Paper Abstracts

Cultural Area : East Asia

Peter KORNICKI

Vernacularization and the evolution of writing systems in East Asia

This paper considers the impact that the development and invention of writing systems did and did not have on vernacularization in East Asia. It seeks to answer the following questions. Why did each society develop a distinctive script and why was the Chinese script the only common script? What explains the rapidity with which the Tanguts and Tibetans developed independent scripts and the tardiness with which scripts emerged in Japan, Korea and Vietnam? How was it possible to present vernacular versions of Sinitic texts without a vernacular script?

 

Cultural Area : China

Sarah M. ALLEN

Translating History: Gou Daoxing’s Soushen ji

The Dunhuang text entitled Soushen ji 搜神記, attributed to Gou Daoxing 句道興, is frequently classed (in modern terminology) as a Tang zhiguai 志怪 or biji 筆記 collection. However, its contents mark it as quite different from the typical Tang collection in its focus on incidents that are also recorded in earlier texts, ranging from early histories such as the Zuo zhuan 左傳 and early philosophical texts such as the Han Feizi 韓非子, to Gan Bao’s 干寶 much more famous fourth-century Soushen ji and early medieval miracle tale collections. The narratives of these events found in the Dunhuang text are never identical to those in the earlier sources, either in wording or (in many cases) in detail, but they remain close enough to be easily recognizable as versions of the same story. Moreover though the text often gestures to a source, the citation given often reads simply “historical records” 史記. The eclectic content of the Dunhuang Soushen ji, its juxtaposition of material more familiarly associated with a wide range of earlier sources, and the Dunhuang versions’ frequent divergence from those more familiar narratives raise a number of questions about the types of sources Gou Daoxing used and the intended purpose of his compilation. My essay will use this intriguing text as a starting point to explore how canonical material was “translated” into new mediums and contexts during the medieval period.

 

Attilio ANDREINI

Intralingual Translation and Early Exegetical Traditions of the Laozi 老子

The aim of the present paper is to examine to what extent the early exegetical tradition of the Laozi  老子 offers additional information on the relationship between commentarial literature on “Classics”, or “Canons” (jing 經) and intralingual translation.

More precisely, through an investigation on the commentaries attached to the Yan Zun 嚴遵 version, the Heshanggong 河上公 version, the Wang Bi 王弼 version and the Xiang’er 想爾 version of the Laozi, the paper will try to verify if the exegetical methods contemplate procedures of intralingual translation in order to re-contextualize a Canon through its commentary (by reducing the temporal distance that separates them) and to mediate between their linguistic and hermeneutic differences.

In particular, the different interpretations developed by the commentators on the meaning of yi 一 (“One”, “Unity”, “Conformity with the Absolute”) in the Laozi will be examined. By focusing on a specific topic, the investigation will show clearly how each exegetical tradition has built its critical system to meet different explanatory purposes and we will attempt to verify whether each of these exegetical purpose implies a distinct approach of re-shaping the canonical text.

A further objective will be to check whether the source text, paraphrased or restructured according to each commentator’s tenets, may or may not be seen as the aim of a “proper" translation. Starting from the attempt of Zethsen (2009) to set-up alternative criteria to define the process of translation compatible with a wide range of translational phenomena - among which that of intralingual translation - the investigation will proceed one more step in order to determine if, on case-by-case basis, source text, transfer and intertextual relationships produce “forms” of translation and whether these translations are eligible to be labeled as intralingual, interlingual or “inter-genres”.

The latter typology, in particular, addresses the need to explore in greater depth the relationship between jing "Canon" and zhuan 傳 "commentary" (or zhu 注 "interlinear commentary”), which is  a tight relationship of mutual dependence, because neither of them has meaning without the other. According to the words of Wang Chong 王充 (27–c. 100 CE, who argued that "the Sages make the jing; the Worthies created zhuan for them: they transmit the ideas of those who made them, and adopt the fixed intent of the Sages. Therefore the jing need the zhuan") it can be seen that any text could assume the status of jing through the addition of a zhuan: such addition certified a “Canon” as a constant, normative paradigm which, thanks to its commentary, reveals hidden meanings and produces a fecund application to many different situations. The case of Laozi is no exception, since among the Peking University corpus of bamboo texts (Beida Hanjian 北 大漢 簡) which should be dated to the second half of the reign of Emperor Wu 武 of Han 漢 (141-87 BCE) there is a nearly complete version of the Laozi (Beida Laozi 北大 老子) divided into two sections, which are entitled Laozi shang jing 老子.上經 (Laozi, First Section of the Canon) and Laozi xia jing 老子.下經 (Laozi, Second section of the Canon). This specific feature not only indicates that the status of "Canonical Scripture" (jing) was already accorded to the text during the Western Han period, but it may also reinforce the traditional claim that the Laozi achieved such a prestigious recognition during the reign of Emperor Jing 景  of Han (156-141 BCE).

 

Wolfgang BEHR

Resounding the gloss: on the origins of paronomasia as an intralingual argumentative device

Paronomastics, although known as an embellishment since the earliest stages of Chines poetry, reemerges as a massively deployed glossing strategy during the Pre-Imperial/Imperial transition period. Against the background shift from what has been called “nominalism” (Makeham 1991, 1994) in Early Chinese philosophy, i.e. the adbandonment of the previously widespread acceptance of merely conventional ties between extralinguistic referents and their linguistic representations (Ptak 1986-7, Djamouri 1993), a move towards forms of “essentialism” set in during the Early Empire, necessitating new motivations of the linguistic sign, whether oral or written. Trying to escape from the abyss of the arbitraire du signe by concocting invented traditions of nomothetic saints, the Han Ruists attempted to anchor the gloss in fashionable correlative cosmologies, and, at the same time, the signifié in its intrinsic ontology. Along with an increasing awareness of language change (Behr 2005), internal and external linguistic diversity (Behr 2004), a new articulation of philosophical arguments thus emerged, which depended on the harnessing of synchronic homophonies and the construction of wild intralingual paretymologies, through which the core terms of the Chinese philosophical lexicon could be paronomastically reappropriated. 

After tracing the earliest reflexes of a vernacular-yǎyán 雅言 (Behr 2016) divide in excavated texts, and sketching the rampant loss of Old Chinese derivationsal morphlogy under conditions of heavy language contact and its consequences for the emergence of a recalibrated relationship between writing and language, my contribution will focus on paronomasia as a synchronic intralingual practice (cf., e.g.,. Huang Lili 1995, Zhao Zhongfang 2003, Geaney 2010, 2016, Zhang Guoliang 2011, Meng Xin 2014, Suter 2015, 2016). Aimed at creating powerful philosophical propositions, it will be argued that this practice played an important in the establishment of what would eventually be construed as a “classical” canon of Chinese texts and a corresponding normative language (tōngyǔ 通語), effectively disguising the less presentable aspects of its quasi-creolized linguistic pedigree.

 

Barbara BISETTO

Intralingual translation and the making of the yanyi textual category

The textual category of yanyi (lit. elaboration on the meaning) has been mainly discussed in relation to the rich production of vernacular narratives based on historical and pseudo-historical records which were published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the context of the late imperial print culture.

The narrative outgrowth of this textual category, however, marked the point of convergence and transformation of some key elements germinated in earlier centuries in the first occurrences of this category within the context of the commentarial tradition. Particularly relevant among these features are the use of amplification in the hermeneutical practice, the impact of printing and the flourishing of pedagogically focused commentaries, as well as the prominent role assigned in these commentaries to practices of rephrasing to help the reading and learning of canonical and non-canonical texts.

In my presentation I will focus on this earlier stage of yanyi in the commentarial tradition and will discuss selected textual examples from two fourteenth century works: the anthology Du lü yanyi (Explanations of Du Fu’s codified poetry) by Zhang Xing, and the commentary Shi yanyi (Explanations on the Odes, preface 1383) by Liang Yin (1303-1390). I will analyze what kind of interpretive practices and what kind of attitudes toward language do these texts envision, particularly from the perspective of intralingual translation, and will try to define what kind of social needs they were addressing and what kind of social action they were meant to accomplish in the context of their production. The aim of this presentation is twofold: (i) to contribute to shed some light on the conceptualization of yanyi as a process of mediation and interaction between levels of culture; (ii) to contribute to a description of some of the discursive practices at the heart of this process in terms of translation.

