¹ The most famous set of translations and commentaries are The Chinese Classics, with a translation, critical and exegetical notes, prolegomena, and copious indexes, first published in Hong Kong between 1861 and 1872. This 8-book set comprised five volumes, the fourth being The Book of Poetry. A second edition, including a reprint of the last three volumes attached to a complete revision of The Four Books, was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford (1893–95) [hereafter CC]. For details of the revision see my article, ‘Some new dimensions in the study of the works of James Legge (1815–1897): part II’, Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal, 13, 1991, 33–48. Less well known are six volumes of Legge's further translations, completed between 1879 and 1885, of The Sacred Books of China in the ‘Sacred Books of the East’ series (see below). The first collection of Confucian texts in this set included retranslations of The Book of Historical Documents and The Book of Poetry and a new rendering of The Classic of Filial Piety (vol. 3 of the series).

² See Hanying Sishu (The Chinese/English Four Books), (ed.) Chongde, Liu and Luo Zhiyu (Changsha: Hunan People's Press, 1992Google Scholar) and Zhou Yi (Book of Changes), (ed.) Tai Yi and Tai Shi (Changsha: Hunan People's Press, 1993). It is significant for the claims of this paper that these publishers did not use Legge's original translation of the Shijing for their bilingual edition of that classic.

³ See the 1885 Japanese edition of the English translation and Chinese text of Legge's 1861 edition of The Four Books by N. Imamura: .

Editions of the Analects include Yamano Masaharo's edition (Tokyo, 1913), with the Chinese characters, English translation, and selective Japanese notes; a similar edition with fewer notes appeared c. 1950, entitled Confucian Analects: Dr. Legge's version, (ed.) Yoshi Ogaeri in Tokyo: Bunki Shoten. A text held in the New York Public Library, (ed.) O. Shimisu and M. Hirose, includes the whole of The Four Books in Chinese and English (Legge's translation), along with a Japanese translation and selective notes. Entitled in English, The original Chinese text of the Confucian Analects, the Great Learning …, it is unfortunately undated.

⁴ In each of the five volumes of The Chinese Classics Legge provided an annotated bibliography of relevant texts. These run to nearly 250 entries: 183 titles of general works in Chinese (including some Japanese publications and editions of texts); 17 dictionaries and technical tools in Chinese; 22 works in English; 13 in French; 7 in Latin; and one in Russian. Beyond the materials listed, Legge's personal library included other texts in Italian, German, and Dutch. For more details of his personal library, see my ‘Some new dimensions in the study of the works of James Legge (1815–1897); part I’, Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal, 12, 1990, 29–50.Google Scholar

⁵ See Chi-fang, Lee, ‘Wang T֙ao's contribution to James Legge's translation of the Chinese Classics’, Tamkang Review, 17/1, 1986, 47–67.Google Scholar

⁶ The critical document in this debate, published by Legge's friends after it was denied publication in the proceedings of the General Missionary Conference of 1877 in Shanghai, , was Confucianism in relation to Christianity (London, 1877)Google Scholar. After its publication, both critics and supporters of Legge's missiological position published articles in the standard Chinese missionary journal, The Chinese Recorder, the critics referring to his understanding of Confucian religious history as ‘Leggism’.

⁷ Legge, Helen Edith. James Legge: missionary and scholar (London: Religious Tract Society, 1905).Google Scholar

⁸ Legge provided ‘modern’ translations of some texts to broaden their appeal. See Legge, James, The Chinese Classics, Vol. II: Life and works of Mencius (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippencott and Co., 1875: iv).Google Scholar

⁹ The nephews were sons of Legge's brother, John Legge; both had graduated from Aberdeen University in 1862 and then together entered a Nonconformist seminary, Lancashire Independent College in Manchester. The elder was named John Legge, after his father, and the younger, James Legge, after his uncle. A minister friend, Alexander Cran, joined them in the project. For further information, see Legge, James, Memorials of John Legge … With memoir by James Legge (London: J. Clarke & Co., 1880Google Scholar). See also Legge, James, The Chinese Classics … Vol. III: The She King; or, The Book of Poetry (London: Trübner and Co., 1876: iii)Google Scholar. This is the third volume of the ‘modern’ translations [hereafter the Metrical She King (1876)].

