The master of translation
Yan Fu’s informed adoption and adaptation of modern Western and classical Chinese ideas changed the way a generation thought, Fang Aiqing and Hu Meidong report in Fuzhou.
An extraordinary mind was born in Fuzhou, capital of Fujian province, 170 years ago. Not far from his birthplace, the meandering Minjiang River runs into the East China Sea. In the course of his 67 years, Yan Fu (1854-1921), or Yen Fuh as he called himself, both witnessed and contributed to the dawn of modernization in his home country, as well as the change in its people’s minds from “China as the world” to “China in the world”.
Yan had a solid educational background in both classical Chinese and modern Western thinking, and from the many books he read, chose and translated a variety of Western authors, including Thomas Henry Huxley, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu and Herbert Spencer.
He is also believed to have been the first scholar to have systematically introduced classical German philosophy — that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to be specific — to Chinese youth.
In his monograph, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West, historian Benjamin Schwartz of the United States describes Yan’s effort as one to “find the true secret of Western wealth and power”, and in the introduction, US political scientist Louis Hartz presents Yan as “a new foreign observer of Western thought as a whole”.
Yan lived at a time when the feudal Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) was being shaken by Western powers, and intellectuals were struggling to seek a way out and ensure the country could survive, maintain its independence and prosper.
He also emphasized the need to improve the physical strength, moral standards and education levels of individuals, and was once in charge of then avant-garde universities including today’s Peking University and Shanghai’s Fudan University.
Apparently, Yan’s endeavors meant something, as he prioritized the science, technology, social and political theories of the West as key references for rescuing his then impoverished and weak homeland.
Max Ko-wu Huang, a historian from Taiwan, believes that Yan’s introduction to Western thought comprised four interconnected parts — scientific concepts based on logical reasoning, political ideology based on liberal democracy, capitalist economic theory, as well as social doctrine centered on the theory of evolution.
However, Yan was also aware of the destructive side of Western civilization and was cautious about the trend toward wholesale Westernization prevailing in the country at the time. To the contrary, the great thinker raised his voice in support of the quintessence of traditional Chinese culture, and insisted that China’s survival would ultimately depend on its millennia-long civilization.
In October 1921, when he realized he was dying, he said in his will to his family: “You should know, China will not perish. Its existing traditions will be reformed, but should not be dropped completely.”
In retrospect, Yan’s words and deeds had their limitations, but it’s still fair to say that he was ahead of his time.
Historically, influential figures with different political views and from different parties, like Liang Qichao, Cai Yuanpei, Hu Shi and Mao Zedong, all spoke highly of him and his contributions.
During his period of leadership in the city of Fuzhou and later at the provincial level in Fujian, President Xi Jinping placed great importance on the study and promotion of Yan’s thinking.
In December 1997, Xi commended Yan for his “rigorous scholarship, pioneering reform, pursuit of truth, patriotism and efforts to revitalize the nation”. In November 2001, he praised his patriotic sentiments and enlightened thinking, stating that, “to this day, Yan’s idea of science and patriotism remains relevant”. In 2021, he paid a visit to the thinker’s former residence in Sanfang Qixiang, or the Three Lanes and Seven Alleys area of Fuzhou, to mark the 100th anniversary of Yan’s death.
In 1920, Yan wrote a poem to celebrate his grandson’s birth. The last sentence goes, “when our country has got peace and prosperity, don’t forget to come to my grave and tell me”.
Creative interpretation
Born the son of a doctor, Yan studied under sophisticated Confucian scholars largely influenced by the Neo-Confucianism from the Song (960-1279), Yuan (1271-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties.
After his father’s death, he enrolled in the Foochow Shipbuilding Institution when he was 14. There, he studied Western science and technology in English, using imported textbooks. The subjects included algebra, geometry, calculus, electromagnetism, optics, thermodynamics and chemistry.
He later entered the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London, where he studied the natural sciences knowledge that is needed to translate Western books. He valued research methods like specialization, generalization and experimentation.
Yan continued to read English books and newspapers for the rest of his life. He stressed that advanced scientific and technological knowledge at the time was mostly written in Western languages, resulting in the need to learn them to be able to read Western newspapers and journals in their original languages.
His fellow townsman and classmate Sa Zhenbing (1859-1952), a renowned navy commander, once said that Yan read a lot, and some books over and over again, learning parts of them by heart and summarizing his reflections.
Yan compared and selected titles from his “mental shelf” before deciding which to translate, and which should be translated first, Sa added.
When Yan returned from the United Kingdom, he continued to study classical Chinese culture and thinking with renowned Confucian scholar Wu Rulun, a representative of the Tongcheng school of literature, which is known for practical, well-structured, simple and elegant essays. He also took the keju (imperial civil service examinations) four times, but failed each time.
However, the experience left him with a deep understanding of traditional culture and literature, laying a solid foundation for his later success in translating and introducing Western knowledge to China.
One of his best-known translations is of British naturalist T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, which advocates Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection.
He translated the first two chapters, Prolegomena and Evolution and Ethics, and published them in 1898 as Tianyanlun (On Heavenly Evolution). More than 30 editions were published over a decade.
Yan avoided translating word by word, and when paraphrasing a text, he allowed it to serve his purpose of raising awareness of the country’s crisis, says Wang Gangfeng, a professor at Fujian Normal University’s School of Marxism, who attended a commemorative event to celebrate the 170th anniversary of Yan’s birth in Fuzhou on Jan 5.
In his translation notes for Tianyanlun, Yan quoted British sociologist Herbert Spencer’s thinking on social Darwinianism to complement Huxley’s views, arguing that weak countries should strengthen themselves, and fight and not wait for their demise. In the end, “the one that’s most adaptable to change survives”.
