Date: October 9, 2024
Location: CRT 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Time: 2:30-4:00pm
Among those who have studied and contributed to the understanding of ancient China, few are more important than the five translators and interpreters of “Chinese Classics” that will be presented in this lecture. All of them happened to be Christian missionaries, and all of them produced works that have continued interpretive influences even in the 21st century within the linguistic cultural contexts where they were produced (Legge in English, Zottoli and Couvreur in Latin, Couvreur also in French, Wilhelm in German, and Guerra in Portuguese). To understand their religious and hermeneutic orientations, and how these affected their understandings of the ancient texts which they studied and translated, provides insights into how and why their translation corpi remain both influential and controversial in the year 2024, both in their own cultures and within Chinese intellectual circles. These interpretive orientations, influences, and controversies will form the core of this lecture.
Speaker: Professor Lauren F. Pfister
Professor Emeritus of Hong Kong Baptist University and now Rector of the Hephzibah Mountain Aster Academy, Lauren F. Pfister / 費樂仁 is a philosopher, sinologist, and theologian. A former head of the Religion and Philosophy Department and Director of the Centre for Sino-Christian Studies at HBU, he is a founding member of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy. Over three decades, he has studied “missionary-scholars” as translators of Ruist (“Confucian”) and Daoist classical texts, exploring their interpretive influences within both contemporary Euro-American and Chinese cultural settings.
Moderators: Prof. Gang Song, School of Chinese, HKU
Prof. Ji Li, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, HKU
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