¹⁰ Mercer had an active and long career in the political administration of Hong Kong. He published a book of rather pedantic poetry in 1869, Under the peak; or, Jottings in verse, during a lengthened residence in the colony of Hong Kong. See descriptions of his political activities in Eitel, E.J., Europe in China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1895]), esp. pp. 220, 275–6, 297, 408–11Google Scholar. See also Metrical She King (1876: iv).

¹¹ The loss of the Chinese text in all the renderings of The Sacred Books of China was lamented by a number of scholars who knew The Chinese Classics, but its absence helped to make the text more appealing to a public which could not hope to read Chinese. Only one text—Chenfeng Mumen had an obvious printing error in the 1872 Chinese text (the fourth lines in the two stanzas are reversed). (See CC, IV, 1872, 210.)

¹² This claim needs to be carefully qualified. Legge himself knew of two German translations of the Confucian classic, both of which had been translated from a Latin version by Father Lacharme. In his first translation of the Shijing in 1872, Legge reviewed a number of renderings in Lacharme's work and discovered them to be ‘very inaccurate Latin translation[s]’. (See Legge, James, CC, IV, 1872, 167Google Scholar.) Legge made other comments on and evaluations of Lacharme's work throughout this text, almost all of which rejected Lacharme's renderings. Since the two German versions depended on Lacharme, they were already at a disadvantage. Of the two— Ruckert's, FriedrichSchi-King, Chinesisches Liederbuch, gesammelt von Confucious (Altona: 1833)Google Scholar and Johann Cramer's Schi-King, oder Chinesische Lieder, gesammelt von Confucious—Legge considered the former the far better version, in spite of inherent flaws due to lack of contact with the original Chinese.

¹³ See Couvreur, Seraphim, S.J., Cheu King: Texte chinois avec une double traduction en français et en latin (Ho Kien Fou: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1896; 4th ed.Google Scholar, Taipei: Kwangchi Press, 1967, 1992). One major difference between Couvreur's version and Legge's third 1879 translation is that the former numbers all the stanzas, even though they are already distinctly separated. In Legge's third version, there are no numbers identifying the sequence, although he had included them in both the 1872 and 1876 versions, at the extreme left of each stanza.

¹⁴ Karlgren preferred to start each stanza with a dash and to place its sequential number at the beginning of the stanza in the midst of a running paragraph. This saves space and helps to identify particular stanzas fairly clearly in the translation; his Chinese version, however, does not distinguish the stanzas at all. (It should be noted that Legge's Chinese version in the 1872 translation provided both stanza and line numbers, making the process of referring to the original much easier.) See Karlgren, Bernhard, The Book of Odes: Chinese text, transcription and translation (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1974)Google Scholar. Both Couvreur's and Karlgren's versions included the transliteration of the Chinese text into contemporary Chinese sounds, with Karlgren adding in parentheses the pronunciation of rhymes in the reconstructed phonetics of the older Chinese. This adds a philological interest, especially in Karlgren's case, which is not as evident in Legge's versions. Legge did carefully and thoroughly discuss the ancient ‘prosody’ in the 1872 version, but only at the end of his notes on each poem and without transliteration, using only the Chinese characters themselves.

¹⁵ See Waley, Arthur (tr.), The Book of Songs: the ancient Chinese classic of poetry (London: Allen and Unwin, 1937)Google Scholar. Waley's rearrangement of the poems into topical units, much like Legge's third version of 1879, according to their religious interest, also restructured the text in ways completely foreign to the Chinese classic itself. Waley's reorganization is far more radical than Legge's, but it must be remembered that in Legge's time imperial Chinese civil service examinations were still using the standard text, and the need to ‘follow the authoritative model’ was thus more urgently felt.

