On the Latin Translation of Mencius of François Noël, SJ.

This paper aims to examine in depth the Latin translation of Mencius by the Belgian Jesuit François Noël (1651-1729), a masterpiece that assumes paramount importance in Western intellectual history. Included in his Sinensis Imperii Libri Classici Sex (1711), the translation is the first publication of Mencius in a European language. Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat's (1788-1832) disparaging remarks of Noël's translation in the early nineteenth century have exerted considerable influence on the academic community for a long period of time, though Rémusat himself viewed the Latin language as an ideal medium for translating Chinese classics. A handful of contemporary scholars have attempted to redress the balance, but a formal study of this work is still lacking. This paper attempts to compare the manuscript with the printed versions of Noël's Mencius, and discuss some of the major differences between the two. Noël's work is full of protracted paraphrases of Medieval Latin, and this can be conceived as a product of cultural translation under the principle of domestication in early modern Europe. It is known that Noël attracted widespread criticism for his conscious effort to intermingle the text and the commentaries. However, as the Jesuits were evidently not able to translate separately the Four Books and the commentaries during the seventeenth century, it was necessary for them to add the commentaries to the text in order to make the translation more intelligible to the literati in the Western world at that time. For precisely the same reason, Noël's paraphrastic renderings did not only come from the original Chinese text and the commentaries, but also from his own elaboration. He ventured to combine the commentaries by Zhu Xi ... (1130-1200) and Zhang Juzheng ... (1525-1582) and rearrange the contents in an organized manner. Noël did not mention Zhang in his translation, yet curiously, he pointed to Zhang's Sishu zhijie?? in most cases when he quoted Mencius in Philosophia Sinica, particularly in the third treatise of the book. Noël referred to some other Chinese works as well in the interpretation of Mencius, including Sishu mengyin ... and Rijiang Sishu jieyi ..., but the quotations of these works in Philosophia Sinica were not necessarily found in his Latin translation. Scholars have put forward a number of explanations to account for the later publication of Mencius in Europe as compared with the other three of the Four Books. When we observe this Latin translation and some other evidence, the point that Mencius's ideas contradict the Catholic ecclesiastical views in fact does not constitute the most compelling reason for the exclusion of Mencius from Confucius Sinarum Philosophus published in 1687. It is worthy of note that, in the process of translation, Noël in general did not distort the original meanings of the words or sentences in Mencius that were apparently at odds with Christian philosophy, though there were cases where he misinterpreted the translated materials, intentionally or not, in Philosophia Sinica. Moreover, Noël was cautious in picking appropriate Latin words to introduce key concepts in Mencius as being part of his work to synthesize the philosophy of Mencius and Christianity. It was not rare for him to use two Latin words of similar meanings to stand for one Chinese character. The author seeks to prove that there is good reason for Noël to use pietas instead of humanitas (employed by Stanislas Julien [1797-1873] and Angelo Zottoli [1826-1920]) to translate the term ren ' in Mencius, and there is also sufficient evidence to vindicate his reluctance to differentiate cor and animus in translating xin .... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]