 

Vibeke Børdahl

The Interplay of the Oral and the Written in Jin Ping Mei cihua

On the basis of my previous studies of the so-called ‘storyteller’s manner, shuoshu ti 說書体, in Chinese popular oral and written entertainment literature, I hope to begin a study of the ‘manner’ as found in the novel, Jin Ping Mei cihua 金瓶梅詞話(1617). What is the function of the ‘storyteller’s manner’ in anonymous literary work of Jin Ping Mei cihua? How far can we relate the function and form of the ‘manner’ to oral professional storytelling, as we know it from present day performance practice of storytelling in China, such as Yangzhou storytelling, Yangzhou pinghua 揚州評話, and other oral genres of China?

In this contribution I just want to communicate some findings concerning the narrator’s meta-narrative phrases, the so-called ‘storyteller’s stock-phrases’, together with a few tentative thoughts on the novel’s connection to oral storytelling.

Keywords: Jin Ping Mei cihua, novel, performed literature, pinghua, stock phrase, storyteller’s manner, storytelling.

 

Stéphane FEUILLAS

Kong Yingda孔穎達 (574-648) as a translator of the Chinese Classics

The enormous set of commmentaries commissioned by the Tang Emperor Taizong 唐太宗 (r. 598-649) and mostly written by Kong Yingda孔穎達 (574-648), the famous, still extent and widely used until now by modern scholars Correct Meaning of the Five Classics (Wujing zhengyi 五 經 正義) has until the middle of the eleventh century constituted the basis of the scholar’s curriculum and one of the essential books on the mastery of knowledge required for the examinations. Taking the form of a sub-commentary (shu 疏), it brings together the various commentaries of the dynasties of the Han (or for the Classic of Change those of Wang Bi 王弼 (226-149) and Han Kangbo 韓康伯 (332-380). Nevertheless this work has often been devalued in the history of Chinese thought, modern interpreters noting that the contribution of Kong Yingda and his team were often marginal, and claiming that its interpretative choices were few and above all lacking any originality.

In this paper, I’d like to enhance another way to look at the work and another practice. I’ll try to show that the bulk of his work consists in a real intralingual translation of the text of the classics on the one hand, or of the Han and Six Dynasties’ commentators on the other hand. For the sake of clarity, I will limit myself to some examples taken from his commentary on the Records on Rites (Liji 禮記) and demonstrate through a careful reading of the textual tools used by Kong Yingda (for instance use of dissyllabic words instead of the monosyllabic words of the classics, addition of grammatical empty words) that the nature of those commentaries is close to a translation.

This paper will also try to give some reasons of the translation in the Tang Dynasty of the ancient classics and of the Han commentators and ask a question very rarely addressed, namely that the ancient Chinese language was partly lost during the Six Dynasties and that beyond the screen of a continuous tradition appears some discontinuity not only in the episteme of the Chinese philosophical history but also in the Chinese language itself that the Kong Yingda’s commentaries precisely reveal and are aimed to fill out.

 

Rainier LANSELLE

Language and discourse in the formation of late Ming and early Qing vernacular short story

Because the developement of premodern Chinese fictional literature took place in a context of diglossia, it was marked by narrative procedures which encompassed not only discursive, but also strongly linguistic aspects. A key-feature in the strategies of Chinese authors of fiction from the Yuan to early-Qing has long been the recycling of classical sources, recast and by the same way resemanticized. This enduring performative endeavor coordinated a subtle mix of rewriting, quotation, amplification, commentary, and plain translation, with a constant shift between the two linguistic domains of classical and vernacular, the differentiation of which the authors showed a keen awareness.

The consequence of this creative environment was twofold. First it had a strongly transformative effect on the source texts that were submitted to such a process of overhauling, in a way very much akin to what has been described in the context of interlingual translation. Depending on similar processes of dis-location and re-location, it postulated the creation of new readerships and contributed to the updating of whole corpuses of stories, oftentimes achieving unprecedented literary fame and cultural significance. And second it had important consequences in the field of narratology, as, through it, authors of fiction transformed to a great extent the identity of who was speaking. The expert/layman relationship subsumed under the wen 文言 vs./ tongsu 通俗 differentiation implied a very different narrative contract, affecting this time not only the reader, but the fictional identity of the narrator. The consequences of this were manifold, and strikingly akin, this time, to what has been described in the context of intralingual translation — in its effect on the transmission of knowledge, to cite but one example.