Nevertheless, Legge was quick to point out in his 1872 translation that both the Han dynasty Mao school and the Song dynasty school following Zhu Xi's interpretations did consider the placement of and interrelationship between poems a significant factor in understanding the larger meanings of individual poems. One example of this intertextuality is the interpretation Zhu Xi gives of the ‘Shan you shu’ poem in the Odes of Tang of the Lessons of the States in which this poem's significance is tied to the themes of the previous odes. (See CC, IV, 1872, 176.)Google Scholar

¹⁶ See, for example, the fine evaluative work by Wong Siu-kit and Li Kar-shu in ‘Three English translations of the Shijing’, Renditions, November 1987, 113–39. Having considered the translations of The Book of Poetry by Legge, Waley and Karlgren, they place Legge's academic rendition of 1872 last in terms of precision and poetic style. The criteria they apply include late Qing philological knowledge, advances in linguistic and etymological understanding, accuracy of word-for-word and phrase-for-phrase translation, devices by which the rendering reflects the Chinese standard, as well as the fluidity and clarity of the contemporary English rendering. In their generally thoughtful assessment, Karlgren's version emerges as the most systematic and precise, while Waley's is the most stylish and poetic. Criticisms of Legge include excessive reliance on Zhu Xi's philological evaluations and a too limited awareness of the importance of late Qing philological scholarship. That Legge followed Zhu Xi in some cases is clear, but this can be overstated. In fact, Legge opposed Zhu Xi's philological and interpretive positions almost as often as he supported them, preferring in those instances either a Han school position, a Qing option, or one of his own preference. A knowledge of Legge's Metrical Shijing, I suspect might have modified some of their judgements of his style.

¹⁷ See, for example, Bassnett-McGuire, Susan, Translation studies (New York: Routledge, 1980CrossRefGoogle Scholar; revised ed. 1991, esp. 39–75). In her work, Victorian translation theorists (such as Arnold and Longfellow) are distinguished from Romantic and post-Romantic theorists in that they elevated the importance of the text in the original language to an extreme, emphasizing the accuracy of a rendering and denying much liberty at all to the translator; whereas Romantics such as Goethe tended to have a more liberal view of the creativity of the translation act.

See also Robinson, DouglasThe translator's turn (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 65–126Google Scholar. Robinson argues that the Romantic translation theorists gave metaphor paramount status as a means of characterizing the act of translation. (See p. 160). For an historical overview which supports the Romantic vision see Steiner's, GeorgeAfter Babel: aspects of language and translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

¹⁸ The development of these theoretical positions is complicated by the fact that some theorists feel there is no need for any change, only a more precise set of descriptive theories, while others propose a more radical shift towards a less rationalist and more relational theory of translation. For one such theory with many qualifications in the footnotes, see Robinson, , The translator's turn, 65–69.Google Scholar

¹⁹ A general discussion of these questions in relation to translations of poetry are found in Bassnett-McGuire, , Translation studies, 81–109Google Scholar. Examples of the problems in aiming for exact equivalence, most often illustrated by poetic translation, are provided in Robinson, , The translator's turn, 133–193.Google Scholar

²⁰ This is the terminology of Eugene Nida. Peter Newmark (whom Donald Robinson characterizes as a ‘commonsense-for-sense’ theorist) claims that the principle of dynamic equivalence is becoming ‘generally superordinate, both in translation theory and practice, to the principles of primacy of form and primacy of content.’ See Newmark, Peter, Approaches to translation (Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd., 1988), 132Google Scholar, and for Robinson's, comment, The translator's turn, 173.Google Scholar

²¹ Robinson's work is an attempt to present a radical alternative along ‘dialogic’ lines, following the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke in reinterpreting locally-based terminology according to what he calls an ‘ideosomatic feel’ for the appropriateness of translations. His theoretical approach to language bears a striking similarity to that of the pre-Qin Daoist philosopher, Zhuangzi and is opposed to that of a number of current translation theorists, including Eugene Nida and Peter Newmark, who tend to over-generalize their rationalized categories to the point where they cannot fail to raise certain theoretical doubts. Robinson's position seeks to avoid such conflicts of principle by not insisting on the universalizability of his ideas.

²² Sometimes a translation gives n o obvious sign that it is in fact a translation, in which case, text and translator create the impression of an exact translation (even if it is unintended): this phenomenon has been called the ‘realistic illusion’ by Mikhail Bakhtin, and is discussed in Robinson, , The translator's turn, 170–172.Google Scholar

²³ Buchanan, George, Rerum Scoticorum Historia (Edinburgh, 1582)Google Scholar. Details of the text and its influence on Legge's later translations are provided in my ‘Some new dimensions … part 1’, 42–3.

