Furthermore, neither the introduction nor the endnotes adequately place Confucius in historical context, making the book strangely vague about Confucius's impact on his time and people. While the translations are often elegant, and Leys's endnotes offer a few telling examinations of the vagaries and subtleties of translating the Analects, Leys is too often diverted from the Analects by barely relevant citations from European writers and his own digs at other translators of Confucius. The Analects consists of brief passages of partially recorded or remembered conversations between the Master and a set of often unidentified interlocuters, compressed scenes compiled into a sequence of chapters and verses that fluidly creates a shape of its own. The publisher's biography of Leys calls him ""an astringent observer,"" and such observations are readily apparent in Leys's sometimes bad-tempered and occasionally ill-judged glosses on a thinker whom he clearly believes would have agreed with him that late 20th-century culture is undergoing the same chaotic moral crisis as 6th-century B.C. Norton & Company and has a total of 400 pages in the book. This particular edition is in a Paperback format. Because they offer diverse and sometimes diametrically opposite meanings, the words of Chinese classics are as likely to reflect the prejudices of the translator as the are to exhibit scholarly rigor. The title of this book is The Analects (First Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) and it was written by Confucius, Michael Nylan (Editor), Simon Leys (Translator).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |