Gu Yanwu, Record of Daily Knowledge and Collected Poems and Essays: Selections.

• Author: Pattinson, David

Gu Yanwu, Record of Daily Knowledge and Collected Poems and Essays: Selections. Translated and edited by IAN JOHNSTON. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Pp. xvii + 323. S75.

Translations across a range of an individual premodern Chinese writer's oeuvre remain rare. It may be possible to find many of an individual's works across a number of anthologies and studies, but it remains difficult in most cases for someone without sufficient understanding of Chinese to gain a coherent overview of the work of one writer. This greatly restricts access to Chinese thought and literature for those who either have a commitment to Chinese Studies but whose ability to read literary Chinese is limited, or who are scholars of other cultures wishing to explore the works of Chinese writers for comparative purposes. For these reasons, Ian Johnston's translation of selected works of one of the most important Chinese writers of the seventeenth century is very welcome.

Most of the book is devoted to translations of excerpts from Gu Yanwu's Rizhi lu, the Record of Daily Knowledge, a collection of Gu's writing on a wide range of topics in governance, philosophy, social mores, literature, and so on, heavily laced with quotations from philosophers and scholars of the past. The last quarter of the book consists of translations of essays, letters, and poetry from Gu's collected works. The excerpts are all presented in the order in which they appear in the original. Johnston's introduction provides an overview of Gu's life, supplemented by a chronological biography in appendix 1, and of the Rizhi lu and his other works. In the translation itself, a short summary of the contents of each chapter of the original is provided, so that even if only one essay from the chapter has been translated, the reader is aware of what else is in it. Similar summaries are provided at the head of each chapter of the essays, letters, and prefaces. The poems are divided into five sections matching the five periods in Gu's post-1644 life outlined in the introduction. Following the poems are four appendices: the biographical summary, a list of Gu's works, and translations of Zhang Binglin's "Preface to Huang Kan's Rizhi Lu jiaoji" and Liu Zongyuan's "On the Feudal System" (Fengjian lun), which influenced Gu's thinking. There are forty-three pages of annotations, a bibliography and an index.

Translating a text like Rizhi lu is a formidable task. The translator must first decide which of...