²⁴ Buchanan, George, Paraphrasis Psalmorum Davidis Poetica (n.p., 1566)Google Scholar. An English version of the text was prepared in 1754 under the title, A poetical translation of the Psalms.

²⁵ The manuscript, for reasons which are not obvious, was never published; it is now held in the New College Library of the University of Edinburgh.

²⁶ From CC, IV, 1872, prolegomena, 115–16 et passim, emphasis added.

²⁷ This he did only for the Guofeng , division in the 1872 edition. (See the 1872 translation, 19, 37, 72, 90, 108–9, 123, 149, 162, 173, 189, 204, 214, 219, 225, 242–3. Sometimes no explicit evaluation is given, but in a number of cases Legge listed those worthy of attention for their information, moral stance, poetic interest, or aesthetic value. He speaks of two poems among those in the Wei section which are ‘most interesting and ambitious’. From the host of Zheng poetry he mentions two, the eighth and nineteenth which ‘stood out conspicuously’ because of their positive values. Yet a stern voice could also be heard: ‘To none of the odes of Ts֙aou does there belong any great merit.’ Legge quotes the praise of Zhu Xi and one of the Cheng brothers, but in the Zhounan and Shaonan he comments tersely that they ‘do not approve themselves so much to a western reader’. As at the beginning, so at the end: the last three odes of Bin he considered to be ‘of a trifling character’, but he immediately pointed to the first and third poems of that section as not only being longer but also ‘of a superior character’.

²⁸ Elsewhere I have assessed the importance of Legge's presentation of the translations included in both The Chinese Classic and The Sacred Books of the East, using aspects of the communicative action theory of Jürgen Habermas to identify the advances Legge had made over earlier attempts at translating some of these materials. See ‘James Legge’ in the Encyclopedia of translation: Chinese-English, English-Chinese, (ed.) Sin-wai, Chan and Pollard, David E. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995: 401–422).Google Scholar

²⁹ In the metrical Shijing, I recorded at least 41 different syllabic patterns among the poems. The 4-syllable lines always occur in connection with 6- or 8-syllable lines (see Metrical She King, 1876, 80: ‘Peifeng Zhongfeng’ ; 236, ‘Xiaoya Xiaomin Qiaoyan’ ; and 351, ‘Zhousong Wei Tian zhi ming’ ). Examples exist of complete poems from 5-to 12-syllables per line. A greater number of these kinds of poems is in either 8- or 10-syllable lines. Among the many variations which include two or more lengths of line in a stanza, there are 14 poems in the 8, 6, 8, 6 rhythm (pp. 89, 96, 187, 194, 278, 308, 351, 355, 356, 362, 364 [2 poems], 271, 372); seven poems appear in the rhythm 8, 8, 6, 8, 8, 6 (pp. 91, 176, 239, 248, 275, 315); seven other poems have been transformed into the rhythm 8, 6, 8, 6, 8, 8 (pp. 71, 233, 274, 281, 293, 298, 358) and five are reformulated in a 10, 10, 8, 10, 10, 8 rhythm (pp. 178, 203, 219, 262, 291). More than half the rhythm patterns occur only once in the whole of the translation.

³⁰ Metrical She King (1876), 112–113, 124.Google Scholar

³¹ ibid., 113, 170, 201, 351.

³² ibid., 154, 161, 366.

³³ By my count 79 poems were printed without any line variation and the same number with the second and fourth lines indented.

³⁴ Bassnett-McGuire, , Translation studies, 91Google Scholar. This conclusion summarizes a discussion of three different renderings of Catullus Poem 13, and is followed by the statement, ‘But this is not the only criterion for the translation of poetry …’.

³⁵ To put this claim in another perspective, only one out of every five poems in Legge's 1876 Shijing attempts to imitate the number of lines in each stanza of the original. There are also a few renderings, all in the Xiaoya , in which the English lines per stanza are fewer than those in the Chinese text: see Metrical She King (1876), 214, ‘Tonggong Jiri’ ; 229, ‘Qifu Shiyue zhi jiao’ ; and 263, ‘Sanghu Kuibian’ .

³⁶ It should be noted that, in some cases, the line lengths are more irregular in Chinese than in English. See Metrical She King (1876), 143, ‘Weifeng Fatan’ , and 247, ‘Xiaoya Beishan Beishan’ .

³⁷ See, for example Metrical She King (1876), 65, 69, 114, 174, 221, 226, 264, 308.

³⁸ Some representative pieces are found in Metrical She King (1876), 165, 167, 208.

³⁹ e.g., Metrical She King (1876), 109, 152, 153, 170, 175, 260, 281.

⁴⁰ There are very few clues as to who were the original authors of the translations in the vast majority of cases. When double versions occur, there is usually some explicit statement explaining that the versions were prepared by two different authors. Otherwise, it is difficult to tell. In the prolegomena to his 1872 version of the Shijing, Legge provided a prodigious amount of information about the line lengths, rhyme structures, and their variants. In the notes under each poem he always included, for the reader willing to compare the notes, all the specific rhymes identified by Duan Yucai and occasionally some other Chinese philologist. With these details at their disposal, any of Legge's collaborators would have had enough information to enable them to try to achieve a rendering imitating the original poem in a number of ways.

⁴¹ Only one poem was completely reformulated into terse 5-syllable lines; the rest all had some lines of 6 or more syllables in their stanzas. See CC, IV, 1872, 282, ‘Xiaoya Dou ren shi Tiao zhi hua’ .

⁴² Before such a second English version of ‘Zhousong Min yu xiaozi Xiaobi’ (CC, IV, 1872, 367), Legge clarified the point precisely: ‘I received from Staffordshire [that is, from his nephew, the Revd James Legge] another version of this piece, which gives it a more general character. It is not so historically accurate as the above version, but I think the reader will be pleased to see it.’

From this and similar statements we can surmise that Legge consciously styled the poems within the concepts and contexts which he felt most suited the rendering. Still, the very fact that he did publish two versions rather than one suggests that he was aware of the possibility of diverse renderings and was willing to present a number of them if others would be ‘pleased to see them’, a liberal attitude to translation not always recognized in his own day.

⁴³ CC, IV, 1872, 296–7.

⁴⁴ The skilful transposition of phrases and rhymes is captured quite well by Legge in this 1872 rendition, but this is a literal English translation which leaves one completely at a loss as to the covert meanings intended by the various symbols from the non-human natural world. The rhyme scheme of this particular poem, representing each final character with a letter, is

⁴⁵ CC, IV, 1872, 297.

⁴⁶ This is from Lun Yu, ‘Taibo’ [8:8], which Legge translates (CC, I, 1872, 211):

1. The Master said, ‘It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused

2. It is by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established.

3. It is from Music that the finish is received.’

⁴⁷ Metrical She King (1876), 217–18. It is instructive to compare several other renderings with this 1876 version. Couvreur, who aims to render the poems from Zhu Xi's perspective, refers to the four images as allegories, but then proceeds to translate the poem without any direct reference or link to Zhu Xi's teachings. Both Legge and Couvreur seek to convey Zhu Xi's understanding, and both use the introductory notes to the poem for this purpose (the 1876 version of Legge's group does not give so detailed an account of Zhu Xi's position), but Legge chooses to present the poem in a way which brings out the fuller meaning. Couvreur remains reticent, letting the reader search for the connections between the notes and the images. (See Couvreur, , Cheu King, 215.)Google Scholar

Waley's rendering is very different. He also prefers to translate the metaphors in a literal manner, but the last two lines of the poem are italicized, with a note below explaining that these are a refrain. His interpretive trope lies above the refrain in the word for ‘beneath’, for which he offers the following explanation: ‘The “beneath” certainly has a double sense and hints that the lower classes are treated as of no account. The refrain is a cryptic threat to emigrate.’ (See Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs, 314). Waley's rendering thus represents a complete rejection of the moral connection with The Doctrine of the Mean.

⁴⁸ CC, IV, 1872, 407–8.

