It is vain therefore for a translator to attempt a literal version.
#BOOK OF CHANGES I CHING HOW TO#
How to surmount this difficulty occurred to me after I had found the clue to the interpretation ⎯in a fact which I had unconsciously acted on in all my translations of other classics, namely, that the written characters of the Chinese are not representations of words, but symbols of ideas, and that the combination of them in composition is not a representation of what the writer would say, but of what he thinks. But their version is all but unintelligible, and mine was not less so. Regis and his coadjutors (Introduction, page 9) in their Latin version. Much of what I wrote was made up, in consequence, of so many English words, with little or no mark of syntactical connexion. When I made my first translation of it in 1854, I endeavoured to be as concise in my English as the original Chinese was. There is hardly another work in the ancient literature of China that presents the same difficulties to the translator. But notwithstanding the account of the origin of the book and its composition by king Wăn and his son, which I have seen reason to adopt, they, its authors, had to write after the manner of diviners. I suppose that there are sinologists who will continue, for a time at least, to maintain that it was intended by its author or authors, whoever they were, merely as a book of divination and of course the oracles of divination were designedly wrapped up in mysterious phraseology. The peculiarity of its style makes it the most difficult of all the Confucian classics to present in an intelligible version.
![book of changes i ching book of changes i ching](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0b/14/4c/0b144cde6885e7b9ea71170873e8aac5.jpg)
![book of changes i ching book of changes i ching](https://img.tradera.net/images/131/360071131_f27cbf8b-bcbd-4eb7-9d33-bb9c64b8c2c3.jpg)
In this regard, it is worth quoting at some length the words of James Legge (1815-1897), the Victorian translator of all the Confucian classics, a monumental achievement that still stands today as an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to acquaint him/herself with these essential texts of early Chinese civilization.
![book of changes i ching book of changes i ching](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/zbAAAOSwU4FaAyZ5/s-l400.jpg)
Of all the Chinese classics, the I ching is the one that most Sinologists do not want to touch because of its maddening opacity. We shall probably finish the first draft within a year. For the last two decades or so, my brother Denis and I have been working on a translation of the Yìjīng 易經 (Classic of Changes).