My friend @StatesWarring has an ongoing project translating Classical Chinese (CC) texts into English, and enlisting willing victims such as myself to narrate them for posterity.
It’s always a tricky business reconstructing and reproducing the sounds of antiquity, even for one as well documented as China’s. I approach all this with a mixture of “ ah sod it” and nervous reverence, but it’s better than not doing it. How else do we seduce susceptible souls into this wondrous universe?
The Book of Lord Shang is lesser known in the CC canon, but fairly significant as the oldest known Legalism text. It is one that I’m not too familiar with for the reason stated above, so thanks to Warring States for taking on this project. I’ve had experience translating texts from CC to English, but never have I attempted narrating them in Cantonese.
As Moser hilariously explains, “Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here’s a secret that sinologists won’t tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the “personal” section of the classified ads that say things like: “Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988–8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please.”
“In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets easier the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket.”
No pressure at all. Doubly no pressure that it’s Chapter 11, the Establishment of Fundamentals. The ancients sure loved their absolutes. As for me, no particular absolutes with regards to the Cantonese pronunciation, which people in the field broadly agree is closer to Middle Chinese than not. If some of my tones sound off to a modern Cantonese speaker, well… sod it.
Originally published at https://noeticnotions.substack.com.