Some Penguin Classics become immediately indispensable. They so firmly supplant all previous editions of their particular work that those previous editions become curiosities, interesting in only ancillary ways. A notable recent example of this would be the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of the Heike, and now the Penguin imprint clearly has another: a lavish new edition of the famous Analects of Confucius, translated and annotated by Yale history lecturer Annping Chin.

These Lunyu of Confucius (551-479 BC) are an enormous, shaggy, multi-faceted collection of sayings and anecdotes preserved by the disciples of Confucius and their disciples. The work is a pillar of Chinese literature, and the many, many parallel (and rival) commentaries on the work by its later handlers shape some fascinating, alternating readings. As Chin correctly points out, that multitude of analytical voices has sometimes been simplified by later scholars:

Most of the translations in English, however, do not reflect this rich tradition in reading the Analects. Instead, they tend to favor one commentary, Zhu Xi’ from the twelfth century, that had become standard through five hundred years of imperial support and the only interpretation the state would accept in the civil service examinations. My work follows a different approach. I relied on the scholars from the last three hundred years – scholars who put research before ideology – to show me the competing interpretations and the possibilities of understanding a word, a sentence, or a passage, and my translation is what I arrived at after I had considered the range of choices before me.

“My hope,” she writes, “of course, is to recover some of the ambiguities and nuances in what Confucius says, which are often lost if one comes to trust a single voice or a single vision.”

She succeeds wonderfully in her edition of the Analects; for the first time in a popular non-academic version, we get something very closely approximating the strange and compelling nature of the original, which reads like a surreal blending of Christian scripture and the social commentaries of Tom Wolfe. Too many times in previous editions, translators have reduced this rich complexity to a string of fortune-cookie apothegms that don’t in any way convey why this text would have remained a foundational work revered and consulted and studied for centuries.

Take a look, for instance, at the 1955 translation done by James Ware, which was such a sales hit for the old Mentor paperback line:

It is hard to converse with the people of Hu, so when a lad arrived and sought an interview with Confucius, the pupils were in a quandary.

“I do not sanction his departure just because I sanction his arrival. Why all the worry? When a man, hving cleansed himself, arrives, I receive him; but I don’t guarantee his future.”

In the Mentor version that found its way into so many backpacks in the early ’60s, that’s all you get – pithy, yes, but not particularly informative. Chin’s translation and accompanying note flesh things out considerably:

The people of Hu village [being boorish and obstinate] were difficult to talk to. A young man [from this village] came to see the Master [and the Master received him]. The disciples were puzzled. The Master said, “I accepted him when he was here, but that does not mean I will accept whatever he will be doing when he is not here. So why should there be a problem? In coming here, he made his heart pure, and so I accepted him [as he was,] a purified man. This does not mean, however, that I proved of what he had done in the past.”

Note

Although no one can say for sure why the people of Hu village were “difficult to talk to,” it seems reasonable to assume that they were “boorish and obstinate,” as Zheng Xuan and Liu Baonan suggest. And Confucius’ decision to speak to this young man from Hu reveals much about what he was like as a teacher: he accepted anyone who came to him with pureness of heart even though, he said, he could not vouch for the person’s past or future behaviour.

Or take a famous passage from Book 17 about perception and reflection. Here’s Chin’s translation and accompanying note:

The Master said, “If a man, by the age of forty, is still being disliked by others, that perception will remain until the end of his life.”

Note

Confucius expresses similar sentiment in 9.23, but there he says, “If a man is forty or fifty and has not done anything to distinguish himself, then he is not worthy of our respect.” So while he suggests in both statements that by the time a man is forty his character is formed and so it is nearly impossible for him to change, here is stresses other people’s perception of such a man – that they will not alter their view of him and start liking him. This led Qing scholar Yu Yue to conclude that Confucius could be speaking about himself.

And in the Mentor edition (which is by no means atypical of the all the earlier versions)? It’s this:

It is all over for the man of forty who is held in aversion.

Four things above all, we’re told, the Master taught: literature, conduct, loyalty, and reliability. He would look with favor (and maybe even a smile!) on Annping Chin’s labors.