⁴⁹ Metrical She King (1876), 272–3.

⁵⁰ In the commentarial notes to his 1872 translation, Legge carefully chooses from among the interpretive options, explains the problematic issues and justifies his agreement with both Mao and Zhu. Yet when he comes to translate the term, he simply declares that he will render ‘the name with a small g’ without any explanation. Couvreur captures the blasphemous intent by expanding the terms into half paraphrases, giving for Shangdi, ‘ce maître supreme de l'univers’. Waley's approach is completely different, supported by two footnotes, but grasping with proper effect the sense of the blasphemy:

Very leafy is that willow-tree

But I would not care to rest under it.

God on high is very bright;

Don't go too close to him!

Were I to reprove him,

Afterwards I should be slaughtered by him.

Waley explains his twist in the second line, from desire to rejection, by claiming in a brief footnote—‘because liu (willow) also means “slaughter”.’ ‘God’ he explains in the footnote as ‘i.e. the ruler’. See CC, IV, 1872, 407–408Google Scholar; Couvreur, , Cheu King, 305Google Scholar; Waley, Arthur, The Book of Songs, 323.Google Scholar

⁵¹ At this point it appears that Legge's deep piety became a stumbling block to translation. His way out was through the technique of footnotes, in which he could plant the irony for others to follow up. For a helpful discussion of the ‘ironic trope’ in translation, see Robinson, Douglas, The translator's turn, 167–175.Google Scholar

⁵² See Lister, Alfred, ‘Dr Legge's metrical Shi-King’, The China Review, 5/1 (July), 1876, 7.Google Scholar

⁵³ ibid., 8.

⁵⁴ Newmark, Peter, Approaches to translation, 21, 134 respectively.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Another example not mentioned above is worth considering. Lister criticizes the use of ‘gentleman’ in speaking about a high-ranking person who mistreats and manipulates women. (He is referring to a text in the 1876 translation, 106.) The term in Chinese is shi , indicating a noble warrior or even a ritual expert, and Legge was being very faithful to the trope of the original text. He did not, however, seek to conceal the cultural criticism involved; there was certainly heavy irony in describing this rank of person in so unfavourable a light. To translate the term as ‘charlatan’ would be to over-react and deny the irony its bite; to insist that ‘gentleman’ is inappropriate is to force a particular reading on a ‘shift of expression’ produced by a very different cultural context. See the original criticism in Alfred Lister, ‘Dr Legge's metrical Shi-King’, 7. For the problem of the ‘shift of expressions’ between distinctly different cultural contexts see Bassnett-McGuire, , Translation studies, 83, 145–6.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ See examples of various kinds of stylized language and awkward renderings in Metrical She King (1876), 169, 172, 197, 232, 255.

⁵⁷ Once again, the prominence among Chinese scholars of studies on the ancient dialects of various states, as in The Book of Poetry, and the importance of the Han dynasty dictionary, Shuowen , which focused on the loss of direct access to the meanings of terms because of the ‘shifts of expression’ within various Chinese dialects, make the appearance of some Scotticisms a fortunate, if unwitting, parallel to the feel of the actual text in the Chinese classic.

⁵⁸ See for example, the Metrical She King (1876), 199, 205, 207, 251, 274, 294. In a few cases, there was evidence that Legge himself had overcome some of these problematic translations in the four years between the 1872 translation and the 1876 project. Compare the following passages (the two paginations refer to the 1872 and 1876 versions respectively): 226, 180; 261, 199; 292, 215.

⁵⁹ In CC, IV, 1872, 381, Legge included in his notes the fact that Mosaic legislation required harvesters to leave some of the harvest for the poor and widows (Deuteronomy 23: 19–22, and elsewhere). The Chinese text refers only to widows. However, when it came to the metrical version (p. 259), Legge's editing permitted the full shift of expression into the biblical phraseology,

‘Handfuls besides we drop upon the ground

And ears untouched in numbers lie around;—

These by the poor and widows shall be found’

One might argue that the widows were also poor, but to avoid the biblical locution would be sophistry. It is not a terribly serious point, but it does show the subtlety of the translator's art. In this 1876 version, unlike that of 1872, there is no note to clarify the biblical parallel and its difference from the customs of Zhou dynasty China.

