Tango or Tangle: A Hybrid Zhuangzi in James Legge’s Words

• Main Authors: Yen-Chen Hsu, 許晏禎
• Other Authors: Yiu-Man Ma
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/7j4723

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 翻譯碩士學位學程 === 107 === James Legge was one of the most influential scholar-translators in the 19th century. His multiple identities as a missionary of London Missionary Society, a translator of voluminous Chinese classics, and the first professor of Chinese in the University of Oxford greatly influenced how he understood and represented Chinese traditions in his translation. As a missionary, Legge adopted the controversial “accommodating attitude” toward Chinese traditions, believing that the ancient Chinese had known the existence of God. In his translation of the Zhuangzi, one can see frequent intrusion of Legge’s “Christian slips of tongue.” The translation proper and Legge’s annotations to the translated texts form a tangled cosmology of Daoism and Christianity. On the other hand, though a pioneering scholar who studied, translated, and constructed the earliest impression of “Daoism” in the Western world, Legge’s interpretation of the Zhuangzi often seemed rather “Confucian” and deviated from the “natural” way of Zhuangzi. Legge’s translation of the Zhuangzi, entitled “The Writings of Kwang-tze,” was published in 1891, included in The Sacred Books of the East: The Texts of Taoism. The Sacred Books of the East was an important book series for people in the West to get acquainted with Chinese philosophies/religions. The Zhuangzi constructed by Legge can be regarded as one of the earliest impression of the Daoistic text in the Western world. By reading both original and translated texts closely and analyzing how Legge’s theological ideology and Sinological scholarship participated in his translation of the Zhuangzi, this thesis aims to demonstrate the “hybridity” of “The Writings of Kwang-tze” and reflect on the everlasting tricky issue of representing “otherness” in translation.