Relying on the corpus of the late-Ming to early-Qing huaben 話本 short stories and critical material such as prefaces, my paper will focus on a careful examination of the various creative techniques governing the recasting of classical material into vernacular narratives, with a particular attention to its linguistic aspects. On this basis I shall examine how the qualification of intralingual translation can apply to these creations, implying phenomena by no means alien to interlingual translation.

 

Haun SAUSSY

A Neglected Feature of Translation: The Intertext

By “intertextuality” we usually mean a network of echoes and correspondences that construct the meaning of a work of literature by putting it in symbiotic relation with other pre-existing works of literature (classical statements of this insight are to be found in Kristeva, Σημειοτική, and Riffaterre, La Production du texte). A translation, it might be said, is through-and-through intertextual, because, in theory, every word or sentence of the French translation of Ulysses, let’s say, has its raison d’être in a corresponding word or sentence of the original English-language novel it purports to translate. But when a text is among the first to tread a certain path of cultural exchange, the equivalences and understandings that make translation possible may seem particularly weak. In such cases, translation is helped along—sponsored—by a preexisting text in the «target language» of the translation relationship. That preexisting text may be mined for phrases, ideas, structures, devices, style, attitudes, a relation to an audience, or other aspects that might make more likely the success of the newly-introduced text from abroad. I call the text mined in this way the «sponsor text.»

An example is ready to hand. The introduction of Buddhism to China, starting in the late second century of our era, was a transcultural initiative taking many forms on different levels of Chinese society. At one extreme, foreign monks who had learned some form of Mahayana Buddhism preached to Chinese with some education who condensed their doctrines into pithy résumés. At another extreme, during the period of disorder and anomie that followed the collapse of the Han Dynasty, disaffected upper-class intellectuals who found congenial the escapist and individualist themes of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi recognized in Buddhist teaching some of the ideas that allowed them to achieve some distance from the Confucian imperatives of family duty and public service. This upper end of the social spectrum—so-called «gentry Buddhism» -- formed the milieu for a curious hybrid culture, sometimes known as Neo-Daoism or xuanxue, in which Buddhist themes intermingled with those of the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, the Liezi and their recent commentaries.

Naturally, when ideas and texts from one culture are introduced to another, there is room for conflict and for misunderstandings (both generous and ill-willed). The use of the language of the Zhuangzi as a vehicle for the conveyance of Buddhist ideas among the educated gentry of the third and fourth centuries is a form of interlingual translation (although virtually none of the Chinese involved in the «translation» knew Pali, Sanskrit, or any other foreign language); it is also an intralingual translation, causing the ideas in these earlier Chinese works to take on new connotations and to be extended in new ways by those who had been in contact with the exponents of monastic Buddhism. This paper will concentrate on the use of Zhuangzi citations by two antagonists, a representative of the court and the important monk Huiyuan, arguing over the relation of the state and the Buddhist sangha. The intertext proves pivotal in more ways than one: not just providing a common vocabulary for the discussion, but supplying the actual stakes for which the antagonists compete.

 

Maria Franca SIBAU

Vernacular Rewriting and the Art of Enlivenment: Intralingual translation in Xingshi yan  (1632)

Many stories in the late Ming huaben collection Xingshi yan (1632) by Lu Renlong present a parade of filial sons, chaste wives, loyal ministers—historical figures whose names and deeds are found in classical language biographies disseminated through historical compilations, local gazetteers, anthologies, encyclopedias. No exception to this is the fourth story, which tells of Chen Miaozhen, a girl who performs gegu (flesh slicing) to save her ailing grandmother. Lu Renlong based his vernacular retelling (labeled as yanyi) on a biography written by the eminent early Ming literatus Song Lian.

In the foreword and in a tail commentary to the story, the commentator (who is usually assumed to be Lu Yunlong, the redactor’s brother and an active publisher in the last decade of the Ming) proclaims the superiority of the vernacular tale vis-à-vis the classic statement of grandfilial devotion, Li Mi’s “Memorial to Express My Feelings” (Chen qing biao, 3rd c. AD), on the one hand, and quatrains by famous scholars that celebrate virtuous paragons, on the other. Such superiority is predicated on the story’s capacity to bring to life its heroine and its power to affect and stir the otherwise recalcitrant reader to action. Yet the commentaries themselves are written in classical language.