⁶⁰ See for example, Metrical She King (1876), 248, 271.

⁶¹ This locution occurs in the Metrical She King (1876), 285.

⁶² ‘Xiaoya Dou ren shi Baihu’, as rendered in Metrical She King (1876), 278.

⁶³ The 1872 rendering (p. 340) is corrected in the Metrical She King (1876), 236. This proves to be an important locution in the history of Christianity in China precisely because Confucian scholars who became Christians following the teachings of the Jesuits used ‘Father-Mother God’ in their writings and influenced the Jesuits to do so also. See a discussion of this use of the phrase in Standaert, Nicolas, ‘Inculturation and Chinese-Christian contacts in the Late Ming and Early Qing’, Ching Feng 34/4, 1991, 1–16.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ See Metrical She King (1876), 184. In this poem, ‘Binfeng Chixiu’ , the end of the first stanza is ‘I am to be pitied’. This is transformed here into ‘Hear my prayer’, a phrase added for the sake of rhythm and rhyme but out of keeping for the actual poem.

⁶⁵ In both CC, IV, 1872, 369, 371, and Metrical She King (1876) renditions (pp. 252–5), Legge had used the term ‘priest’ for the Chinese character zhu When he retranslated the text to portray the religious dimensions of Confucian classical traditions, he changed this rendering (Max Müller's editing or Legge's conscious self-correction?) to ‘officer of prayer’. See ‘Sacred Books of the East’, 3, 1879, 366–8.

⁶⁶ Metrical She King (1876), 363–4.

⁶⁷ In ‘Peifeng, Baizhou’ (Metrical She King, 1876, 76–7), images attached to the heart are rendered in English as mind, spirit, thoughts, impressions, belief, feelings, spleen and soul. From the perspective of dynamic equivalence, these are perfectly legitimate, but for the rendering of an authoritative text with sensitivity to its age a nd context, they may be problematic.

⁶⁸ Other material relevant to the 1876 project and its evaluation can be found in that text, pp. 103, 109, 128, 141, 192, 209.

⁶⁹ Metrical She King (1876) 112–13.

⁷⁰ Metrical She King (1876), 196, 221, 224, 226, 230, 241, 263, 356, 360.

⁷¹ See CC, IV, 1872, 589–90; in the Metrical She King (1876) 360–61.

⁷² According to Duan Yucai's notes which Legge summarizes at the end of the poem in CC, IV, 1872, 590, the repetition of the rhymes is achieved by a forced or artificial rhyme in a more ancient dialectical register.

⁷³ In this poem there are some adjustments to be made in the reading to make the words ‘fit’ the pattern. In this case for example, as throughout the whole of the metrical version, the term ‘Heaven’ is elided and counted as one syllable.

⁷⁴ The authority is Hwang Tso. See CC, IV, 1872, 590.

⁷⁵ The ‘Sacred Books of the East’, 3, 1879 translation follows the CC, IV, 1872 version closely but with some slight changes. In order to present King Wu more obviously in a context of prayer, Legge adds at the beginning of the second stanza ‘(he says),’—but this merely adjusts imbalanced lines, making the meaning clearer but bringing no aesthetic quality to the piece. (See ‘Sacred Books of the East’, 3, 1879, 360.)

⁷⁶ One such speech, which has been completely overlooked in religious studies of these poems in English involves the words of God (Shangdi) spoken to King Wen. See the ‘Daya Wenwang Huangyi’ , Metrical She King (1876), 297.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ In CC, IV, 1872, Legge referred to over 75 species and genera under their Latin rubric, and a similar number in some English form. It is instructive to note that he only referred to two such items by their Latin names in the Metrical She King (1876): dentirostres and Anas galericulata (pp. 233 and 262 respectively).

⁷⁸ CC, IV, 1872, 240.

⁷⁹ See Arthur Waley in his appendix to The Book of Songs: the ancient Chinese classic of poetry, 337.

⁸⁰ This English translation by Lindsay Ride is included in a biographical note on James Legge, now published at the beginning of CC, I, 16–17.