Yan Fu’s (Mis)translation of “Feudal/Feudalism”

In the Preface to her celebrated book, Translingual Practice, Lydia Liu raises many profound and provocative questions concerning cross-cultural studies:

Are languages incommensurate? If so, how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly perceived equivalences? For instance, can we talk, or stop talking, about ‘modernity’ across the East-West divide without subjecting the experience of the one to representations, translations, or interpretations by the other?”

(xv)

Instead of discussing a philosophical question like whether languages are essentially commensurate or not, I am going to explore a number of concrete questions centered upon the translation of a key term in modern China: how the English word “feudal/feudalism” were translated into the Chinese word fengjian 封建 in the late Qing (1895-1911) and early Republican eras (1912-1927)? How were “hypothetical equivalences” between the two different words created? What historical occurrences shaped and maintained these equivalences, and what impact did they exert upon modern Chinese historiography and Chinese intellectuals’ pursuit of modernity? Lydia Liu herself has also noted the influential yet problematic translation of “feudal” into fengjian. She writes at the end of her book: “Since 封建 (‘feudal?’) happens to be one of those seminal translations in modern translingual history that have provoked much controversy surrounding Marxist interpretations of pre-capitalist Asian societies and consequently exerted a huge impact on these societies’ perceptions of their own past, the etymology of the term deserves more than casual attention” (261-2). However, as her focus is placed on literary texts, she does not address this historical term in any detail. Arif Dirlik has investigated the historical process of this semantic change, arguing that the confusion is largely derived from the importation of Marxist historiography in the 1930s which twisted Chinese history to fit a European historical model.¹ Viren Murthy examines how fengjian was likened to Western local autonomy and reinterpreted by late-Qing intellectuals to implement a radical political reform.² Praesenjit Duara looks into how the reinterpreted fengjian was denigrated and abandoned as a usable political tradition due to the rise of nationalism in the early 20th century of China.³ Their works undoubtedly shed light on the process of establishing the problematic “equivalence” between fengjian and feudalism and its relationship with modern Chinese historiography, but their research does not examine the role of translation and translator in this historical process. Several Chinese scholars (Ri Zhi, Feng Tianyu, Zhou Zhenhe and Nie Changshun) to some extent make up for this inadequacy, but all of them tend to treat translators as transparent and unproblematic mediators.

In this paper, I will focus on how Yan Fu (1854-1921), one of the most influential translators and intellectuals in the late Qing period, rejected and reaffirmed the equivalence between fengjian and feudal. Instead of taking Yan Fu as an unproblematic and transparent language transmitter, I will take a close look at his translations and translator’s notes and commentaries to demonstrate how he changed and appropriated the original texts and his own translations to make his intervention into the late Qing political and intellectual scene. This particular focus not only allows me to explore an understudied academic question but also to uncover the historical richness of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic encounters.

I

Fengjian 封建 is a classical Chinese word composed of two characters, i.e., feng 封 and jian 建. According to Feng Tianyu, feng originally means planting trees and raising mounds. Then its meaning was broadened to the granting of land by a king to his relatives and subordinates. The former meaning is closely related with the latter one, because planting trees and raising mound often functioned as marking the border of one’s land in pre-imperial China. Jian 建 means “establishment.” These two characters were more often than not used separately in the early Zhou Dynasty (around 12th century, B.C). When put together, fengjian initially referred to the division of land, as in this passage from the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuo Zhuan), a...