Ku's translation directionality

Translators’ narrative construction starts from their selection of what languages to translate from or into. This section discusses how Ku's translation directionality, which was against the tide of the time in China, shows his agenda of critiquing Western modernity. I will explore this point by contrasting Ku with his contemporary Chinese translators Yan Fu (1853–1921) and Lin Shu (1852–1924). I will also discuss the reasons why most research on Ku and his translations fails to recognise Ku's agenda.

Baker first discusses the narrative effect of translation directionality in her critique of the translation programs provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute.Footnote ²¹ She argues that the process of selecting source and target languages is one of narrative construction and ‘has implications for the way we understand the relationship between the protagonists represented by these languages’.Footnote ²² In her analysis of that particular case, the narrative constructed through this selection is that the societies represented by source languages are to be monitored by those whose languages are deployed as targets. Although my analysis shows a different relationship, Baker's work does demonstrate that directionality in translation is a sign of narrative construction.

In this light, Ku's choice to translate from Chinese into English is worth a narrative analysis, especially given the tide of the time in China as far as translation directionality is concerned. China in Ku's time saw what is often understood as its third climax of translation, the other two being the translation of Buddhism lasting from Eastern Han Dynasty to Song Dynasty (roughly from the second to tenth centuries) and the translation of Western scientific works during the Ming–Qing transition period (around the seventeenth century).Footnote ²³ In Ku's time, Chinese intellectuals translated books of various genres and topics into Chinese from various languages such as English, French, and German. Although they may have differed in terms of the genres or topics of the books to be translated, they translated from other languages into Chinese rather than the other way around.Footnote ²⁴

The different translation directionality between Ku and his Chinese contemporaries can be explained in terms of how their different narrative subscriptions and their different choices of the source–target pattern contributed to the construction of different narratives. Ku's contemporaries’ choice of translating from Western languages into Chinese conveys a narrative that it was China that needed to be informed by the West. In their eyes, the vulnerability of China in its response to Western powers was due to the weakness and even backwardness of the Chinese political system, socio-economic structure, and Chinese culture itself. They seemed to agree that China at the time was in a premodern period while the West had entered the modern era so, for them, the urgent task was to introduce Western modernity into China. Yan Fu and Lin Shu, who were praised by the political reformist Kang Youwei (1858–1927) as the two most outstanding translators of the time, were typical of this kind.Footnote ²⁵ Yan Fu translated what can be called social sciences while Lin Shu was engaged in the translation of Western literary works. Both their translations were aimed at modernising China.

As Schwartz argues, the efforts that Yan Fu made in his life were for a wealthy and powerful China.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, Yan's translations were not purely for the sake of knowledge transfer, but rather were intended to strengthen China as a nation. Yan introduced social Darwinism into China through his translation of Huxley's works, raising his Chinese contemporaries’ awareness of the danger of the destruction of the Chinese race and calling them to fight for the future of the Chinese nation. He also translated John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, trying to elaborate on a concept of freedom that he believed could enlighten the Chinese people.Footnote ²⁷ Yan did not translate in accordance with his own translation principle of 信 (xin, faithfulness), but rather manipulated and intervened in his translated texts. All these manipulations and interventions were aimed at serving his own agenda of enlightening the Chinese people and making China powerful.

This emphasis on strengthening China is also true for Lin Shu's translations of Western literary works. Lin's translated works were aimed, as Hill argues, to manufacture a new Chinese culture that promoted the idea of strength.Footnote ²⁸ To Lin, ‘rejuvenating China’ was his mission so that China could become, metaphorically speaking, a juvenile characterised by energy, vigour, and strength.Footnote ²⁹ Lin even translated works that were colonialist and racist in order to serve his own agenda of calling for his Chinese contemporaries to become strong and fight for a powerful China.Footnote ³⁰