Yan’s translation, with its elegant prose and rhythm, belonged to the writing style of the pre-Qin period (before 221 BC), a time of prosperity in thought. The era remains a profound source of thinking today.
According to Wang, this was Yan’s way of attracting the attention of the conservative intellectuals and the social elites.
Because the great translator saw many similarities between the East and the West, he would sometimes replace Western mythology and legends with ancient Chinese stories for easier understanding, and frequently made reference to classical Chinese texts and applied their ideas to explain Western concepts.
In notes that are comparable in length with the translated text itself, Yan introduced the lives and deeds of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers as background information to help readers understand the original text.
Tao Youlan, director of Fudan University’s translation and interpretation department, says that Yan’s ancient-style prose is so beautiful and concise that, like salt dissolving in water, the meaning of the original text is properly conveyed.
She has initiated a program, inviting eight scholars of translation studies from eight universities across the country, in which they will guide students to read and appreciate eight of Yan’s translated works. They will explore in detail how Yan polished the translated text by using his particular rhetoric and strategies, and how he conveyed the original ideas in his translation.
The focus of the program is not only on language itself, but also on the ideas Yan’s words contain and the social impact of his translations, Tao adds.
It was Yan, in his translation notes for Tianyanlun, who initially elucidated the three norms of translation — faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance — that professionals pursue today as their ultimate goal, and Tianyanlun is a reader-oriented model.
During an interview with the Shanghai Review of Books in 2019, Shen Guowei, a linguistics professor at Japan’s Kansai University and author of two monographs on Yan’s translations and thinking, called for attention to the fact that when Yan translated these Western works about social sciences, neither the subjects, nor the related concepts and terms, existed in China.
Yan once said that he would think for days, or even months, on the translation for a single term and often borrowed words from archaic Chinese expressions or created new words of his own. Then, there was still the issue of how to tackle the differences in sentence structure between the languages.
However, in his later academic translation efforts, Yan continued to explore and adjust his strategy, while facing self-doubt and setbacks — the inevitable fate of all pioneers. Shen says that research into Yan should view his translations as a whole, place him in the historical background and social environment of his time, and take his own changes of mind into consideration.
Willful introduction
Each of Yan’s translations has a clearly defined practical purpose and function, says Ouyang Zhesheng, a history professor at Peking University.
Yan’s understanding of modern Western civilization reached an unprecedented level, and his introduction of the Western principles of the natural and social sciences was valuable and meaningful in guiding China’s social and political reform in his time, Ouyang says.
Schwartz wrote that Yan pioneered advocating the notion that “the problem of China above all was a problem of science”.
Yan believed that the Chinese should start by mastering the basic scientific principles of the West before promoting gradual, steady reform to avoid drastic sociopolitical upheavals.
He called his translation of On Liberty, by British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, Qunji Quanjie Lun, which translates as “On the Rights and Limits of Society and Individuals”. He argued that given China’s situation at the time, individuals should first and foremost strive for the group interest in order to protect themselves.
This idea of placing the interests of the nation and society above all is also evident in his translation of Scottish economist Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and he also covered Spencer’s The Study of Sociology under a cloak of Confucian thought to express the same idea, even though this partly contradicted with the author’s viewpoint.
While translating French political philosopher Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, Yan sought to provide a reference for what he thought could serve as a reform of constitutional monarchy.
He fully evaluated Chinese and Western civilizations, on the basis of which he formed his own idea about mutual learning, Ouyang says.
“He was straightforward about facing reality and was targeted. He remained critical, and did not engage in empty talk,” Ouyang says, adding that Yan’s spirit represents the Chinese people’s exploration and endeavor to transition Chinese culture from traditional to modern, which is still valued today.
Yan paid close attention to international affairs and recognized the importance of diplomacy. Based on extensive reading, he wrote articles analyzing the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) for the public, and provided information on World War I to policymakers.
He also endowed traditional culture with new connotations. For example, he reinterpreted the I Ching (Book of Changes), Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi, by applying Western perspectives, in the belief that only in this way could classical wisdom be better applied to the society of his day.
Disappointed with Western civilization in his later years, Yan came to re-evaluate Confucianism and rediscovered the modern significance in the thinking of Confucius and Mencius.
Unlike Schwartz, who describes Yan as a Faustian figure who abandoned core Confucian values to embrace Western thinking, Huang says that Yan’s outlook was rooted in Confucian and Taoist traditions, and was therefore the fruit of a convergence of the East and the West.
That determined his understanding and misunderstanding of the European works he translated and commented on, Huang adds.
The Taiwan scholar notes in particular that Yan was aware that his countrymen would tend to accept Western ideas that were consistent with their existing traditions, and his deliberation was obvious.
“China has marched along a different path to the West in establishing the authority of science. … Heralded by importing evolutionary theories, the introduction of Western science didn’t sever the origins of traditional Chinese values, nor did it lead to skepticism or moral relativism,” Huang says.
“The uniqueness of Chinese modernization lies in the continuity of traditional ideology and its consistent pursuit of the combination of value rationality and instrumental rationality. Resulting from longterm historical evolution, this also prompts us to consciously build a modern civilization with Chinese characteristics today,” he adds.
Yan’s granddaughter Cecilia Yen Koo, who is 99 years old, wrote in her letter to the commemorative event on Jan 5 that there was no doubt that as a result of her grandfather’s introduction, and after further comparison, review and integration by the later generations, the concepts and doctrines of the East and the West have been picked over and applied in different scenarios and environments in China, and have played a role in the country’s development and modernization.
She suggests that it might be possible that the many precious legacies her grandfather left behind, after review and study, can provide fresh thinking for future solutions.