The Grand Scribe’s Records, Volume X: The Memoirs of Han China, Part III by Ssu-ma Ch’ien (review)

The first volume of William Nienhauser’s Grand Scribe’s Records appeared in 1994, the same year that China Review International published its first issue, with the lofty ambition of producing a scholarly and heavily annotated English translation of Sima Qian’s Shiji that would complement Burton Watson’s fluent partial translation of 1961. Watson’s version included sixty-five full or partial chapters (out of the original 130), with thirteen additional chapters added in a 1993 second edition. In the nearly quarter-century since that first volume, Nienhauser has kept his translation project moving forward, with seven books to date that offer a total of eighty-three full Shiji chapters, which means that with the most recent volume Nienhauser’s translation has finally overtaken Watson’s. Crucially, Nienhauser’s work includes many of the chapters from pre-Han China that Watson had omitted.

The significance of Nienhauser’s contribution cannot be overstated. The Shiji is one of cornerstones of early Chinese history, and giving students and scholars access to fully annotated translations is an achievement that will endure for many generations—much like Édouard Chavannes’s partial French translation in five volumes published between 1895 and 1905, which was finally completed by his academic successors with four additional volumes in 2015. In addition, the Grand Scribe’s Records has been a model of collaborative international scholarship. Nienhauser has been the editor and a contributing translator for each of the volumes, but individual chapters have been translated by scholars from China, Europe, and the United States, thirty-three of whom have had their names included in the title pages of various volumes, not to mention the many graduate students and colleagues who have met together in Shiji workshops, reviewed chapters, or contributed appendices.

The latest installment in the series, the Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. X: The Memoirs of Han China, Part III, carries forward the original vision set forth in 1994. Using the standard 1959 Zhonghua Shuju edition of the Shiji as its base text, the volume offers heavily annotated translations of nine chapters (SJ 113–121), each of which concludes with a translator’s note of three or four pages and a brief bibliography. Some of the weaknesses of the series since the beginning remain—its use of Wade-Giles romanization and a surprising number of typos for an academic publication—but the translation is quite serviceable, the translator’s notes are crisp and insightful, and the annotations and maps are marvelous. (Readers will usually be able to figure out the printing errors easily enough, though the subheading on p. 296 should be “Yi Transmission” rather than “Shang shu Transmission,” on pp. 299–300 there are some inadvertent duplications in the translation, and p. 305 n. 239 is missing a negative: “Chiang could [not] match Tung’s arguments.”)

As always, the notes offer a wealth of information on minor figures, geography, bureaucratic titles, ancient and modern commentaries, sources, ambiguous terms, variant readings, and alternative translations. If anything, the annotations in the Grand Scribe’s Records have gotten stronger over the decades. For instance, in the most recent volume there are notations of changes in recent reprints of the Zhonghua Shuju edition (pp. 143 n. 299, 255 n. 53), comments from the Zhengyi commentary that are missing from the Zhonghua edition (pp. 144 n. 300, 279 n. 76, 295 n. 178), and constant comparisons to corresponding chapters in the Hanshu. The latter feature is a particular service to scholars, even those who are comfortable reading Classical Chinese, since the textual differences between the two histories are often helpful both in parsing the meaning and also in discovering...