It's been a while since I posted, and that is due to my impending China trip (leaving early tomorrow AM!).   Although the first portion of the journey is largely fun, escorting a group of alumni from my college to various and sundry famous locales (looking forward to Huangshan, where I have never been), after that I am off to some academic work, a confernece at Beida.

And in good academic fashion I am writing a paper to present, something a bit more esoteric than my usual postings here.  The general topic is: why Confucianism is not catching on in the US (I realize that this is an empirical issue and some may want to argue that it is catching on.  But I don't think so….).  In thinking about this, I am exploring the extent to which translation is not the problem.  And I have discovered Wlater Benjamin's famous piece, "The Translator's Task" (PDF!).  At first, I was not particularly taken with his analysis.  The traces of a kind of divine realm of "pure language" ran against my usual rationalist impulses.  But the more I thought about, the more I could see how Benjamin's view can show us how Confucianism is, in his sense, "translatable." 

I am pasting in the section of the paper, with footnotes, that deals with this below the fold. Warning: 2000 words!

The
central problem of translation, any translation, is that there can be something
beyond mere words conveyed by a particular text.  Walter Benjamin engages with this problem in
his introduction to a translation of the poems of Baudelaire[1].  What is it that makes a poem a poem?  It is obviously composed of words.  But a good poem, a moving poem, is one that
conjures feeling and meaning greater than the literal definitions of the words
on the page.  Thus he describes the
difficulty faced by all translators:

What
does a poem “say,” then?  What does it
communicate?  Very little, to a person
who understands it.  Neither message nor
statement is essential to it.  However, a
translation that seeks to translate something can transmit nothing other than a
message – that is something inessential. 
(151)

 The
significance of a work of art (and, I would argue, philosophy as well) is not
simply derived from its linguistic or physical components.  Words have certain meanings, but great works
stir something else, a more abstract and ineffable recognition, an
inexpressible connection, an illumination. 
This is something more than simply a “message.” And to translate that is
to capture something other than the words on the page.

This
applies as well to texts like the Lunyu
and Mencuis.  The allusive qualities of these works raises
certain translation challenges.  There is
much that is unspoken, unwritten.  Some
of this is due to the ambiguous qualities of classical Chinese and the
aesthetic sensibilities of ancient times. 
The authors assume a broader cultural field that is alluded to only in
the most indirect and figurative language. 
Surplus meaning, that which is outside the text, also includes knowledge
embodied in direct, personal experience of the actions advocated by the texts[2].  In other words(!), you have to live the text
in order to apprehend the text.  This
would imply that to translate Confucianism, with any hope of capturing it significance,
the translator would have to live by its ideals; for example: carrying out
familial and social duties, with an awareness of established best cultural
practices, in a conscious effort to cultivate greater humaneness in oneself and
the world.

                And
if this is the case, translation would appear to be next to impossible.  But Benjamin doesn’t think so.  Paradoxically, he argues that profound texts
demand translation:

Translation
is properly essential to certain works: this does not mean that their
translation is essential for themselves, but rather that a specific
significance inherent in the original texts expresses itself in their
translatability.
(153)

             A text like the Lunyu, Benjamin is suggesting, has import greater than its Chinese
language forms.  It expresses a much
broader, transcultural (universal?) human experience that, while couched in a
specifically Chinese context, can be meaningful for people in vastly different
times and places.  Indeed, by this
argument, the full significance of the Lunyu
can only be realized when it is expressed in other languages.  

            Benjamin offers his concept of “pure
language” as a kind of spiritual connection of all people.   He
does not posit it as an actual language, a merging of all extent languages into
a singular linguistic system.  It is not
a super-Esperanto.  Rather, it implies a meta-linguistic
human capacity for intercultural understanding. 

All
suprahistorical kinship of languages consists rather in the fact that in each
of them as a whole, one and the same thing is intended; this cannot be attained
by any one of them alone, however, but only the totality of their mutually
complementary intensions: pure language. 
Whereas all the particular elements of different languages – words,
sentences, structures – are mutually exclusive, these languages complement each
other in their intentions. (156)

             At its most general, the intention
of pure language is interconnection: persons strive to relate to one another;
we are social beings.  There are, of course,
more specific intentions for particular pieces of text or moments of speech,
and these more focused intentions also provide a basis for translation[3].  At a practical level (which is not what
concerns Benjamin) we daily find solutions; pragmatic translation is
ubiquitous.  More profound and mysterious
expressions – Benjamin seems to want to call them “spiritual” – at first sight
may appear to be resistant to literal translation.  Some words simply do not have a match in
other languages; some works of art appear to be too deeply immersed in a
particular cultural context.  But it is
precisely here where Benjamin believes that the intention of interconnection,
the purpose of conveying an esoteric yet beautiful feeling or idea, brings us
into the realm of pure language.  While
we may be able to create such an expression in one language, it can only be
fully revealed in the “mutually complementary intensions” of many (all?)
languages.

