THE WORLD OF MASTER ZHUANG

Book excerpt: The World of Master Zhuang is translated from Zhuangzi annotated and put into modern Chinese by Chen Guying. It is a fascinating collection of essays and tales composed by Zhou Zhuang of China’s Warring States Period and his followers. It is classified as literary, rich in philosophical ideas and taken as one of the three major classics of Daoism (the other two are Laozi and Liezi). This is why virtually all literate Chinese know the book, and its readers adopt the rich supply of idioms in their daily communication and always learn from it something helpful, whether it is wisdom, knowledge, insight, consonance, sympathies, comfort, relief, reconciliation or compromise. All those who have attempted a translation either intralingually or interlingually share similarities in most cases but differ sometimes, due to occasional illegibility of the original and divergence in interpretation. For this reason, the translators tried to comprehend the original against its historiocultural background, trace the missing information from its context guided by linguistic theories, correct errors adopting expository strategies, make the text coherent by means of necessary cohesive devices and express in English as a native speaker, so that it may be appropriately understood by as many readers as possible.