 This paper seeks to examine the story of Miaozhen as a text and as an artifact from a variety of angles, including the relationship between the classical source text and the vernacular retelling, the linguistic and ideological interplay between different paratextual levels (preface, eyebrow, and tail commentaries) and the story proper, and the connotative use of calligraphic script displayed in the original woodblock edition. 

 

Viatcheslav VETROV

Chinese Language Varieties as Competing Semiotical Models: Reflections on the Language Use in Wang Yangming's Philosophy

In Wang Yangming's work, both suyu and wenyan are used as a means of philosophical discourse. The choice of either variety is motivated not by socio-linguistic considerations, but by the necessities of the philosophical argument. One of the main issues for Wang Yangming is the unity of ethics and optics, i.e. the persuasion according to which a scholar who aspires to attain the Way should be able to get the right focus in the process of studying, to discard the unnecessary knowledge, to concentrate on the essential, never to reduce the true knowledge-issue (the “quality” of learning) to being a matter of mere quantity. The philosophical motivation of the parallel use of suyu and wenyan styles in the Chuanxilu is two-fold: on the one hand, Wang Yangming addresses the issue of simplicity and clarity of the true learning which had been continuously discussed by the Chinese intellectuals since antiquity and which constantly refers his disciples and readers to the realm of the topology of Chinese culture (this motivates the use of the suyu-style, the topos of “things-close-at-hand”.) On the other hand, he is quite aware of the difficulties his contemporaries are confronted with while trying to understand the Canonical scriptures. Being convinced, that his own age faces quite the same problems as those discussed in the Canonical scriptures, he resorts to the use of wenyan to demonstrate the unity of ages as well as the ever-lasting unity of Principle.

The topology of culture will be discussed as the the primary frame of reference for the language-use in Wang Yangming’s work. However, as most secondary sources in Sinology interpret the use of suyu and wenyan in Chinese sources in socio-linguistic terms (relying largely on Charles Ferguson’s diglossia theory), the problem of culture topology will by necessity be supplemented by the discussion of the language-typology issue. As a means of philosophical investigation, neither suyu nor wenyan can be interpreted as a low or a high variety. For this reason, the paper proposes to refer to both varieties as competing semiotical models rather than as illustrating a diglossic language situation in the classic, Fergusonian sense of the term..

 

Cultural Area : Korea

Marion EGGERT

Translation, Transcoding, Code Switching: Diglossia in Chosŏn Korean Poetry

Widespread assumptions about the “high” and “low” social status during Chosŏn times of Literary Sinitic on the one hand and the Korean language on the other hand are hard to uphold when we look at poetic genres and their language use, at least up to the 17th century, since a number of “high” poetic genres made use of the vernacular. This paper will attempt to approach the complexity of the relationship between these two languages in pre-modern Korean poetry by taking a closer look at their linguistic interpenetrations: renderings of Chinese poems in Korean verse as well as the other way round (A), and the use of language materials or registers of one of the two languages in poetic works composed in the other language (B).

Concerning (A), we will for analytical ends differentiate between translation as a means of making a text available to monolinguals, and transcoding as a means to make use of the potentials of the codes as such (i.e. the “source language”/“target language” – concepts which can of course become vague in a diglossic/bilingual situation). These potentials certainly include (but are not limited to) the socio-cultural significance of the respective languages, i.e. the (second order) code according to which their use is deciphered; a careful reading of instances of transcoding should therefore be able to give some indication of this code.

At the same time, it needs to be asked to which degree acts of transcoding (and translation) produce, reinforce, change, or break down this (second order) code. In this respect, instances of code switching within a literary work (B) may be enlightening, since they can prepare the ground for, or be a sign of, code merger. We will test the hypothesis whether linguistic code merger is accompanied by a tendency towards sharper demarcations between writing systems.

