Introducing "The spread and translation of Jami works in China in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties"

SHEN Yiming , Peking University

The book "Expansion and Translation of Jami Works in China in the Late Ming Dynasty and Early Qing Dynasty" was published by Religion and Culture in China in 2022. This book takes two texts of Sufi philosophical works, i.e. Lawayeh and Ashaeh al-Lamaat, written by Jami and their two Chinese translations, Zhenjing zhaowei and Zhaoyuan mijue, as the subject of research, and conducts a research from the perspective of two languages ​​and two cultures. Gives. The author of this book examines the internal logic of term selection in the process of Chinese translation of Persian prose. Therefore, this book clearly shows the expansion and evolution of Jami texts in China and sheds light on the historical context of the Chineseization of two Persian Sufi proses.

This book has a total of more than 350,000 Chinese words and is divided into four chapters except the introduction.

The first chapter specifies the origin and evolution of Persian Sufi literature and mystical philosophy and introduces Jami's life and works in detail. Describe and analyze the creative background of Jami's two Sufi philosophical works from the source.

The second chapter deals with the transmission and transformation of the Jami text from Herat to China, and examines the similarities and differences between the Chinese translation and the Persian text, as well as the reasons for the differences and changes.

The third chapter deals with the depth of the text and introduces and compares the two Jami proses and their Chinese translations, including the status of the collection of different manuscripts, a brief introduction of the structure and content of the manuscripts, etc.

The fourth chapter deals with two Persian works of Jami (Lawayeh and Ashaeh al-Loma'at) and their Chinese translation manuscripts (Zhenjing zhaowei and Zhaoyuan mijue) and compares them based on case analysis. These cases include the collection and analysis of the features of the translated words in two translations, and consider "truths", "mortality" and a group of terms "essence, attribute and noun" as three cases for discussion. Through case studies and comparisons, the author finds that the translators of the two Chinese translations rarely use the transliteration of the original text, but borrow traditional Chinese philosophical vocabulary such as Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

The first appendix of this book reports the master-disciple lineage during the Ming and Qing dynasties. This group of scholars was engaged in the explanation of Arabic texts, mystical and Sufi prose. The second appendix is ​​a compilation and correction of the manuscript version of the "mijue Zhaoyuan" (Chinese translation of the Ashaeh al Lomaat Jami ) written in 1890 and collected by the Yenching Library of Harvard University.