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Thesis Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated

Phạm Quốc Bảo Contributor
· 6 replies · 148 views
Meaning & languageBuddhistChineseJapanese & KoreanDaoismConfuciusLaoziZhuangzi#daoism#false-friends#translation#wu-wei
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Where it stands

I translate French philosophy and fiction into Vietnamese, and I spend my working life with words that will not cross borders. Wu wei is a strange case for me, because in Vietnamese it already exists as a Sino-Vietnamese word, vô vi, and it carries baggage that English translators rarely notice.

Consider the English options. "Non-action" is the oldest, and sounds like doing nothing. "Effortless action", Edward Slingerland's rendering, is better, but "effortless" whispers "relaxed", "easy", "go with the flow", which is precisely the misreading the texts warn against: the ease is the end of long discipline, not a substitute for it. Roger Ames and David Hall tried something like "non-coercive action", which is more accurate and almost unusable in a sentence.

Meanwhile the word was never stable in Chinese either. Chinese Buddhist translators used the same two characters to render the Sanskrit term for the unconditioned, what is not produced by causes. So in my family's Trúc Lâm Zen tradition, vô vi can point to nirvana, not to a style of acting. The Confucians, for their part, use the term for the sage-king who governs by virtue without visible effort.

My thesis: every English rendering imports one of these senses and hides the others. We should leave wu wei untranslated, gloss it once carefully, and let readers learn it the way they learned "karma" or "nirvana".

Translators and readers, tell me where this goes wrong.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    For Fellow

    I agree, and your Buddhist point is the clincher. If a single Chinese word can mean a cultivated way of acting in the Laozi and the unconditioned in a Buddhist sutra translation, then no single English word can be faithful to "the" meaning. Leaving it untranslated at least signals that there is something to learn.

  2. Ji-woo Park

    For Fellow

    In Korean the word is muwi, and my students meet it first in the Confucian sense, from the passage in the Analects where Shun governs without doing anything except holding himself with reverence and facing south. So already in East Asia the same word points in three directions: Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist. An English reader given "effortless action" will never suspect that. A footnote does more work here than any single word.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Claire Dubois

    Against Fellow

    As a translator into French I'll push back. Untranslated words do not stay neutral; they become exotic. "Karma" and "nirvana" are your examples, and look what happened to them in European languages: "karma" now means roughly "what goes around comes around". An untranslated wu wei will soon mean "being chill" on a mug. A translation at least forces the reader to meet the concept in their own language and notice that it doesn't fit.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Phạm Quốc Bảo

      Contributor

      Claire, that's the strongest objection and I'm not sure I can answer it. Perhaps the choice isn't between translating and not translating, but between a word that hides its strangeness and a word that shows it. "Non-coercive action" is ugly, but its ugliness makes the reader stop. Maybe that's a virtue in a translation of a difficult idea.

      Helpful · 3
  2. Liu Jianguo

    Against Contributor

    I'm no translator, but in my experience the word matters less than the story. Nobody who has read Cook Ding to the end thinks wu wei means lazy, whatever word is on the page. If translators must choose, I'd rather they chose a plain word and put the story next to it.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Dawit Gebremedhin

    Against Fellow

    A note from Ge'ez manuscripts. The Book of the Wise Philosophers came into Ethiopia as a translation from Arabic in the sixteenth century, and the translators freely adapted the sayings to their own Christian world. Purists call that distortion; I've come to think it is how ideas survive a crossing at all. A word left untranslated is preserved like a specimen. A word translated, even imperfectly, is alive and can be argued with.

    Helpful · 1