 

Ross KING

Inscriptional repertoires and the problem of intra- vs. interlingual translation in traditional Korea

 

Modern-day Korean parlance about translation frequently references ‘translation into hangul’, ‘translation into Korean letters’ or (worse) ‘translation into Chinese letters’. Is this yet another instance of clumsy English on the part of Koreans producing such phrases for the consumption of foreigners, combined with the tendency on the part of lay persons to conflate speech and writing? This paper suggests rather that such usage has deep historical roots and can be found in abundance in traditional Korean contexts, all of which raise important questions about premodern Korean ideologies of language, writing and translation. These in turn beg theoretical questions about the status of language, writing and translation in premodern Korean literary culture, about the relationship between ‘Chinese’ language and writing and Korean vernacular language and inscription in traditional Korea, and about the vocabulary that we use today to understand and better contextualize and historicize these issues. This paper therefore focuses on conceptualizations of translation in traditional Korea by examining 1) Language and writing/linguistic codes and inscriptional ecologies and 2) Terms for Translation and Types of Translation. I conclude that the premodern Korean inscriptional spectrum was not a simple binary of cosmopolitan orthodox hanmun vs. vernacular Korean, but was a range of inscriptional styles that included Idu and kugyŏl. Moreover, the ways in which texts were inscribed, re-inscribed and transliterated between these different inscriptional styles challenges modern-day notions of ‘translation’, on the one hand, but also invites an understanding of them as more intra-lingual than inter-lingual: hanmun was not a foreign language. Until China and Chinese language(s) and Chinese script were de-centered and Other-ized, these sorts of facile inter-inscriptional flip-flops were all just intra-lingual recastings~regraphicizations~reinscriptions of the same underlying semiotic core, as far as the Koreans of the day were concerned.

 

Cultural Area : Japan

Rebekah CLEMENTS

Intralingual translation and the creation of eighteenth century Japanese prose

The Japanese Kokugakusha (or “nativist”) Ban Kōkei (1733-1806) is best known for his published collection of biographies of eccentrics, Kinsei kijinden (Eccentrics of our times, 1790), which was one of the best-selling books of Japan’s late eighteenth century, and for his Japanese-style poetry (waka). Less known, however, is that Kōkei was an ardent proponent of writing what he called “kunitsu bumi” (prose in the national style). At a time when most prose writing in Japan used either the medium of written literary Chinese, or a hybridized mixture of Chinese and Japanese elements, Kōkei advocated a move towards a purer Japanese style that drew upon precedents in Japan’s literary past while incorporating contemporary linguistic developments. Much like the well-known European example of Cicero, who developed his rhetorical Latin language centuries earlier by translating from classical Greek, the main methodology used by Kōkei (who did not know of Cicero) was translation, or as he called it “utsushibumi” (“transferred” or “translated” text). In Kōkei’s usage, utsushibumi meant two things: intralingual translation between the elegant literary language of the Japanese past and contemporary, everyday Japanese; and interlingual translation between literary Chinese and Japanese. This paper puts Kōkei’s efforts at language reform in the context of eighteenth century developments in intralingual translation from classical into vernacular Japanese, and explains the role of translation in his attempts to develop a “national” language nearly one hundred years before the national language advocacy of the Genbun itchi (“Unification of Spoken and Written Japanese”) movement of the Meiji period.

 

Matthew FRALEIGH

Intralingual and Interlingual Glossing of Sinitic Poetry in Early Modern Japan

Interlingual approaches of glossing and construing Chinese language texts in accord with the syntax, grammar, and lexicon of the Japanese language were important from the very inception of writing in the archipelago and remained dominant from the tenth century until well into modern times. With the rise of commercial publishing, spread of literacy, and rapid urbanization that characterized Japan’s early modern period (1603–1868), interest in engaging with (and producing) Sinitic poetry expanded to an unprecedented extent. Especially from the latter half of the early modern period, Japanese Sinologues such as Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) began to more explicitly theorize the linguistic issues at stake in various interpretive methodologies and to reflect upon the significance of such key terms as “gloss” 訓 (Jp. kun; Ch. xun) and “translation” 譯 (Jp. yaku; Ch. yi). This intellectual ferment prompted scholars to expand the potential of glossing approaches at both the interlingual and intralingual levels. This paper focuses on three Sinitic poetic treatises written in Japan around the turn of the eighteenth century: Katsugen shiwa 葛原詩話 (1784) by the Buddhist priest Rikunyo 六如 (1734–1801), Shishisai shiwa 孜孜齋詩話 (1800) by the young scholar Nishijima Rankei 西島蘭溪 (1781–1853), and Yakō shiwa 夜航詩話 (1816) by the scholar Tsusaka Tōyō 津阪東陽 (1757–1825). I examine the range of interpretive approaches each of these “remarks on poetry” (Jp. shiwa, Ch. shihua) employs in engaging with Sinitic poetry (including both intralingual and interlingual glossing, as well as practices more explicitly framed as translation) with the goal of identifying what the texts reveal about contemporary Japanese conceptualization of linguistic register in Literary Sinitic.