Although Yan and Lin had very different backgrounds and differed in their selection of books to be translated, they had the same translation agenda—that is, introducing Western modernity into China in order to save China from its national crisis. Modernity and translation were intertwined in China, as argued by Xie: ‘[M]odernity in China began and evolved with translation … the Chinese discourse of modernity was not only inaugurated, but also enabled by translation. In other words, translation is not merely auxiliary and instrumental to the shaping of Chinese modernity, but an essential part of it.’Footnote ³¹

Indeed, modernity that arose in China at the turn of the twentieth century was effected by translation. It was through translations of Western books into Chinese that the project of modernity began to be built in China. This has led Lydia Liu to label Chinese modernity as ‘translated modernity’.Footnote ³² While they may have differed in the extent to which China should be Westernised, translators such as Yan and Lin agreed that the introduction of Western modernity into China was a necessary and, maybe, sufficient condition for China's escape from destruction and the possibility of its rejuvenation.

This choice of translating from foreign languages into Chinese, I would argue, is due to the narratives to which translators such as Yan and Lin subscribed. They believed that it was China rather than the West that needed to be informed because they subscribed to the particular dual metanarratives of ‘individual enlightenment and national salvation’ that had circulated in China since the late nineteenth century. As the Chinese philosopher Li Zehou argues, modern Chinese history saw ‘qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou 啟蒙與救亡的雙重變奏’ (the dual variation of individual enlightenment and national salvation).Footnote ³³ Specifically, Chinese intellectuals were concerned with enlightening the Chinese people and saving China from its national crisis that was caused by bullying from Western powers. The narratives of ‘individual enlightenment and national salvation’, in Ku's time, were interdependent in that enlightenment of the Chinese people was the task that would save the Chinese nation whilst the prevention of national destruction required the enlightenment of the people, although, in the end, as Li points out, the narrative of ‘national salvation’ overrode that of ‘individual enlightenment’.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, the narratives of ‘individual enlightenment and national salvation’ reached the level of metanarrativity so that Chinese intellectuals who subscribed to them, such as Yan Fu and Lin Shu, made all kinds of efforts, including the translation of Western books into Chinese, to enlighten the Chinese people so that they would be able to save the country from destruction.

However, Ku's choice to translate Chinese texts into English conveys a narrative that the West had to be informed of the Chinese civilisation, which he believed had something to offer for the West to get out of its crisis. Ku intended to show the Western people ‘how the study of the Chinese civilisation can help to solve the problem facing the world to-day, the problem of saving the civilisation of Europe from bankruptcy’.Footnote ³⁵ To Ku, the problems with which the modern West was confronted could be solved with the aid of the Chinese civilisation, typically reflected in Confucianism. Ku took the Confucian way of living and governing as an alternative to what prevailed in the modern West.

Ku critiqued, rather than embraced, Western modernity, I would argue, because he subscribed to the public narratives of the crisis of Western modernity, as elaborated on by Western romantic or conservative thinkers such as Goethe, Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Emerson. As I demonstrate elsewhere, Ku responds to or resists the narratives constitutive of Western modernity such as rationalism, democracy, secularisation, revolution, anarchy, racism, and colonialism, while at the same time making narrative connections with those conservative or romantic Western writers.Footnote ³⁶

Therefore, I view Ku's translations as responding to or resisting the narratives that were circulating in the West rather than in China. Unlike Chinese translators such as Yan Fu and Lin Shu at the time, who worked hard to translate into Chinese, Ku was instead speaking to his Western contemporaries through his translations of Confucian classics. This argument can be intuitively justified if we consider the simple fact that translations are in the first place aimed at the target readers, as indicated in Gideon Toury's thesis that ‘translations are facts of target cultures’.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, throughout his translations, Ku responds, explicitly or implicitly, to the narratives in the target world rather than the Chinese context, whether in resisting the narratives of those writers with whom he disagreed or standing in solidarity with those thinkers with whom he agreed.

