Scene 1:
Lost in translation. Distorted through translation. Reframed by translation.
Bodily knowledge cannot be divorced from the means by which it is communicated. Shifting cultural frameworks shape how information is perceived and processed by audiences across the globe, although translated knowledge is often asymmetric.
The meaning of the original work can evolve into an unrecognizable refraction of what it once was, the implications of which resonate across spheres of exchange. Integration of foreign knowledge within native epistemologies presents a unique set of challenges that translators must confront depending upon their underlying motivations.
Scene 2:
Compiled, written, and translated in the late 17th century, the book Specimen Medicinae Sinicae includes translations of traditional Chinese medical texts, reproductions of Chinese meridian charts, and Westernized explanations of East Asian bodily beliefs (Cleyer).
Throughout its pages, the Asian medical body is replicated and repurposed, reshaped to fit European ideas of what medicine could and should be. Diagrams are left unlabeled, and Chinese beliefs are explained through a humoral lens of understanding (Sappol et al. 38)
Scene 3:
Andreas Cleyer, acting Surgeon General in Batavia for the Dutch East India Company (VOC for short), sat within his office, brow furrowed in concentration (“Specimen Medicinae Sinicae…”). Scattered across his desk were Chinese texts, Latin and Dutch translations of Chinese texts, and meridian charts that he just couldn’t seem to fully understand. Through the window, he could hear the muffled shouts of sailors and merchants, loading and unloading cargo as ships sailed into the brightly illuminated port. Even within the confines of the VOC’s Batavian outpost, there was no escaping the salty air.
Glancing back at his work, he couldn’t help but attempt to make sense of what laid in front of him. Michael Boym, a Jesuit missionary working within China, had done his best to translate and accrue Chinese medical texts over the decade during which he was stationed there. Andreas’ friend, Philippe Couplet – yet another Jesuit missionary residing within East Asia – had forwarded Boym’s manuscripts to Cleyer, along with his own translations. Finally, Wilhelm ten Rhijne, a Dutch physician sent to Japan by the VOC, had contributed his own translations to Cleyer, which now lay on the corner of Cleyer’s desk.
Giving up, Cleyer decided to send his compiled translations to a publishing house in Frankfurt (Cleyer). His European audience would just have to make sense of the body diagrams on their own – Cleyer had reluctantly determined that a complete reconciliation of Chinese medicine with European beliefs was next to impossible.
Scene 4:
Wilhelm ten Rhijne found life in Japan not to be what he had expected. The isolationist attitudes prevalent in much of Eastern Asia manifested themselves in a form of Occidentalism common amongst those who interacted with Europeans. The Japanese were skeptical of the Dutch, considering them to be barbaric despite showing growing interest in the European anatomical perspective. Ten Rhijne reciprocated this interest, compiling and translating Chinese medical texts as a hobby. Japan and China’s heavily restrictive trade policies made an already difficult task even harder, but increased the value of any knowledge Ten Rhijne was able to procure (Atushi).
The system he used to translate the works was far from perfect. Ten Rhijne used a Japanese translator knowledgeable in Chinese medicine to translate the texts into Japanese, and then a different Japanese translator to translate Japanese into Dutch (Rodgers et al. 216). Given the lack of dictionaries, most of the translation process was carried out through discussion and conversation, the conclusions of which were then translated into Latin by ten Rhijne (216). He couldn’t help but wonder how the information he received was influenced by Japanese bodily beliefs – the diffusion of European anatomy had already begun to influence Asian practitioners, evident through the use of double-line channels to represent meridian paths that had traditionally been represented by single lines (Sappol et al. 38).
Scene 5:
The woodcutter’s calloused hands caressed the pearwood as he prepared to make the first incision. He had been tasked with replicating strange diagrams of the body, unlike any he had ever seen before. The underlying anatomy did not reflect European conceptions of the body.
“What does this mean?” he thought, as he punctured the hard wood with his sharp wood carving tool, unaware of the physician on the other side of the world puncturing a human body with a needle.
Scene 6:
“How ignorant!”
“How foreign!”
Cleyer’s work resonated with the European intellectual class. The tremors of Orientalism had already formed as a consequence of mislabelling and distortion. Any potential action to rectify emerging stereotypes would prove inconsequential.
Scene 7:
The inconsistency of culture mirrors the inconsistency of the body. Attempts to reframe foreign epistemologies distort the underlying meaning of transmitted knowledge. At first glance, what seems to be an obvious truth is merely the product of an underlying assumption. However, it seems that these assumptions are oftentimes more important than the truths themselves.
Translation is a lens through which knowledge is refracted. We can only hope that the basic meaning of the knowledge in question does not vanish.
Sources
Atsushi, Ota. “The Dutch East India Company and the Rise of Intra-Asian Commerce.” Nippon.com, 30 May 2020, www.nippon.com/en/features/c00105/.
Cleyer, Andreas. Specimen Medicinae Sinicae. 1682.
Rodgers, Daniel T., et al., editors. Cultures in Motion. Princeton University Press, 2014. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgd71. Accessed 12 Mar. 2021.
Sappol, Michael, et al. Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine. Blast Books, 2012.
“Specimen Medicinae Sinicae…” Specimen Medicinae Sinicae… | LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS & EXHIBITS, The New York Academy of Medicine, 2016, digitalcollections.nyam.org/Cleyer#:~:text=The%20Specimen%20Medicinae%20Sinicae%20includes,a%20European%20audience%20proved%20difficult.