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A couple of days ago we examined the mystifying Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) collocation 惡惡 (here).  After considering several different ways to pronounce and interpret the elements of this expression, we decided that, in most instances, it should be read wùè and be rendered as "hate evil".

Today we'll go much more slowly and deliberately through a brief classical occurrence of 惡惡 to gain a better appreciation for the meaning of the dyad 惡惡 and how to appreciate its nuances in actual use.

Here I shall quote a short passage from Lǐjì 禮記 (Record of rites) (ca. 3rd c.-1st c. BC):

Suǒwèi chéng qí yì zhě, wú zì qī yě, rú wù èchòu, rú hào hǎosè, cǐ zhī wèi zì qiān. Gù jūnzǐ bì shèn qí dú yě.

所謂誠其意者、毋自欺也。如惡惡臭、如好好色。此之謂自謙、故君子必愼其獨也。

Since 惡 and 惡 are here broken up into a different grammatical configuration than they were in the disyllabic expression 惡惡, I will not directly translate 惡 and 惡 as "hate" "evil", but will take a more circuitous route to arrive at a translation of the whole passage to which they belong.

This passage from the Record of rites later becomes an integral, core part of the immortal Confucian text known as "The Great Learning" (and the source of the Sinographic name of Middlebury College, 大學 [C dàxué / J daigaku / K daehaggyo / V đại học]!).  Consequently, it behooves us to parse and interpret the text correctly.

At first I was going to provide a translation of the CC text into MSM, since they are, after all, two separate languages, the former dead and the latter living.  I thought that would shine some intermediary light on the CC text, but after checking about half a dozen MSM renditions online, I was so dissatisfied by all of them (for example most of them completely missed the causative valence of the first verb) that I decided to skip MSM and go straight to James Legge's (1815-1897) Victorian English translation which is much more accurate:

"What is meant by 'making the thoughts sincere' is the allowing no self-deception, as when we hate a bad smell, and as when we love what is beautiful. This is called self-enjoyment."

Charles Muller's contemporary (July 4, 1992) English translation is also superior to the MSM translations:

“'Making the will sincere,' means 'no self-deception.' Like when we allow ourselves to be disgusted by a bad smell or become infatuated with an attractive appearance. This is called 'self-satisfaction.' Therefore the Superior Man must be watchful over himself when he is alone."

Not only does Muller capture the causative verb in the first clause, like Legge, he also grasps the significance of "suǒwèi X zhě, Y yě 所謂X者、Y也" as a definitional construction, which the MSM translations disregard.  "Making the thoughts sincere" becomes a core principle of Confucian (and Neo-Confucian) philosophy for the next two thousand years, so it behooves us to get it right.

Side note

All of the major online translators (GT, Baidu, Bing, DeepL) misparse, mispronounce, and misinterpret these 8 key characters badly: 如惡惡臭、如好好色*.  Of course, since the machine translators are designed for MSM, they should not be expected to translate LS / CC correctly.  It would be like asking a Sanskrit / Classical Greek / Latin only translator to render Hindi / Modern Greek / French correctly, and vice versa.

—–

*Here the first 惡 and the first 好 are verbs, whereas the second 惡 and the second 好 are adjectives modifying 臭 and 色 respectively.

Selected readings

• "Hate evil" (11/21/24)
• "Translating from Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic to Mandarin" (1/14/24)
• "Hype over AI and Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic" (11/9/23) — with lengthy bibliography
• "Why Literary Sinitic is so darn hard" (5/30/19)
• "Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese dependency parsing" (11/27/19)
• "Massive borrowing" (0/18/19) — see the comments for discussion of the East Asian word for "university" (in Korean, Vietnamese đại học, Japanese daigaku, and Chinese dàxué)

[Thanks to Jing Hu]

November 24, 2024 @ 6:34 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Grammar, Pronunciation, Translation, Vernacular

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