In the spirit of a talk Ien Ang gave in 1992, I’ve had this nagging feeling that my dissatisfaction with my not knowing Classical Mongolian goes beyond that proportionate to a practical inconvenience. But staying closer to Beatrice Bartlett than Ien Ang for now, this is a post about the practical inconvenience, prompted by another Qing Dynasty multilingual printed book I came across in the University of Chicago East Asian Library.
Remember the proliferation of multilingual duin bithe (Ch. sishu 四書, Mo. dörben bicig ᠳᠥᠷᠪᠡᠨ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ) I mentioned in a previous blog? Well, going off the catalogue of Nakami Tatsuo (based in part on the card catalogue that’s now nowhere to be found), there are at least four of them at the University of Chicago. I know of at least one more copy in the library that is not listed here, but let’s ignore that for now.
Many strange things about these descriptions, but perhaps the most obvious is that Item 11 (M856/6156C) is somehow significantly longer than the other ones, sitting at 20 volumes instead of the usual six. Well, turns out this is not at all a Manchu-Chinese work as the catalogue says, but a Manchu-Mongolian-Chinese trilingual one titled (from case) 滿蒙漢三合繙譯四書. Here’s a glimpse of the Qianlong Emperor’s introduction in volume 1, presented in all three languages:
This introduction, dated 乾隆二十年十二月十四日 (Jan. 15, 1756), accompanies many 18th and 19th-century multilingual editions of the Four Classics, which are often reprints (or in this case, expansion) of the imperially commissioned Manchu translation carried out by Ortai 鄂爾泰 (1677–1745) in early-eighteenth century. But it is also a source of potential problems or confusions, as this short text may be the only basis through which bibliographers date all the various editions in which it appears. Something like that has happened here: despite the introduction making no reference to the Mongolian language whatsoever, it is taken—for the lack of better sources of edition information elsewhere (e.g. the cover)—as an authoritative indication of the time of impression.
The sad joke, of course, is that a better source for dating these volumes is perfectly available in the book, in the form of a Mongolian monolingual preface immediately preceding this trilingual one. It is in fact the first text a reader of this book would have encountered:
dörben bicig kemegci anu, küngzi, zengzi, zi se zi, mengzi ene dörben boγda ekilen ündüsülegsen bicig bolai…There you go, it’s a preface as formulaic as any other, but one presenting important information nonetheless. The Four Classics are important, the writer affirms, but the Mongolians were not as lucky as the Manchus in receiving an imperially commissioned translation. So what about all the Mongolians who want to read this important work in their own language, instead of those of the manju and the kitad? Luckily, the author of the preface was surprised (sanamsaγar ügei) to find a translation by “a Mongolian baγsi of the Tümed Banner named Kelzang ᠺᠡᠯᠽᠠᠨᠺ” and subsequently labored to make the woodblocks that would result in the trilingual Four Classics we’re holding in our hands. More precisely, the efforts started in Tongzhi 8 (1869) and concluded in Guangxu 18 (1892), taking over twenty years to complete.
Hai Zhongxiong 海中雄, a scholar active in the Mongolian and Tibetan Cultural Center in Taipei, observed in 2020 that of the five Mongolian translations of the duin bithe listed in 《全國蒙文古舊圖書資料聯合目錄》 (Union Bibliography of Mongolian Rare Books in the People’s Republic of China) published in the PRC in 1979, four were in fact this exact edition with only minor differences in collation, while the fifth is a 1924 stereotype reprint of this edition (without the Manchu) published by the 蒙文書社 in Beijing. Three of these entries in this union catalogue were dated to 1755.
We have here another example of a nineteenth century multilingual text with substantial paratextual material given only in a non-Chinese language. Jakdan, memorably, wrote an introduction to his translation of Strange Tales in Manchu, and I can think of one or two similar cases with Mongolian. There is something intentional in this gesture, as if turning away from the universalist vision of the Qianlong Emperor in which every language of the empire is easily translatable to any other toward an earlier period of the Qing in which non-Chinese language served as something closer to a cipher. There is, of course, nothing scandalous or secretive in this preface (or Jakdan’s, for that matter), but it partakes in a distinctive and unintuitive phenomenon that is not fully understood.
Which makes me think about Holbein’s smudge. But that’s enough for today.
Barbarism as Method 