This being a literary work, and having nothing scientific to boast of, I have tried to give my English readers the same literary impression that the Chinese has. Tradutore traditore, say the Italians; I hope I have not been too much of a traitor.
A translation is always a most difficult work; if it is materially exact, word for word and sentence by sentence, the so-called scientific men are satisfied, but all the charm, beauty, and interest of the original are lost. Very often, too, such translation is obscure and unintelligible. Each nation has an heirloom of traditions, customs, or religion to which its literature constantly refers. If the reader is not acquainted with that literature, these references will convey no meaning to his mind, or they may even convey a false one. In Chinese, this difficulty is greater than in any other language; the Far Eastern civilisation has had a development of its own, and its legends and superstitions have nothing in common with the Western folklore. The Chinese mind is radically different from ours, and has grown, in every generation, more different by reason of a different training and a different ideal in life. The Chinese writing, moreover, has strengthened those differences; it represents the ideas themselves, instead of representing the words; each Chinese sign may be rightly translated by either of the three or more words by which our language analytically describes every aspect of one same idea. The sign which is read Tao, for instance, must be, according to the sentence, translated by any of the words: direction, rule, doctrine, religion, way, road, word, verb; all of them being the different forms of the same idea of direction, moral or physical.
Some French sinologists, aware of this difficulty, now translate the texts literally, and try to explain the meaning by a number of notes, which sometimes leave only one or two lines of text in a page. This method seems at first more scientific; it explains everything in the most careful way, and is very useful for the translation of inscriptions or of certain obscure passages in historical books. But for real literature, it is the greatest possible error, leaving out, as it does, all the impression and illusion the author intended to convey. Besides, the necessity of going, at every word, down the page in order to find the meaning in a note, tires the reader and takes away all the pleasure he should derive from the book.
One may even say that a materially exact translation is, in reality, a false one; the words we use in writing and speaking being mere technical signs by which we represent our ideas. For instance, the word "cathedral" will certainly not convey the same idea to two men, one of whom has only seen St. Paul's, and the other only Notre-Dame de Paris; for the first, cathedral means a dome; for the other it means two towers and a long ogival nave. Below the outward appearance of the words there lie so many different images that it is absolutely necessary to know the mentality of a nation in order to master its language. In fact, a true translation will be the one that, though sometimes materially inexact, will give the reader the same impression he would have if he were reading the original text.
Since I first went to China, in 1901, I have had many opportunities of acquainting myself with all the superstitions of the lower classes, with all the splendid mental and intellectual training of the learned. My experience has helped me to perceive what was hidden beneath the words; and in my translation I have sometimes supplied what the author only thought necessary to imply. In many places the translation is literal; in other places it is literary, it being impossible for a Western writer to retain all the long and useless talking, all the repetitions that Chinese writing and Chinese taste are equally fond of.
George Soulié.