Translators have made books from around the world available through the centuries to those unable to read the language in which a work first appears. Translation allows us to gain insights and grapple with the arguments of authors from around the globe. A world without translation would be, for most readers in the Anglosphere, a world without such works as Sun Tzu’s classic Art of War or Mao Zedong’s modern On Protracted War. While Asian literature is relatively well represented in English translation, from Murasaki Shikibu’s ancient Tale of Genji to Murakami Haruki’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translations of their non-fiction equivalents are comparatively rare.
Intellectual history
It is not uncommon for auto rickshaws and trucks in India to proudly proclaim “Mera Bharat Mahaan” (My India is Great) in decorative signage. While the statement (among other didactic notes about traffic safety) has kept bored or exhausted fellow commuters engaged, Yorim Spoelder points out in his new book Visions of Greater India: Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c 1800-1960 that that talk about India’s “greatness” has a long history. The abstract greatness of the kitsch signage stems from another notion of “great”, that of a geographical entity that is not bounded by the Himalayas, but overflows into Central Asia on one side, and Southeast Asia on the other.
In the early decades of the 20th century, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore toured China, Japan and the Dutch East Indies to spread his message of Asian solidarity. Tagore’s Asianist vision was rife with anticolonial sentiment but unapologetically Indocentric: it projected India as the cultural and religious fount of Eastern civilization and the spiritual motor of a revitalized Asia.
Max Weber, an heir of the Enlightenment, wrote about “‘progress’, to which science belongs as a link and motive force”’ when considering the limitations of scientific rationalism. In detaching science from the strictures of reason, he had come full circle. This quote helps frame Alexander Statman’s ambitious essay, A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science, a book about the reception of Chinese ideas on science or, rather, natural philosophy, in France during the late Enlightenment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.