 

Jean-Noël ROBERT

Japanese Buddhist Poetry and Bilingualism

This paper is part of an ongoing research on the relationship between Japanese language Buddhist poetry (shakkyô-ka 釈教歌) and the Chinese-language Buddhist sources, which can be considered as the original Scriptures from the Japanese point of view, since there was hardly ever a knowledge of Sanskrit among Japanese clerical circles deep enough to give direct access to Indian sources. I will use as a starting point the waka poems about the Lotus Sutra as a distinctive subgenre of Japanese poetry. They were utilized by the medieval poets, who were generally deeply versed in Buddhist lore, as a means of transposing the Buddhist teachings into Japanese language and of hierarchizing the relationship between Chinese and Japanese. A consequence of that use was that Buddhist waka played an important role in the sacralization of the Japanese language in an epoch when there was no systematic translation of the Buddhist scriptures into Japanese. Thanks to the practice of assimilation of Japanese deities and Buddhist entities as expressed in the formula honji-suijaku 本地垂迹 (“Emanations descending from their original basis”), the Japanese language was thus endowed with a double religious value: on the one hand, it was a creation of the Japanese gods, on the other hand, it was precisely for this reason deemed supremely fit for conveying the Indian and Chinese Buddhist teachings as well.

I will attempt too to compare and contrast Buddhist waka poetry, whose most distinctive literary constraint is the use of purely Japanese vocabulary (yamato-kotoba) and the prohibition of Chinese vocabulary (kango), with another poetic genre, much less successful in the literary history of Japan, the imayô-uta, as partially preserved in the Ryôjin-hishô 梁塵秘抄 (end of the twelfth century), certainly more popular at that time, which made free use of Chinese vocabulary and was in that more similar to the Korean sijo 時調 poetry.

 

Cultural Area : Vietnam

John D. PHAN

Aestheticizing the Vernacular in early modern Sino-Vietnamese translation

As in other parts of East Asia, Literary Chinese predominated both documentarian and imaginative expression for most of Vietnam’s history as an independent polity.  Examples of vernacular (i.e. Vietnamese-language) writing date to the early 2nd millennium (following indepedence from the crumbling Tang Dynasty), but early examples are restricted mostly to Buddhist proselytization, and occasional literati whimsy.  The vernacular was not treated with any seriousness by the literati community until the 15th century, when notable Lê黎 Dynasty statesman, Nguyễn Trãi阮廌 (1380-1442), produced a sizeable body of poems written in Vietnamese (and using the now moribund script called “Chữ Nôm” 字喃).  This early flash of brilliance in vernacular poetry, while greatly influential, soon faded away before a classical educational system reinvigorated by Neo-Confucianism. 

Vernacular writing would only gain steady momentum following a crisis in that classical education system, brought on by a series of clan wars spanning the 16th-17th centuries.  Starting in the mid 17th century with the printing of an influential Sino-Vietnamese dictionary entitled Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds 指南玉音解義 (Viet. Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa), Vietnamese authors began to take an interest in the translation of Literary Chinese compositions (both imported and authored regionally) into vernacular Vietnamese.  The Explication itself is built on the elaboration of Literary Chinese definitions, into versified couplets for each term.  This practice of elaborating an original Literary Chinese text into the vernacular also constituted an exploration of the literary boundaries of the Vietnamese language—an excavation, probing, and ultimately, an expansion of the limits of the vernacular to express literary, intellectual, ethical, and philosophical content as dictated by the Literary Chinese original.  Such experiments in translation, in turn, paved the way for a rennaissance of vernacular literary expression, over the 18th-19th centuries.

 

Cultural Area : Central Asian/Altaic Spheres

FUNADA Yoshiyuki

Did Mongolian Language Affect Chinese Language? Focusing on the “Literal Translation Style” Used in Translating Mongolian Documents into Chinese under Mongol Rule

This article examines the influence of Mongolian language over spoken Chinese, focusing on the question of the so-called “literal translation style” (Zhiyiti)—i.e. a style of Chinese language metaphrased from Mongolian. The emergence of this style was epoch-making in that state power created, on its own initiative, a particular style of translation, and required that officials use it in translating Mongolian official documents, including edicts, into Chinese. The Zhiyiti was a type of “contact language,” or Mongolic Chinese, based on Chinese vocabulary and Mongolian syntactic structures.

