Confucius. - The most venerable book, Shang shu: also known as the Shu Jing: the classic of chronicles

Translated by MARTIN PALMER
with JAY RAMSAY and VICTORIA FINLAY

In undertaking any translation, the translator is as much an interpreter as a literal translator. In trying to make the images, myths, legends, proverbs and styles of a completely different culture accessible, you have to interpret as much as translate. In this translation I draw attention to this with the very first line of the first chapter, as I have mentioned above. The literal translation would be along the lines of It is said that if we investigate back into antiquity. I have chosen to interpret this as the beginning of a story about the ancient past and its heroes, so have used the phrase Long, long ago as a way of opening a story about the distant past which will be familiar to Western readers. It is perhaps also worth pointing out that ancient Chinese is terse. The first line contains only four characters from which any translator or indeed native speaker has to construct meaning.

I have also rearranged the order of paragraphs where the meaning becomes clearer by using a more traditional, Western way of constructing a paragraph. This has meant that at times I have moved a line or two from near the beginning of a paragraph or from the middle and put it towards the end as this enhanced the meaning of the paragraph.

Occasionally, as I did in my translation of Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zi), I have not translated every name if that name only appears once and has no particular relevance or role. This applies to some personal names as well as occasionally a place name.

What became clear as we worked on the translation is that there are distinct sections where a rhythm is discernable which indicates either a poem per se or a text which through oral

Therefore I have reflected this in the translation and not treated every sentence as if it had no distinctive pattern, which is what other translations have tended to do. In discerning these patterns of poetry and prose, we have sought to bring to life texts which come from many different centuries, many different hands and which have very many different styles between them, from heroic saga to bureaucratic lists, via official documents of policy. I am grateful to Jay Ramsays poetic and prose reworking of some of the key sections, which inspired me to see similar patterns in other sections of the book.

In so doing I hope we have been able to breathe life again into a text which through Confucian conformity and the pressures of rote learning had come to be seen as worthy but perhaps rather dull. It is not. It is as diverse and fascinating as any ancient collection of texts be that the Bible, the Rig Vedas or the Babylonian texts. It is also still an invaluable guide to how to live a virtuous life and how to interpret our place within a moral cosmos. And perhaps it can once again play a role in restraining or removing bad rulers who offend against Heaven and do nothing to help the lives of the ordinary people.

Martin Palmer
Easter Sunday, 2014