awareness of linguistic structure on the part of early Chinese writer.

Статья содержит комментированный перевод на русский язык одного из наиболее известных произведений корейского буддийского наставника Вонхё 元曉 (617–686).
The paper contains an annotated Russian translation of one of tne most well-known texts by Korean Buddhist master Wonhyo 元曉 (617–686).

Debido a la tardía aparición de la sinología en España, en relación con otros países europeos, las investigaciones sobre el Zhuangzi莊子son más bien escasas. Sí debemos prestar atención a los trabajos de traducción y exegesis de Carmelo Elorduy y de Iñaki Preciado, que han supuesto un hito en la tradición sinológica española, ya que nadie antes había traducido el Zhuangzi basándose en las interpretaciones de anotadores chinos. Al final del mismo se dedica un espacio para comentar la traducción de Pilar González España y Jean-Claude Pastor Ferrer. Ésta incluye únicamente los capítulos interiores y presenta algunas anotaciones textuales breves de carácter explicativo, pero escasean las alusiones a comentaristas chinos.

The Classical Chinese modal negative wu, which may be represented by the graphs 毋, 無, or 无, has traditionally been labeled “imperative” or “prohibitive,” but its use is not restricted to negative commands.  Modal wu is not simply an “imperative” or “prohibitive” negative, but rather, that it is modal in the sense that it is associated with the speaker’s perception that the agent is able to exert control over his actions.
Sentences with modal WU can be divided into four broad categories: prohibitive or imperative sentences; sentences in which someone is caused, ordered, or requested not to do something and in which the clause negated with modal wu follows a verb such as shyy 使 ‘to cause’, minq 命 ‘to command’, linq 令 ‘to order’, or chiing 請 ‘to request’;  sentences in which someone expresses a desire not to do something and in which the negated clause follows a verb expressing desires such as yuh 欲 ‘to want’; and sentences in which modal wu occurs after auxiliary verbs expressing ability such as neng 能 ‘can, be able’, keeyii 可以 ‘can, may’, or der 得 ‘be able, get to’. In transmitted/received texts, modal WU is often represented by the same graph as the verb WU 無 ‘lack’, but the two negatives were semantically, syntactically, and phonologically distinct.

Статья посвящена сравнительному исследованию «Жизнеописаний достойных монахов [Страны], [что к] востоку [от] моря» 海東高僧傳, составленных корейским ученым монахом Какхуном 覺訓 около 1215 г., и одного из использованных им источников — «Лянских жизнеописаний достойных монахов» 梁高僧傳, составленных китайским монахом Хуэй-цзяо 慧皎 в начале VI в. Приложение содержит комментированный русский перевод соответствующих разделов обоих памятников.
The paper is dedicated to the comparative study of “Lives of Eminent Korean Monks” 海東高僧傳, composed by Korean scholar-monk Kakhun 覺訓 circa 1215, and one of its sources, “Liang Lives of the Eminent Monks” 梁高僧傳, composed by Chinese monk Hui-jiao 慧皎 in the beginning of the 6th century. The appendix contains the annotated translation of the corresponding parts of the two texts into Russian.