 The starting point of this analysis is the fact that you can find some common linguistic elements between the language of official documents written in Zhiyiti and that of the Laoqida (Nogeoldae), one of the oldest Chinese language textbooks originally published during the Mongol period. This article proves, firstly, that the Laoqida was not metaphrased from Mongolian. Then, it proceeds to analyze highlight why the linguistic elements of Zhiyiti are found even in the materials which were written without the use of the Zhiyiti style. Although Zhiyiti was a linguistic style chiefly meant for the purpose of translation, the documents produced in Zhiyiti were also read out aloud on various occasions so that people listened to the sounds of the Zhiyiti. It was through this process that the sounds of Zhiyiti came to affect the colloquial or spoken Chinese language.

It is noteworthy that state policy contributed, in this way, to the transformation of a language, even if in a limited degree. This is an interesting case, which might stimulate the further development of sociolinguistic history.

 

Imre GALAMBOS

Manuscripts of Chinese educational texts among China’s north-western neighbours

With the spread of Buddhism in East and Central Asia, the region developed a cultural and literary tradition, parts of which transcended political and linguistic boundaries. Within this common heritage the Chinese influence was particularly strong, and Chinese Buddhist literature commonly circulated beyond the frontier. Although most of this shared culture was Buddhist in content, there were also many other types of texts that found their way across the borders, including the classics, histories, dictionaries, military treatises or medical literature. One of the most interesting types of texts in this context are primers and other educational texts, which had typically been compiled in their original environment for the sake of teaching literacy skills and conveying basic cultural knowledge to children living in China proper. Some merely consisted of lists of characters so that children would learn how to write the most common ones, others also included didactic knowledge designed to educate in fundamental cultural values. Ironically, the earliest surviving copies of many of these texts—and, in fact, at times the only copies—come from sites that once belonged to China’s neighbours. Of these Korea and especially Japan are probably the riches sources for such material. Yet in this paper I am primarily interested in manuscripts preserved beyond the north-western frontier, most importantly among the Uighurs, Tibetan and Tanguts. In these cultures Chinese primers circulated both in their original language and in translation, which means that even decidedly culture-specific information could be used for teaching literacy skills in another language. Taken together, the rich body of Chinese educational material preserved in Central Asian languages demonstrates the enormous prestige of Chinese written culture along the Silk Road.

 

Pierre MARSONE

Written and Oral Language in the Memorandum on the Matrimonial Unions of the Great King (大王記結親事)

The document that we propose to study is unique, and almost improbable, in the history of Chinese epigraphy. It is a stele that was unearthed in 1974 in the township of Cunjin’gouxiang, near to Ningchengxian in Inner Mongolia. The stele was found at the heart of the territory of the Xi 奚, a people who were closely related to the Khitan, and who we know to have been governed by a Great King (Dawang). They were speakers of an Altaic language, and few of them indeed would have spoken, let alone read, Chinese.

However, probably at the demand of the king himself, the Xi inscribed a stone of 1 x 0.35m that is original in multiple ways. First, it is inscribed not only on the front and back but also on its two sides. Then, it is not written from right to left like an ordinary Chinese inscription, but its columns are to be read from left to right. A third major originality of the stele is the language it employs. In contrast with the vast majority of Chinese steles, the text contains no poetic forms and no moral or philosophical considerations. It is a listing of the hundreds of sheep, horses, and cattle exchanged during the conclusion of marriages, and also a clear mention of the application of the law of sororate that the Khitan abolished only in 940. If it would be difficult to speak of ‘Classical Chinese’, the stele could be considered as being globally composed in ‘the written language’ 書面語; yet it is scattered with expressions drawn from the spoken language or from dialect, which constitutes a supplementary originality.

This document of considerable ethnological value is extremely difficult to translate precisely. We will principally try to identify and assemble its vernacular expressions in order to analyse as closely as possible the mixing of written and oral language that it contains and the reasons that could have led to the use of such an unexpected register of language in the epigraphy of the edges of the sinicized world at the beginning of the tenth century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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