23 - Legge, James
James Legge is perhaps the single best-known translator of Chinese in the nineteenth century. His translations of various Chinese classic texts are still consulted today by scholars, and are widely available both in print and online. There are at least four full-length modern biographies [Wong Man Kong, James Legge: A Pioneer at Crossroads of East and West, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Educational Publishing Company, 1996; Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. University of California Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-520-21552-8; Lauren F. Pfister, Striving for 'The Whole Duty of Man': James Legge and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China, 2 vols., published by The Scottish Studies Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz in Germersheim, 2004; and Marilyn Laura Bowman, James Legge and the Chinese Classics: A Brilliant Scot in the Turmoil of Colonial Hong Kong, Victoria, BC: Friesenpress, 2016], as well as numerous biographies at various websites (Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity; Boston University’s School of Theology, History of Missiology; even Wikipedia has a decent page), so here I will focus on his translation activities.
Like so many other nineteenth-century translators, James Legge did not set out to become one. He was first a missionary and learnt Chinese in order to proselytize. It is ironic, then, that he is best known today as a proselytizer of Confucian thought to the English-speaking world through his extensive translations of the Confucian Classics.
Legge’s career spans most of the nineteenth century; he shipped out as a missionary to Southeast Asia in 1839, where he served as the principal of the Anglo-Chinese College until 1843, when he and the College both moved to Hong Kong upon that territory being ceded to the British after the first Opium War. There he served as superintendent at what was then re-named the Theological Seminary until 1856, when disagreements with the London Missionary Board caused him to resign. Except for a couple of trips home and one short tour of various treaty ports after the second Opium War, Legge remained in Hong Kong until 1873, when at the age of 58 he returned to the UK and spent a brief period in semi-retirement, until in 1875 he moved to Oxford, first as a fellow of Corpus Christi College and then as the first professor of Chinese at Oxford, where he remained until his death in 1897 at the ripe age of 82.
Legge began his translation of the Chinese Classics in the 1840s and was still working on them in the 1890s; the first edition of the Four Books (The Analects of Confucius, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, and Mencius) were published in 1861, followed by The Shoo King (Book of Documents; 1865), The She King (Book of Poetry; 1871), The Ch’un Ts’ew, with the Tso Chuen (Spring and Autumn Annals and the Book of Master Zuo; 1872), Classics on Filial Piety (1879), The Yi-king (Book of Changes; 1882), The Book of Rites (1885), Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (1886), and Daoist Literature (Dao De Jing and Zhuang Zi; 1891). At the end, he returned to his first volume of translations of the Four Books and issued a second edition, reflecting the decades of additional labor he spent on Chinese classical learning in 1893.
The real question, however, is how Legge turned from translating Christian texts from English to Chinese in the 1850s, to translating Confucian and then Buddhist and Daoist texts into English. The answer involves his relationship with his fellow missionaries and his attitude toward early Confucian texts. In Legge’s understanding, early China had a monotheistic religion, the worship of Shangdi (上帝), which he proposed as the proper term for rendering “God” in Chinese. His reasoning was rejected by most of his fellow missionaries, who did not believe that the Chinese had ever been monotheistic and worried that the use of a native term for “God” would lead to confusion between Christianity and Daoism or, worse, Buddhism. This disagreement blossomed into the Terms Debate, which continued for several years in the 1850s and eventually led to Legge disassociating himself from the London Missionary Board, losing interest in English to Chinese translation; in any case, he probably could not have gotten his translations published by any missionary press. Instead, while continuing as pastor at a church in Hong Kong, he embraced the role of ambassador of Chinese classical culture to a European audience. His translations are therefore very much a form of argument, an attempt to prove that he is right in his interpretation of early Chinese civilization. [For more on James Legge’s Christian interpretation of Chinese classics, see Chen, I-Hsin, “The Translator as Innovative Sino-Christian Universal Thinker: James Legge's Dialogue with Zhu Xi in His Confucian Analects”]
I say ‘translation’, yet in fact many of Legge’s works were re-translations, since they had already been translated at least once already into English. See my article “Retranslation as Argument” (free to download here) for more on the phenomenon of retranslation.
Legge’s translations also bore fruit in the form of an extended treatise on Confucianism and Daoism that he published: The Religions of China: Confucianism and Taoism Described and Compared with Christianity (1880). Again, this shows his abiding interest in interfaith dialogue and his firmly-held belief that some form of monotheism that could be reconciled with Christianity existed in Chinese history.
Up until this point I have spoken of James Legge’s translations as if he were their sole author. Yet in fact we know that from the beginning he worked with one or more Chinese scholars, most notably Wang Tao (also in the network database).
John Cochran (fl. 1821–1865); After Henry Room (1802–1850). From Helen E Legge; James Legge Missionary and Scholar, London, The Religious Tract Society, 1905.
It is instructive to note that Legge is seated while two of the three “Chinese assistants” are standing, one in quite an authoritative stance and pointing at a text as if telling Legge what the text means. Certainly in the early years of his work, Legge relied heavily on his Chinese teachers and collaborators in his endeavor to understand the Chinese classics and decide which commentaries to follow for their interpretation.
To what extent they may have influenced the form of his English translation is more doubtful; in the only known case of one of them producing a translation into English, Tkin Shen, Legge is at pains to state in the introduction to that volume that he, Legge, had the final say regarding the English expression. As Lawrence Venuti has so persuasively documented, English publishers overwhelmingly favor domesticating translations. Linked to this is the strong preference for translations done or edited by native speakers.