A short interview with Professor Hargett

Professor Hargett published a book recently, titled "Riding the River Home"--I thought it would be interesting to ask him a little bit about his project and post it on the blog:

Q. What got you interested in the topic of "Riding the River Home"?

A. Well, since my graduate school days I have been interested in the prose works of the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) official and writer Fan Chengda (1126-1193). My first book, titled On the Road in Twelfth Century Century China: The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989) presents a critical study of Fan Chengda's three surviving travel diaries. I had hoped to include English translations of all three diaries in the book. But there wasn't enough room, so I had to leave out my translation the longest and best written of the three diaries. I swore at the time that "someday" I would publish an annotated, English translation of that third diary. Well, it took me almost twenty years, but my translation appears in Riding the River Home: A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda's (1126-1193) Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu).This book was published in Hong Kong by The Chinese University Press in 2008. The original title of the work translated in this book is Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu, but this title is a bit boring and probably means nothing to most readers. So, I myself devised the title Riding the River Home to give readers at least a hint that the book is about a long, boat trip down the Changjiang (or Yangzi River), which took the author (Fan Chengda) home.

Q. What was the biggest hurdle/challenge in translating Record of a Boat Trip to Wu"?

A: The biggest challenge is translating twelfth-century Classical Chinese into literate, readable English. This is difficult because there is no gender, number, tense, case, person, aspect, and so on, in Classical Chinese. Another challenge is technical terms (special words indicating linear, area, and weight measures, for instance) and local/colloquial terms (Fan Chengda sometimes employs colloquial terms gathered during visits to local sites). Needless to say, most of these terms are not found in any dictionary. Thus, a lot of "sinological detective work" is necessary to figure out what these terms mean.

Q. Was there anything in the original book that surprised you? If so, what was it, and why was it surprising?

A: Many things surprised me, but what made the biggest impression was this: Fan Chengda was intimately familiar with the history and earlier literature written about the places he visited during his journeys. This reveals an important characteristic of all travel literature in traditional China. To write something intelligent and meaningful about a particular place required thorough knowledge of that place's history and the literature (poems, travel diaries, and so on) written by earlier authors, especially the famous ones.

Q. How did Riding the River Home lead you to your current project?

A: Well, after finishing the Riding the River Home, I prepared an annotated English translation of another work by Fan Chengda. This one is titled Guihai yuheng zhi,which in English translates as "Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea." This text is essentially a gazetteer or local history of Guangxi, Hainan Island, and north Vietnam in the twelfth century.Translating this work into English was extremely difficult, mainly because there are tons of specialized and local vocabulary on everything from birds, quadrapeds, fish, flowers, trees, and the customs of non-Chinese tribes in the south. I'm still not sure that I got everything right in my translation! This book will be published by University of Washington Press in 2009.