First published in Giants Spanning Chinese and Western Cultures, Central China Normal University Press, 2001.(1) I came into contact with Mr. Wei's translations of classical philosophy, especially Kant's philosophy, when I was a graduate student. In the early 80s, in order to complete the course "German Classical Philosophy" and to prepare for the master's degree, I read Kant's "Kant: Critique of Pure Reason: An Interpretation" and Kant's "Critique of Judgment" (Volume II) translated by Mr. Wei. I remember reading Smith's book and my self-confidence was hit hard. It was the thickest book in our department's reference room, and the paper was poor, yellow and black, and it was dizzying to read. The most terrible thing is the style of the article in the book, the sentences are intermittent, the connection seems to be nonexistent, the meaning is blurred and trance, and there are many inverted sentences and subordinate sentences. Every day I read and read, my eyelids fight, and since then I have developed the habit of taking a nap in the middle of the day. Nibbling on the whole book, I have a pot of porridge in my head, and I don't know what I said. At that time, I didn't think about the problem of translation, but I felt that my foundation was too poor, my overall grasp was not enough, and my basic knowledge of Kant's philosophy was not solid. But then I never came back to Smith's Interpretation, and to be honest, half of it was because I was a little apprehensive about the translation. This was my first encounter with Mr. Wei's translations.*From "Wandering in the Dense Forest of Thoughts", Chongqing University Press, 2012 edition.
In the second year, I took the topic of Kant for my master's degree. Combined with my interest in aesthetics, I am going to do "Critique of Judgment". The first volume was translated by Mr. Zong Baihua. Mr. Zong's translation is quite arbitrary. Originally, Mr. Zong's literary style is rarely matched, but when translating Kant's book, this aspect is not very obvious, and the rigor of logic and the coherence and fluency of thinking are not so handy in Mr. Zong's pen, and many places are simply incomprehensible without comparing the original German version. At that time, I made a lot of revisions to Mr. Zong's translation with my own pitiful German, and the text quoted in the master's ** was basically a revised text, because I thought that I still had some opinions and opinions on Kant's aesthetic thought. But when I read the second volume of the Critique of Judgment, I had to accept it with an almost completely blank mind. Prior to this, I had only read Mr. Li Zehou's "Critique of Critical Philosophy", and Mr. Li seemed to advocate that the first and second volumes of "Critique of Judgment" were about aesthetics, the first volume was about the form of natural beauty, and the second volume was about the content of natural beauty. Although I do not agree with this view, I never imagined that Kant's "Critique of Teleological Judgment" would show a theoretical topic that I had never considered before, that is, the question of the inherent and inevitable connection between the evolution of nature and the moral and spiritual life of human beings. Surprised and excited, I eagerly delved into this question, and delved into the second volume of Mr. Wei's translation of the Critique of Judgment. I also found the translation to be somewhat unsatisfactory in comparison with the German original, but it was basically rhetorical. Moreover, the translator seems to have intended to adapt the Chinese to Western expressions, and in many places the syntax and grammatical habits of Westerners are directly and rigidly translated into Chinese. At that time, I didn't know the identity of the translator, let alone his own profound attainments in religious theology and his devotion to religion, but I felt that the translator did not misinterpret Kant's meaning, but used a clumsy translation pen to express Kant's natural teleology, moral teleology, and theological ideas as they were. I have found that even the shortcomings of the translation can be corrected by its merits, and only by reading the ideas of the original can we know how to do a good job in expression. Mr. Wei's translation is difficult to read, but in principle it is readable, it is a digested translation with internal coherence. When I quoted Mr. Wei's translation in the master's degree, I basically did not change it, and only made some rhetorical adjustments in a few places. I later learned that the translator of the book was the same person who signed Smith's book "Queran."
Last year, I bought Mr. Wei's translation of "Critique of Pure Reason", which was compiled and published by later generations. At that time, I was teaching a course on "Selected Readings of Classical German Philosophy" to graduate students. I remember that a few years ago, I also taught this course to graduate students, and I used the popular translation of Lan Gongwu in China to talk about Kant. The text of this translation is extremely elegant, and it reads with a vivid feeling, but its semi-literate style is clearly outdated, and often compromises the original meaning for the sake of elegance, such as adding or deleting words, arbitrarily punctuating, and changing sentence patterns unnecessarily. As for the "Selected Materials of German Classical Philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries" edited by Peking University, although it is a vernacular text, it is an excerpt after all, and lacks coherence. Therefore, in addition to these two books, I also brought the German version of the Critique of Pure Reason for reference. What about a new translation of this lecture? Through teaching practice, I found that based on the Wei translation, except for a few obvious clerical errors, there are not many places to check, and in comparison, I found that there are several misunderstandings between the blue translation and the Bei** edition, but the Wei translation is correct, so I feel that this book is at least the best translation in China at present.
Of course, I am not saying that Mr. Wei's translation is not problematic at all, but that Mr. Wei's translation focuses on faithfulness, rigor, and understanding of the philosophical ideas themselves. Among the three of "faith, attainment, and elegance", he put "faith" in an absolute position. This special emphasis on "faith" makes Mr. Wei's translation have a prominent feature, that is, Mr. Wei does not go along with the translation of many "conventional" nouns and terms, but proposes his own unique translation based on a more accurate understanding. For example, the word erscheinung, which is generally translated as "phenomenon" or "manifestation", is both popular and easy to understand, but Mr. Wei translates it as "appearance". I suspect he is trying to emphasize the dynamic process that the term implies. In modern Chinese, "phenomenon" is no longer used as a noun solution for verb-object structure, but a simple noun. Although the "manifest" of "manifest" is a verb, it is not dynamic and can be understood as an adverb. "Appearing" expresses the meaning of the root word scheinen "to shine" and "illuminate" and the verb erscheinen to mean "to appear" and "to show" more accurately, and it is also more in line with Kant's emphasis on the meaning of human agency in the knowledge of phenomena to make him appear to man. The downside is that "appearing" is not a noun in everyday language and is rarely used as a gerund. Engels had studied nearly 20 Western languages, and he found that almost all nouns in these languages were verbs, which is probably a characteristic of Western languages. What we see in Chinese is the complete opposite, the vast majority of verbs in ancient Chinese are noun combinations, which can be seen from the "splitting method" of Chinese characters; At the same time, many nouns can also be used directly as verbs, such as "food", "seed", "Tao", etc., and "monarchs, ministers, fathers, sons, and sons" and so on. This is a major difference between hieroglyphs and pinyin scripts. We are not accustomed to leaving a simple verb without certain nouns (e.g., "·· activity", "process", etc.) are used directly as nouns. In German, this is as simple as capitalizing the first letter or changing the ending, and a verb becomes a noun, and in spoken language, it can even be used as a noun without any distinction. This cultural difference has created great difficulties for our translation work. Mr. Wei seems to be trying to take a bold approach to instill the language and habits of Westerners into the Chinese language, which is a bold, valuable and meaningful attempt. Another example is the Latin term apriori, which is generally translated as "innate" and "a priori", and Mr. Wei translates it as "pre-test". Literally, there doesn't seem to be any difference between "first" and "before". But I understand that Mr. Wei meant that he wanted to emphasize the logical meaning of the word. Because Kant does not use this term to refer to innate or innate knowledge in psychology and physiology, it does not include the meaning of time first, but to the epistemological meaning of "logic first". From this point of view, the translation of "pre-test" does reflect the logical meaning of the word better than other translations. In addition, beschafenheit (nature) is translated as "creation", glaube (faith) is translated as "faith", physiologie (physiology) is translated as "natural science", etc., all of which are different from the traditional translations. Of course, as things stand, it seems that it will be difficult to completely replace the current translation with Mr. Wei's translation. However, it is important that every person who studies Kant's philosophy today cannot but consider and pay attention to Mr. Wei's translation and the reasons he puts forward, and imperceptibly influence it, which provides the basis for the gradual formation of a more precise and more widely recognized set of terminology in the future. This is a significant contribution of Mr. Wei, and it shows that he is not only a translator, but also an accomplished philosopher and an expert in Kant's philosophy.