Moreover, not only his translations, but also many of his writings were not targeted at his Chinese compatriots. Ku produced most of his writings in English at a time when few Chinese people had a command of English. He took issue with his Western contemporaries with regard to various narratives of Western modernity, but he seldom debated with Chinese intellectuals when these narratives were introduced into China. To take an example, social Darwinism was one of the narratives that Ku contested in his translated Zhongyong Footnote ³⁸ but, as the late Confucianism-sympathetic Chinese philosopher Zhang Xianglong points out, Ku did not debate with his Chinese contemporary Yan Fu, who introduced social Darwinism into China.Footnote ³⁹

It is very important to recognise that Ku was responding to the West more than to China, and failure to recognise this tends to miss important points in exploring Ku as a translator, a writer, and a historical figure. The Achilles’ heel of most research on Ku is a lack of this recognition, which is most conspicuously shown in the prevailing practice of labelling Ku as eccentric by both his contemporaries and later generations in China. Some may argue that labelling Ku this way is due to Ku's ‘eccentric’ behaviours and arguments. For instance, after the collapse of Qing (1644–1912), the last dynasty in China, Ku continued wearing a queue, which has, since the late nineteenth century, been considered in China a symbol of the so-called feudalism or the oppression of the Han Chinese people by the Manchus, the ruling ethnicity in the Qing Dynasty.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, Ku was not at all alone in having these ‘eccentric’ behaviours and, indeed, a great number of Qing loyalists, including the abovementioned Lin Shu, behaved similarly yet were not labelled in the same way as was Ku.Footnote ⁴¹ I argue that Ku was considered eccentric not because of his ‘eccentric’ performances, but due in large part to the fact that he failed to live up to the expectations of his Chinese compatriots. Specifically, they found it inexplicable that Ku, who had a Western educational background, did not embrace Western modernity, as did most of his contemporaries. Ku's enthusiastic advocacy for Confucianism and critique of Western modernity were beyond their expectations or even imagination. This expectation of Ku remains even now, and still has a strong impact on scholarly research on Ku, as shown in the appearance of the word ‘eccentric’ in the titles of recently published works about him.Footnote ⁴²

The expectation that Ku should have embraced Western modernity is a result of not recognising that Ku's concern was more with civilisation than nation. Ku's critics mistakenly supposed that Ku's defence of China emanated from his love of or his identification with China as a nation. This supposition has motivated a nationalistic reading of Ku. Most research on Ku's translation that is informed by post-colonial theoriesFootnote ⁴³ can be explained by this mistaken supposition. However, I argue that Ku's concern was more with human civilisation than with the Chinese nation. Unlike his Chinese contemporaries who were predominantly concerned with and anxious over the fate of the Chinese nation in the face of challenges from the West, Ku was worried about the fate of humanity as a whole, as he diagnosed modern Western civilisation as ultimately leading to destruction that would spread around the globe.

This expectation reflects what I would call a self-Orientalised mentality of many Chinese intellectuals in both Ku's time and now. The military defeat of China by the West and a Westernised Japan led many Chinese intellectuals to believe that China needed to abandon Confucianism before China could be modernised. The process of the development of modern China, as the historian Yu Ying-shih argues, was one of radicalisation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Intellectuals from different backgrounds and with different political stances reached an agreement that Confucianism no longer worked in modern China. Even the so-called twentieth-century New Confucians, who were sympathetic towards Confucianism, also believed that Confucianism needed to be reformed or that it only functioned in the private sphere. Given the merciless attack on and unhesitant rejection of Confucianism by many Chinese intellectuals, the May Fourth era,Footnote ⁴⁵ roughly from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s, has been called a ‘shifu shidai 弑父時代’ (patricidal era).Footnote ⁴⁶ The metaphorical use of the word ‘shifu 弑父’ (patricide) suggests the extent to which the anti-tradition Chinese intellectuals attacked or even demonised Confucianism.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Yu points out, modern China had no real conservatives.Footnote ⁴⁸ This anti-tradition mentality is also a mentality of self-Orientalism, according to which the ‘backward’ Confucianism should be replaced by the ‘advanced’ Western civilisation. This self-Orientalised mentality, which began to develop in China from Ku's time, has made it very hard to understand Ku, who was strongly against Orientalist narratives, as shown in his dismissal of Arthur Smith (1845–1932), the author of Chinese Characteristics—an Orientalist book that was first published in 1890.Footnote ⁴⁹

