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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An invaluable tool for those studying Classical Chinese., May 10, 2001
Readers who are unfamiliar with Classical Chinese are sometimes frankly puzzled as to why different translators, working on the same text, can come up with such widely differing translations. But to fully understand why this can happen, it would of course be necessary to learn Chinese. Basically it has to do with the fact that the grammar of Ancient Chinese is as yet imperfectly understood. Another important reason is that the Chinese character or graph cannot really be equated with an English 'word' - they're very different animals. English words can change their form, as in 'run, runs, running, ran,' but graphs have a fixed form and can't do this. Additionally, graphs will often have a far wider range of meanings than English words. This makes for a language with richer connotations. It's a beautiful language and I don't think that anyone who may be thinking of taking it up will be sorry if they do. Everyone should have at least a little Chinese. Even a little can provide a lot of fun. One of the reasons I've always loved Classical Chinese is because it's an extremely concise and powerful language, a language of great masculine vigor, and one of the first things I look for in any translation from Classical Chinese is a comparable economy and energy. Some people don't seem to understand this, and I think it's because they fail to realize that words, besides expressing meaning, can also serve to limit meaning, especially in grammatically fussy Indo-European languages such as English where sentences are intended to convey as precise a meaning as possible and in doing so can become (as mine are here) rather wordy. But ancient Chinese writing isn't like this. Rather than attempting to narrow and delimit meaning, and to pin us down to something particular and explicit, it aims instead to open and expand our understanding. In other words, although it can look deceptively simple, it is in fact richly suggestive, rich in implications. And this rich suggestiveness will generate many different meanings in the minds of different readers. Proof of this can readily be found by anyone who takes the trouble to compare a few translations of the Tao Te Ching. Those who cannot consult the actual Chinese text will, as I've mentioned, often find themselves puzzled by these differences. What they fail to understand is that, whereas the English ideal is to express one and one thing only, the Chinese strategy is to express many meanings simultaneously. And this is where Professor Gregory C. Richter's text comes in. Professor Richter has provided an invaluable service to all who are interested in Classical Chinese. Whether you only want to check up on an occasional passage of the Tao Te Ching, or whether you want to learn Chinese inductively by memorizing an actual text, or whether you are taking a formal course and simply want some supplementary study material, or whether you are just plain curious, Richter's text will prove invaluable. Not only has he given us the Chinese graphs in a well-printed large clear font which makes them easy to read (though I wish he had used the traditional full forms rather than the modern simplified forms), but he also provides the pinyin transliteration for each graph, a detailed interlinear graph-by-graph gloss, and a final English translation. Considering what an important language Chinese is, there really ought to be far more texts like Professor Richter's, and he certainly deserves our gratitude for creating such an invaluable tool. My advice to the interested would be to snap it up before it goes out of print. One thing he has not provided is instruction in the all-important art of writing graphs (characters, ideograms) correctly. This too is huge fun, and can be an enormous source of satisfaction. For an excellent manual that will teach you how to write Chinese characters beautifully with a pen, you might check out: 'Learn to Write Chinese Characters' (Yale Language Series) by Johan Bjorksten. His models are superb. Another book I can strongly recommend is 'Sound and Symbol in Chinese' (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, Revised Edition 1971 [1962]), by the renowned Swedish Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren. This is a short and truly excellent introduction, in just 98 pages, which covers: The Ancient Language; Word Formation; The Script; Syntax; and Rhetoric. The book has a fine concluding section of Bibliographical Notes with sections on: Grammar; Phonetics and history of the language; Dictionaries; Script; History of Literature; Standard translations; General Works of Reference, Periodicals, etc. Unfortunately it appears at the moment to be out-of-print, but you may find a copy in the library.
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