A Polyphonic Study On Ku Hung-ming’s English Translation Of The Analects

Ku Hung-ming, a famous scholar and translator in the late Qing dynasty, has translated three of the Four Books in Confucianism, The Analects, The Doctrine of Mean and The Great Learning. As a master of the Oriental and the Occidental cultures, Ku became the first Chinese man to translate the Confucian classics into English by himself.Ku’s English version of The Analects was published in the year of1898and nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in the year of1913. In the version Ku eliminated translation of a number of people’s names and place names and cited as notes words from well-known European scholars. The domestic scholars have conducted a study into the translation method in light of the Hermeneutics or the Postcolonial theory, regarding it as a compromise with the semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.Originating from musicology,"polyphony" refers to multi-voicedness in music. Mikhail Bakhtin firstly introduces the concept into literary study, analyzing the characteristics of Dostoevsky’s works and pointing out that the whole works constitute a polyphonic dialogue. Polyphony is characterized by subjectivity, dialogicality and unfinalizability. In the polyphonic world, all the characters boast their own consciousness and talk with the author on the equal plane. As the character can express himself, always engaged in a dispute with himself or with the author, the polyphonic dialogue is always going, endless and unfinalizable.The thesis applies the theory of polyphony to Ku’s English version of The Analects, pointing out that the whole version is a polyphonic dialogue and analyzing the three polyphonic features in detail. Firstly, The Analects, the translator and the readers all enjoy their subjectivity. Secondly, translation of people’s names and place names is dialogic in essence, including three kinds of polyphonic dialogues:dialogue between the translator and the readers, or foreignization; dialogue between The Analects and the translator, or domestication; dialogue among The Analects, the translator and the readers, or dialectical combination of domestication on cultural scale and foreignization on linguistic scale. Thirdly, owing to the open-ended meaning of The Analects, its unfinalizability can be represented in the endless intralingual translation, the conversion between the version in the language of ancient Chinese and that in the language of modern Chinese, and the endless interlingual translation, the conversion between the version in Chinese and that in English.Ku’s eliminating the translation of proper nouns and translating by narration enables the rendering to be polyphonic and dimensional and contributes to the readers’acceptance of Confucian thought.