Recently, I received another posthumous manuscript of Wei Translation, "The Metaphysics of Natural Science" (by Kant), which was compiled and published by later generations. I translated this book in 1988 and published it by Joint Publishing Co., Ltd., and Mr. Wei translated it in 1965. The title of the book, which I translate as "The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science", is certainly a popular translation, but it was indeed quite hesitant at the time, because the German anfangsgriinde is a combination of words, the first half of anfang means beginning, beginning, beginning, and the second half of griinde is the foundation, the basis. When translating "basic", we lose the first half, and when we translate "preliminary", "primary", and so on, we lose the meaning of the back. Considering that the nature of the book is a high-level metaphysics rather than an introductory reading, in order not to cause misunderstanding among Chinese readers, it is still translated as "basic" according to the general translation. But on closer inspection, there seems to be a cultural difference implied here. Because the Western philosophical tradition always puts the highest level of learning at the beginning when classifying learning, it is called "first philosophy", and it is believed that only by first understanding these basic and fundamental studies can we smoothly descend step by step to explore more specific things. This is evident in Kant and many speculative philosophers and rationalist philosophers, and it constitutes the characteristics of Western philosophy that emphasize rationality, logic, and systematization. Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, attaches more importance to the accumulation of knowledge and experience of specific things, and advocates starting from small things, experiencing them carefully, and the longer they accumulate, the more they can finally achieve enlightenment (epiphany). Therefore, what is "preliminary" seems to us to be mostly a superficial and naïve thing, which is disdained by learned people. Mr. Wei felt that the translation of "preliminary" was more accurate, and it seemed to be more influenced by Western rationalism, which was in line with Kant's fundamental idea of "top-down". Of course, it may take a lot of effort and a longer and slower process to make this way of thinking accepted by Chinese readers, but Mr. Wei's radical attitude is still a catalyst for Chinese academia and translation to open their doors to Western learning more boldly.
From my reading and comparison of Mr. Wei's translations of Western philosophy, mainly Kant's philosophy, I feel that the following thoughts can be drawn from the current Western academic and translation circles in China.
In the 30s, Mr. Lu Xun put forward the idea of "hard translation" with a radical attitude. The so-called "hard translation" refers to the direct translation of a heterogeneous culture that does not conform to or does not quite conform to the language habits of the Chinese people through a jerky but not distorted way, and forces the Chinese to accept it. Hard translation is different from "dead translation" in that it is based on a deep grasp of the content, rather than a literal rigidity. Although hard translation has caused certain difficulties for Chinese people to understand literally, it can broaden their horizons, train the adaptability and flexibility of thinking, break the narrowness of traditional habits, and be more conducive to accepting the original Western culture. This attitude caused an uproar in the literary and literary circles at that time, and generally speaking, there were more people who opposed it than those who were in favor. Today, there are even fewer in favor. It is often assumed that "hard translations" do not take into account the receptivity of the audience and are bound to be eliminated and discarded. Nowadays, contemporary Western "hermeneutics" has been regarded as fashionable by the Chinese people, and people regard translation and reading as a kind of free creation and re-creation, and "hard translation" is no longer mentioned, as if it has been completely refuted theoretically. I'm a little upset about this.
The question, of course, involves the question of whether, in principle, a text in one language can be translated into another language without distortion. At least, in terms of literary and poetic translation, I admit that it is as difficult as inventing a perpetual motion machine. Literary translation is indeed a kind of re-creation, and only creation can approach the soul of the original work, and word-for-word translation, even with many annotations, has lost the spirit of the original work. But I think academic translation should be different. Because:
1) Academic works are generally a logical system, which should have universality and certainty of meaning that everyone can understand at the logical level, and even if it contains "poetic" elements, it usually does not depend on or mainly does not depend on poetic language, but is built on the logical language level.