            Let’s take a brief example, one
concept from the Lunyu:  ren
– 仁
.  This idea is of central significance
to the text, and on Benjamin’s understanding therefore also beyond the
text.  It is translated variously as:
“authoritative conduct” (Ames and Rosemont), “Good” (Slingerland),
“benevolence” (Lau), “humaneness” (Watson), and “humanity” (Hinton)[4].  We needn’t make a final decision that any one
of these is superior to the others but, rather, accept that there is a semantic
field suggested by the original term that encompasses all of these words.  One of the good things about the depth and
range of work in contemporary scholarly translation is the availability of
multiple definitional possibilities.  In
the midst of these informed differences, we get the idea.

            Throughout the Lunyu it becomes clear that the intention behind this term, and
arguably behind the text as a whole, is to bring a mindful focus on the
practice of ethical reciprocity: we find what is good in ourselves by
cultivating what is good in our relationships with others.  As is commonly pointed out, this intention is
inscribe in the brush strokes of ren,
composed as it is of an element that suggests “person” and another that stands
for “two”: personhood cannot be defined in isolation, it must be created
reciprocally with others.

            What is immediately apparent here is
that the central notion, ethical reciprocity, is by no means peculiar to the
Confucian tradition alone.  It is
manifest in other cultural contexts. 
Thus, to return to Benjamin, while ren
is embedded in, and is expressive of, a uniquely Chinese experience, it also
signifies a broader human sensibility, an aspiration for living a good life by
helping others.  Its significance is tied
to a particular cultural-linguistic context, but is also fully realized in its
articulation in other languages. 

            Indeed, even in its own languages –
for we must make a distinction between ren
in a classical Chinese context and a modern Chinese context – the meaning of
this term is far from settled[5].  In the Lunyu,
Confucius is presented as pushing against definitional complacency.  In various passages he resists his disciples’
efforts to adduce a clear exemplar of ren,
maybe in an effort to preserve the trans-linguistic qualities of the
concept.  Something about ren cannot be captured in words; it is
the outcome of conscientious practice; and that practice can take place in many
different cultural contexts.  A person
can be ren even when living in a
“barbarian” place. A single illustration of elusiveness of ren is Lunyu 6.30:

子貢曰：「如有博施於民而能濟眾，何如？可謂仁乎？」子曰：「何事於仁，必也聖乎！堯舜其猶病諸！夫仁者，己欲立而立人，己欲達而達人。能近取譬，可謂仁之方也已。」 

             Watson (46) translates this as:

   Zigong
said, if someone could spread bounty abroad among the people and rescue the
populace, how would that be?  Could that be
called humanness?

   The Master said: Why bring humaneness into
the discussion?  If you must have a
label, call the man a sage.  Even Yao and
Shun had trouble doing that much.

   The human person wants standing, and so he
helps others to gain standing.  He wants
achievement, and so he helps others to achieve. 
To know how to proceed on the analogy of what is close at hand – that
can be called the humane approach.

             We can see Confucius’s hesitancy to
accept a fixed standard of ren.   He introduces another term – sheng/”sage” – that destabilizes the
invocation of ren; and then he goes
further and suggests that two exemplary “sages”, Yao and Shun, might not have
lived up to the ideal of ren. It’s
not completely clear what the relationship between ren and sheng is.  Ames and Rosemont (110) translate the second
stanza above as:

The
Master replied: “Why stop at authoritative conduct?  This is certainly a sage (sheng 聖). Even a Yao or a Shun would find such a task
daunting.

             This could imply that sheng is something more than ren; but, then again, the two leading
examples of sheng, Yao and Shun,
might not be sheng.   In the end, we are left with the original question:
what is ren? 

            The last three lines of the passage
turn us away from linguistic precision and toward embodied experience.  Confucius tells us how to be ren, what we need to do to manifest ren in very immediate and specific
circumstances.  If we focus on helping
those around us – and for Confucians that starts with family and friends – we realize
ren in the world.   Words matter for Confucius but actions
matter more[6].  How we linguistically translate what we are
doing matters less than our actual behavior.

            But we are translating a particular text here. Can we have confidence that
we are getting the main idea?  I believe
we can, and that is primarily because we can assume that we know the intention
behind the passage cited above.  In
everything we have learned about Confucius, it is clear that he was quite
consciously trying to encourage people to live by the lights of ethical
reciprocity.   We also know that he
believed that persons who live such lives have a transformative effect on their
communities, regardless of their cultural context.  And that brings us back to Benjamin (161):

Just
as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to
each other in the tiniest detail but need not resemble each other, so
translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the original,
must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a counterpoint to the
original’s mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as
fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language.

            Of course we have to get the words
right, and doing that is difficult work. 
But perfect “resemblance”
in translation is neither possible nor, for Benjamin, desirable.  Whether we name ren “humaneness” or “authoritative conduct” matters less than
entering into the conversation, listening to a variety of possibilities, and
opening ourselves to the broader trans-linguistic significance of a meaningful
text or work of art.  Today, we have the
resources to do just that.  The hard
philological tasks may never be complete, but those efforts have brought us to
a place where our contemporary English translations of “Confucianism” have
formed a sufficient “counterpoint to the original’s mode of intention” that
they can be accepted as fragments of the larger vessel of “Confucianism” writ
large.  American Confucianism is a part
of the greater language that is Confucianism.