This essay examines the effort made by a French scholar named Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie (1844-1894) to translate the basic text of the Yijing (易經 Classic of Changes) into English, and the role that his idiosyncratic translations and interpretations played in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theoretical debates over “the Western origins of Chinese civilization” (中國文化西來說). A central argument of the essay is that both politics and ethnocentrism played a significant role in shaping the responses of Western and East Asian scholars to this particular translation, influencing, in turn, Japanese and Chinese translations of it. In the end, however, new archaeological discoveries in China, together with the rise and rapid growth of Chinese nationalism, sounded the death knell for Terrien de Lacouperie’s controversial theories.
Abstract
This essay examines the effort made by a French scholar named Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie (1844-1894) to translate the basic text of the Yijing (易經 Classic of Changes) into English, and the role that his idiosyncratic translations and interpretations played in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theoretical debates over “the Western origins of Chinese civilization” (中國文化西來說). A central argument of the essay is that both politics and ethnocentrism played a significant role in shaping the responses of Western and East Asian scholars to this particular translation, influencing, in turn, Japanese and Chinese translations of it. In the end, however, new archaeological discoveries in China, together with the rise and rapid growth of Chinese nationalism, sounded the death knell for Terrien de Lacouperie’s controversial theories.
关键词
Terrien de Lacouperie /
Yijing /
translation /
mistranslation /
Babylonia
Key words
Terrien de Lacouperie /
Yijing /
translation /
mistranslation /
Babylonia
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