2) The readers of academic works are generally scholars or scholars, who read with an attitude of inquiry and are prepared to engage in ideological and spiritual labor, which is different from the appreciators and enjoyers of literary works; The purpose of reading academic works is only to use language as a tool to reveal and achieve the concepts and meanings implied under it, not to aim at the beauty of language itself, let alone to arouse the reader's own rich imagination. Therefore, the specific applicability of language as a tool, i.e., the individual orientation and precision of meaning, becomes the primary issue here.
3) There is no doubt that the translation of academic works into the languages of heterogeneous cultures will cause difficulties in understanding, but the main task of the translation of academic works is not to alleviate or eliminate these difficulties by distorting or adapting the original meaning, but more importantly, to highlight such difficulties in certain key places, to draw people's attention to such difficulties, and to make people realize that such difficulties are not entirely due to the level of translation, but to the narrowness of their own cultural vision; This deepens the attention and understanding of heterogeneous cultures in a "defamiliarized" way, and expands the reader's horizons; On the contrary, overly pitying and appeasing the reader's receptivity will only make their vision narrower, their sense of smell more numb, and their misunderstanding deeper. Today, many of us do not seek to understand all kinds of Western terms and terms on various phenomena of Chinese culture, thinking that we are familiar with them, but in fact they are digressing for a long time, precisely because we have been interpreting Western studies too generally for a long time, and have neglected the evil consequences of in-depth study of Western studies by means of "defamiliarization."
It can be seen that in the translation of Western academic works, "faith" is the most important. Of course, "reach" is not dispensable, but its premise is "faith", and it itself depends on "faith"; The situation of "believing but not reaching" is only a temporary phenomenon, as long as you really "believe", there will always be a day when you "reach"; The reason why I feel "not reached" is because I haven't gotten used to it yet. Western scholars are neither fools nor madmen, they also have to communicate ideas to each other, and when they use logical and rational thinking to convey ideas, this communication transcends national boundaries and cultures, and is universal. Further, I can even assert that as long as you truly "believe", you will naturally become "elegant", if the original text is "elegant" in the first place. However, this kind of "elegance" is no longer the kind of elegance that chews the words, but the elegance of the rhythm of the thought itself, the elegance of the tone and attitude of the author and the translator when they talk in unison, the coherence and flexibility of thinking, and the chic and relaxed and eloquent conversation. This is the inner elegance of the spirit. In the past, Yan Fu and others pursued the superficial elegance of the text, requiring it to be catchy and loud, but in fact, many of them were misinterpreted and added in vain, and once the vernacular was popularized, it had no permanent value. Today, there are very few people who read their translations for the purpose of appreciating their translations, and when it comes to understanding the ideas of the originals, their translations cannot be trusted, and they are no longer "attained", so they have to be eliminated. The intrinsic elegance has a long-term value and will not be eliminated due to changes in language habits, such as the translation of some ancient Buddhist scriptures, which is actually very simple in text, but it is a creed for today's study of Buddhist scriptures, and the well has another elegance and purity.
In short, I think that the problem of so-called "hard translation" is not only a question of translation skills, but also a problem of cultural mentality. An open cultural mindset (such as the translation of Buddhist scriptures in the Tang Dynasty) will take foreign cultures seriously and be convinced that foreign cultures have their own "Da" and "Ya", and that it is not only from the outside that "Da" and "Ya" can be imposed on it, and it is also possible to have a truly faithful and scientific attitude towards the original Western scholarship. In this respect, the Japanese nation has such a vision and courage, as long as the West has it, they will all move it and talk about it, and if they are not accustomed to it and do not understand it, they will slowly get used to it and understand it, but they will never give in to their old habits, and if they cannot find an accurate and equivalent translation of their names, they will transliterate all of them. So they soon had the complete works of Kant, the complete works of Fichte, the complete works of Hegel, and many others, and we still have only the complete works of Man-en-Les. If a nation's culture wants to truly progress, develop, and create, it must deny itself and surpass itself, that is, first give up its original position, forge ahead to the outside world, and do not always worry about losing the original good things, but sincerely understand and learn from others. As long as we really do this, and look back at our own traditions, we will find that the good is not lost, but has gained life in this movement and the negation of negation. On the other hand, if you stick to your original position, even though your heart is reluctant to lose your original good things, and you will not learn to walk in the future, and you will not even be able to climb back, then you will always be able to crawl slowly behind others, and you can only watch your own good things rot. This is the dialectic of the "self-denial" of life, but also the dialectic of cultural progress. Therefore, in their eyes, criticism or negative opinions on traditional culture can only be "forgetting the ancestors" and rebellion against traditional culture, without seeing that these opinions are often the hope of traditional culture and the real promotion and promotion of traditional culture!