The situation of Ku in the Chinese context, as reflected in the existing literature on Ku, is also due to the influence of identity politics. In this light, Ku as a Chinese man must have been predominantly concerned with the issues of China rather than those outside of it, despite the fact that Ku's Chinese identity was contestable because he was born and raised outside of China. In other words, because Ku identified himself with the Chinese ethnicity, his writings, and even his translations, have been considered a response to the Chinese context rather than that outside of China, despite the conspicuous fact that most of his writings were written in—and most of his translated works were into—languages other than Chinese.

Ku's invocation of Goethe

Ku's agenda of critiquing Western modernity is also reflected in his invocation of Goethe on the title pages and in the front matter in his translations of Confucian classics. This section demonstrates how Ku sets his agenda of critiquing Western modernity by titling his translated Lunyu with reference to Goethe and citing a poem by Goethe in the front matter of his translated Zhongyong.

In his translated Lunyu, Ku makes Goethe prominent in the title that he gives it—The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius: A New Special Translation, Illustrated with Quotations from Goethe and Other Writers. This is particularly interesting in that Ku privileges Goethe over other Western thinkers and writers, whom he also quotes but who remain anonymous on the title page. This selective appropriation of Goethe among the many Western writers and thinkers whom Ku cites in his translations demonstrates Ku's promotion and priority of the narratives elaborated on by Goethe. Specifically, Ku attempts to lead the target readers to receive his translations with reference to the narratives that Goethe elaborates on in his works.

Moreover, the special space that a title occupies in a book makes Ku's selective appropriation particularly important. Titles are among those few things that readers first approach before they delve into the book proper. Translators choose a certain title with purposes and motivations, since the title can ‘condense the theme and message of a text’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, titles can ‘create a space of public anticipation and initiate a debate over texts even by those who have not read them’.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, Ku's selective appropriation of Goethe through his intervention on the title page can help to establish a link between Confucian narratives and those of Goethe, even before the reader really goes into the body of his translated Lunyu.

Although Goethe's name does not appear in the title of Ku's translated Zhongyong, Ku still makes Goethe present in his translated Zhongyong by putting in the front matter a poem by Goethe, which is titled ‘The Mason Lodge’. This is also a sign of the great extent to which Ku highlights Goethe, since the front matter is also an important paratextual space in which readers can be influenced before they delve into the translation proper.

It is also worth discussing the fact that Ku explicitly attributes this poem to Goethe in the front matter without mentioning the translator, Thomas Carlyle. This is particularly interesting, first contrasted with the fact that Ku accorded himself, as a translator, the status of authorship. On the title pages of both his translated Lunyu and Zhongyong appears the format ‘BY KU HUNG-MING’.Footnote ⁵² In the back matter of his translated Zhongyong, the crediting of the translator with authorship is transparent, as shown in the words ‘BY THE SAME AUTHOR’, under which he lists three books, one of which is his translated Lunyu. This inconsistency in the treatment of Ku himself and Thomas Carlyle as translators with regard to the status of authorship suggests that Ku may have intentionally made Carlyle absent in order to cast Goethe into relief.

The other is related to the level of equivalence between Carlyle's English version and the original German version. Carlyle's English version radically diverges from Goethe's original version.Footnote ⁵³ As Francke points out, Carlyle's English version ‘contains in point of fact no line equivalent to [Goethe's original version]’.Footnote ⁵⁴ A more equivalent English version produced in Ku's time was translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring (1826–1911), who titled the poem as ‘A Symbol’. Although I have no evidence that Ku did have access to Bowring's version, it is reasonable to guess that Ku had also read Bowring's translation, given Ku's familiarity with British writers and translators, as evidenced in his frequent reference to them in his translations. What is more, Ku could also have produced his own translation of this poem because he had a good command of German and was well versed in Goethe's oeuvre.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this sense, Ku seems to have made a choice between three versions—that is, Carlyle's, Bowring's, and his own. Therefore, Ku's adoption of Carlyle's version can also be a form of selective appropriation, which contributes to a certain narrative construction, as we shall discuss later with regard to the content of the poem.

These connections with Goethe on the title pages and in the front matter in his translated Confucian classics further demonstrate Ku's agenda of critiquing Western modernity through his translations, as the work of Goethe is related to the critique of Western modernity. For example, it is widely recognised that Goethe's Faust represents the human conditions that were brought about by Western modernity.Footnote ⁵⁶ The legendary figure, Faust, was considered ‘a fundamental icon of Western modernity’Footnote ⁵⁷ and his story ‘a myth of modernity’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Simply put, the protagonist in Goethe's works was an archetypical modern person who was fundamentally exemplifying modern life and condition. In the eyes of Goethe, as Eggle points out, the modern West was ‘a civilisation at peril’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Through literary productions, Goethe warned the moderns of the danger of modern civilisation and encouraged them to seek a life that was better than that brought about by Western modernity. Given this connection between the works of Goethe and the critique of Western modernity, it makes sense to argue that Ku's highlighting of Goethe in his translations of Confucian classics is also his way of critiquing Western modernity.

Ku's critique of Western modernity is also shown by his quotations from Goethe throughout the translations of both the Lunyu and the Zhongyong. For example, in his translated Lunyu, by citing Goethe, Ku replaces the dominant narrative of progress as materialistic advancement in the modern West with his own narrative of progress as a development of humanity.Footnote ⁶⁰ In his translated Zhongyong, Ku dismisses modern education as producing devils, as described in Goethe's Faust,Footnote ⁶¹ but still invests trust in human nature by recalling how Goethe spoke of human nature.Footnote ⁶² Ku also invokes Goethe to stress how to cultivate morality by living one's ordinary lifeFootnote ⁶³ and explains the difficulty in completely understanding the moral law by invoking Goethe's narrative of the ‘open secret’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The content of the poem that Ku puts in the front matter of his translated Zhongyong also merits discussion. The poem begins by using the mason's way of living to describe the way of living of all human beings, then refers to negative feelings such as ‘doubt and misgiving’, and ends with the following lines:

Ku's reference to ‘choice’ here can be read as a reminder for the reader that they should make the right choice. This warning sounds particularly true when we take into account the contrast in the poem between ‘darkness’ and ‘perplexity’ in the preceding lines, and ‘stillness’ and ‘fullness’ in the following lines. It is justifiable to say that Ku believed that the choice of what Western modernity brought about was the wrong choice, and it was right to choose what his translations offered. Through the mouth of the Carlyle-translated Goethe, Ku encouraged the moderns to refrain from despairing. The word ‘despair’ at the opening of his translated Zhongyong in the front matter seems to be echoed in the closing pages of his translated Zhongyong by the word ‘pessimism’, which appears in the first sentence of the Appendix A that immediately follows his translation proper. Ku seems to suggest that the way to dispel despair or pessimism is to read his translations and follow the way, as encoded in them.

Ku's use of language mixing

In addition to the selection of translation directionality and the invocation of Goethe, Ku also adopts language mixing as a way of contesting Western modernity. This section focuses on the ways in which Ku uses multiple languages on the title pages of his translated Confucian classics and discusses its relevance to Ku's agenda of critiquing Western modernity.

