Chapter 4 From Scripture to Literature: Translations of the Shijing by James Legge and Arthur Waley
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Abstract
Taking translation as a kind of inscription, rather than as mere inter-lingual and cross-cultural communication, this essay examines the complex contextual factors inscribed in and released by the translations of the Shijing by James Legge (1815–1897) and Arthur Waley (1889–1966), two of the most prominent figures of Chinese poetry translation in the West. Active in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century when the British empire was expanding all over the world, James Legge was motivated by a religious mission to convert the Chinese nation; he envisioned his translation as a tool to facilitate proselytization. Arthur Waley, on the contrary, experienced the devastating First World War and the subsequent disillusionment with Western culture; his translation was meant to be part of a general search among Western intellectuals of the time for an alternative whereby to salvage and rejuvenate Western culture. These ideological drives, however, are complicated and sometimes even subverted by their translation praxis at the textual level. Legge’s evangelical passion is often mixed with a reverence for the Shijing as a classic or “scripture,” which causes him to adhere closely to the Chinese canonical tradition. Waley’s liberal stance is translated into a desire to strip the Shijing of its canonical stature and treat it merely as a work of literature, interpreted from a modern Western perspective and rendered in a highly naturalized/domesticated form.