I think one of the most important reasons why Mr. Wei's Kant translations can penetrate into the cultural context of the words themselves is his comprehensive understanding of Western culture. Needless to say, he himself lived in the West for a long time and converted to **Christianity, which brought favorable conditions for him to directly integrate Western culture; More importantly, his dedication to Western culture gives him a broad mind. He did not despise or reject the culture of his home country because he accepted Western culture, on the contrary, he always compared Western culture with Chinese culture, trying to integrate the two cultures and learn from each other's strengths. His voluminous translation work is an integral part of his grand vision, where he is not only a skilled translator, but also an introducer of Western culture. To this end, he believes that Chinese and Western cultures can be communicated, but also emphasizes the heterogeneity between Western culture and traditional Chinese culture. If there was no possibility of mutual communication, he would not have made an effort to do such useless work; However, if you don't see the difference between Chinese and Western cultures, you won't even realize the need for communication, and you won't realize where communication is possible.
I think that Chinese and Western cultures are first and foremost heterogeneous cultures. Heterogeneous cultures also have similarities, but this similarity is only superficial (e.g., Chinese speak morality, Westerners also talk about morality; Westerners have science, Chinese also have science, and so on) and abstract (e.g., Chinese and Westerners are both "people"), and the difference is concrete and historical (e.g., Chinese morality and science are very different from Western morality and science). The similarities and differences between Chinese and Western cultures are not in a parallel and equal position, especially in today's comparison of Chinese and Western cultures, the importance of emphasizing their differences is far greater than emphasizing their similarities. Only by emphasizing the differences can we stimulate curiosity about Western culture, extroverted learning, and the motivation to "take it"; Emphasizing that "China also has everything" can easily lead to lack of progress, complacency, and laziness. In a certain era in the past, when blind xenophobia prevailed, the difference between Chinese and Western cultures was raised to an absolute degree, and "Huayi" was absolutely incompatible, and even foreigners were called "devils". Today, however, when almost everyone is aware of the necessity and inevitability of reform and opening up, blindly emphasizing similarities while ignoring differences will numb our nerves and model our vision, and we will not be able to find the goal we really want to learn from the West, and will only repeat old clichés with new words and phrases.
Therefore, understanding different cultures as heterogeneous cultures is one of the primary prerequisites for the convergence and integration of Chinese and Western cultures today. Otherwise, when you think that you have blended the spirit of Chinese and Western cultures to make it seamless and seamless, it is precisely the time when you unconsciously use traditional culture to misinterpret Western culture is the most outrageous and unenlightened. However, it is not easy to understand Western culture as it is. In addition to a good level of foreign language, the examiner should also have a comprehensive knowledge of Western cultural background, such as religious knowledge, knowledge of dialect, literature, art, history and philosophy, as well as all knowledge related to humanities, such as Western customs, moral norms, legal systems, interpersonal relationships, ways of thinking, etc., and should be interested in and understood, and should be understood as a heterogeneous culture. The so-called "understanding as a heterogeneous culture" means that it is also necessary to pay attention to similar areas of one's own culture, compare and analyze them, and establish a frame of reference for examining the differences between different cultures. Mr. Wei has good qualities in these aspects, and he not only has a wide range of research in Western studies, but also has a profound foundation in Chinese studies. Of course, for an average translator, this is a bit too harsh. But what I mean is that people should have a conscious awareness of this, that is, constantly improve and improve, and not be satisfied with translating Western characters into Chinese, a good translator should be an explorer who always pursues high-quality translations. Today, we see many translated works that have no Western cultural cultivation, and do not know anything about Western historical events, mythological allusions, religious customs, and cultural celebrities, and do not bother to consult them, let alone understand their spirit, and are hurriedly printed and printed without anyone knowing. It's time to sweep away this cultural garbage.
