A Study On The Tangut Version Of The General’s Garden

The General’s Garden is an inventive Chinese military classic which is said to be written by Zhuge Liang.This literature not only incorporates and develops several facets of pre-Qin generalship,but also provides brilliant insights into the selection of generals,the stability of the army and the judgement of the situation.As one of the representative translations of the military literatures in the "Tangut translation bf Chinese books",The Tangut version is the earliest of the current editions of the General’s Garden and the only one that has been translated into minority languages.Based on a review of numerous Chinese versions of the General’s Garden,this article retranslates the Tangut translation with the aim of further promoting the study of the traditional Chinese literature of the General’s Garden by making use of its inter-examination and crossvalidation function.The article is mainly divided into 4 chapters to provide a systematic study of the Tangut version of The General’s Garden.The first chapter discusses the version value of The Tangut version of The General’s Garden.There are two major systems in the Chinese version of The General’s Garden,one is represented by the Han Xifang’s bronze script of the Ming Dynasty,and the other is represented by the Zhang Shu Anthology version of the Qing Dynasty.The Tangut version of The General’s Garden is translated from a long lost ancient version of 37 chapters that was popular before and after the Northern Song Dynasty,and it differs greatly from the current Chinese versions of chapter 45,46 and 50 in terms of the total number of chapters,chapter titles and the expressions of the texts.So the Tangut version of The General’s Garden should be regarded as a new edition system,which can be called one of the ’three major systems’ along with Han Xifang’s bronze carved version of the Ming Dynasty and the Zhang Shu Anthology version of the Qing Dynasty.The second chapter discusses the translation style of the Tangut version of The General’s Garden.This chapter first collects a large number of long and short sentences from the corpus of the Tangut version of The General’s Garden and verifies the academic community’s assertion that the literature has "interpretive" and "deductive" language styles through comparison with Chinese versions.Excavate some Tangut language materials that also appear in other "Tangut translated Chinese books",which further verifies the previous explanations of the Tangut society,military and other aspects in the academic community based on the above language materials.Finally this chapter summarizes the omissions of the Tangut version of The General’s Garden for the first time.From which can be concluded that the mistranslation is partly due to differences in expression habits,partly seems to be caused by some added words and sentences that deviate from the main theme of the chapter.The third chapter is a proof reading of the Tangut version of The General’s Garden.Based on the original copy of English Collection Or.12380-1840,the Chinese translation corresponding to the original copy of The General’s Garden shall be provided line by line,and the Tangut characters newly supplemented according to the surviving forms and the punctuation marks involved in the manuscript shall be marked in the footnote.The fourth chapter is a commentary on the Tangut translation version of The General’s Garden.For the first time,the Han Xifang ’s bronze script of the Ming Dynasty is selected as the base version in Chinese.At the same time,nine Chinese versions with high reference value written in the Ming and Qing dynasties are involved to annotate the Tangut version.In terms of specific interpretation methods,both the needs of philologists and linguistic researchers should be taken into account,and the textual content of the literature should be annotated separately,while the Chinese translation should be proofread.Annotations explain the translation style of the Tangut translators,particularly emphasis on the Tangut words or sentences that cannot directly correspond to Chinese.The Tangut phrases,grammatical phenomenon and phonetic characters that need to be supplemented are presented together in the annotations.The proofreading is attached to a translation made with reference to various Chinese versions,detailing the differences between the Tangut version of The General’s Garden and the current Chinese versions.