Kim właściwie jest Jezus?
Who Is Jesus?

Yang Guangxiang’s Criticism of Jesuit Translation Strategies in Eighteenth-Century China

Author(s): Albert Kozik
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Jesuits in China; Chinese mission; Matteo Ricci; accommodation policy; Yang Guangxian
Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to re-examine Yang Guangxian’s famous treatise "Bu de yi" ("I Cannot do Otherwise") in the light of the Jesuit strategies for transferring knowledge from Europe to China. The first part of the article provides a discussion on the Chinese terms used by the missionaries to refer to their translation projects undertaken in China, such as ‘translating’ (yi, 譯) and ‘disseminating’ (chuan, 傳), and demonstrates how both of these words were adopted to justify the transmission of science and religion between the two civilisations. The concepts of yi and chuan were later reinterpreted by Yang Guangxian, who aimed to reveal various conscious decisions behind Jesuit translations and prove that what they wanted to present as a natural and selfless act of evangelization was in fact a result of numerous manipulations of the original texts. Parts two and three of the article offer a detailed examination of Bu de yi with particular focus on the way Yang used the Confucian tradition of the ‘rectification of names’ ("zheng ming, 正名") in order to counter the missionaries’ strategy of accommodation, and ultimately reclaim the terms they had earlier appropriated for their proselytizing purposes.

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