Ku uses language mixing in both his translated Lunyu and Zhongyong. Three languages appear on the title page of his translated Lunyu. At the top are four Chinese characters ‘siwen zaizi 斯文在兹’ (herein lies the authentic civilisation). Immediately under Ku's name is a quote in German from Goethe, the meaning of which is ‘the shining things exist only for a while, but the authentic things will remain relevant forever’. On the title page of Ku's translated Zhongyong, there are no German words but, at the top, there are the same four Chinese characters. The meanings of both the Chinese and German words seem to suggest that Confucianism represents the authentic civilisation that will remain relevant forever. This language mixing also appears in the body of Ku's translations. For example, he uses Chinese words or phrases from place to place, sometimes juxtaposing Chinese and English, and even without English equivalents in other places. He also uses a few German, French, Greek, and Latin words in the body of his translations.

However, what interests me more is not the actual meanings of these non-English words, but rather the question of whether they mean anything to the target readers—that is, the anglophone population. In the West of the time, the majority of the target readers would not have read Chinese, and at least a certain proportion of them would not have read any languages such as Latin, Greek, French, and German, although it is reasonable to argue that some well-educated people in the anglophone world may have learned some of them. My argument would be that these verbal signs do mean something to the English readers. I believe that Ku's use of multiple languages is meaningful for his translation agenda because, as Baker demonstrates, the use of language mixing creates a space of resistance in which translators reverse the symbolic order and serve their own political agenda.Footnote ⁶⁵ Therefore, the question that I have to ask is: What does Ku intend to resist by mixing languages in his translations? As Tymoczko points out, ‘resistance to what?’ is a basic question that has to be asked when translation is understood as resistance.Footnote ⁶⁶

Ku's language mixing may invite multiple interpretations, but the most conspicuous would be that of difference, which can be visually felt. To appreciate this highlighting of difference by Ku, it is necessary to consider the relationship between difference and Western modernity.

As universalism was one of the defining features of Western modernity, the process of modernisation was one of erasing differences. At the heart of modernity lay ‘the ideology of sameness’.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Bauman points out, ‘[m]odernity brought the levelling of differences’.Footnote ⁶⁸ To borrow the words of Chernela and Pereira, modernity meant ‘an end to difference’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Internally, the modern West promoted standardisation through education, industrialisation, and commercialisation to shape the mindset of people and their ways of living and working, marginalising, excluding, or even eradicating the Other. Externally, the modern West attempted to impose on other nations and peoples its model of life and governance, which it believed to be universal. Where peaceful means failed to achieve this end, violence was promoted and carried out, as typically shown in various forms of racism and colonialism.

This feature of Western modernity as the erasure of differences provides us with a lens through which to explain Ku's use of language mixing on the title pages of his translated Confucian classics. Ku's use of languages other than English can be taken as his response or resistance to the tendency of Western modernity to erase difference. Ku's use of other languages in English-written books was an act of promoting heterogeneity and resisting homogeneity. In particular, his preservation of Chinese characters in both of his two translated works was to make visible the Other that was marginalised and silenced by the West. In his construction of a narrative of difference through the use of language mixing, Ku's visibility as a translator was made explicit. In this sense, Ku does not just adopt a domesticating strategy, as the existing literature on Ku's translation, informed by Venuti's foreignisation/domestication dichotomy, asserts.Footnote ⁷⁰

The physical positions of the languages that appear on the title pages are also interesting. In both books, the Chinese characters appear at the top. This physical hierarchy can be metaphorical: Ku seems to use the physical hierarchy to construct a narrative that the Chinese civilisation that is encoded in his translated works is at the top, which means it is the best, as expressed in the meanings of the four Chinese characters. In this sense, Ku subverts the dominant hierarchical structure that was established by the modern West. His choice to use these strategies on the title page makes Ku's agenda of critiquing modernity more prominent, as the foregrounding function of title pages can better impress readers in a way that casts Ku's translation agenda into relief.