In addition, I believe that the translator should have an in-depth knowledge of the profession of the original work, preferably an expert in the specialty. This is a fundamental principle of the translation of scholarly works. For a long period of time in the past, this principle was well observed in China, and many translations of classical academic classics were written by well-known experts in the field, which not only faithfully expressed the academic ideas and style of the original works, but also provided a large number of annotations and even comments by these experts that were helpful for the Chinese people to understand, which is very worthy of recognition. However, I don't know when serious academic translations have been crowded with a large number of "fake, fake, fake, and shoddy" products, and some of them are eager to make sense of the text and do not seek to understand it; Some avoid difficulties, making readers feel like falling into a fog; Some are poor in knowledge and full of jokes; What's more, there are those who rewrite other people's translations and use them as their own "translations." Some publishing departments have also forgotten their profits, and as long as they feel that a book is a bestseller, they will find someone to translate it, with the result that in recent years, inferior translations have been published quickly and frequently, and there is no market for truly excellent translations. This is a highly abnormal phenomenon. In contrast, Mr. Wei's translations are particularly valuable. His translations are themselves the result of his philosophical research. As a philosopher and an expert in Kant's philosophy, he studied as he translated, and he translated faithfully and rigorously for the sake of research. Mr. Wei's example shows that a truly in-depth researcher of Western studies must realize that all valuable research should be based on the original local translation. It is not enough to read the original text, nor can it be enough to read other people's translations, but only by translating it yourself can it be possible to truly understand the true spirit of the object and have the right to speak.
Finally, I would like to say that the ultimate purpose of our research and translation of Western academic works is to promote the development of the academic culture of the Chinese nation. Many people often have a misunderstanding, it seems that only the study of traditional Chinese culture can promote the cause of national culture, and the study of Western studies is like singing praises for others, and studying too much seems to be detrimental to the dignity of the nation. This is an extremely narrow and ridiculous misunderstanding. When it comes to national pride, if the dignified Chinese nation knows nothing or knows little or little about Western studies, it will be a big loss of face. Culture, thought, and scholarship are the wealth of all mankind. A nation with a broad mind should have a full view of all human wealth, and in the current era of reform and opening up, it should turn its vision to the in-depth understanding of Western studies that we relatively lack. In this regard, Westerners have gone one step ahead of us, and they have put much more effort into Chinese culture than we have done on Western culture, so that many scholars studying Chinese culture in China have to go to Western universities, libraries, and research institutes to enhance our understanding of our own culture. However, no Western scholar seems to have felt compelled to refer to the opinions of Chinese scholars when studying ancient Greco-Roman culture, medieval culture, or Western culture since the Renaissance. Is this a loss of face? I do not want to call for the strengthening of the study of Western studies in China simply for the sake of "fighting for face", I just advocate that there should be a purely academic attitude towards academics, whether it is Chinese studies or Western studies, and all "face" considerations should be put aside for the time being, and as long as they are truly valuable academically, they should be studied and mastered without prejudice and in a realistic manner-this in itself is a kind of work that earnestly enhances the dignity of the nation. There is a world of difference between it and the psychology of shouting about national dignity without doing any work to improve the quality of the nation, or evading arduous research in the style of Aq-style to maintain the superficial false "dignity."
This is what inspired me from reading Mr. Wei's translations of Western philosophy.