This paper discusses Homer as portrayed by Catholic and Protestant missionaries in late imperial China. Due to Jesuit opposition to pantheism, Homer’s name was omitted from most Jesuit writings of the Ming. However, one of Homer’s legends, retold in Plutrach’s Morlia, did appear in 1636 in one of Alfonso Vagnone’s Chinese chreiai. Here Homer is transliterated as Amoru (阿哩[嘿]汝), most likely following the Italian pronunciation of his name. Homer then reappeared in the early Qing: this time it was the French Jesuit Joseph de Prémare who referred to him and his epics. Prémare transliterated Homer as Hemole 何默樂, obviously modeling this pronunciation upon the Greek pronunciation of the bard’s name. Homer’s literary reputation suffered greatly from Prémare’s introduction, which presented the poet largely as a maker of superstition. The first Christian priest who treated Homer as the greatest poet in the West was Karl Friederich August Gützlaff, a German missionary who came to China in 1827. Gützlaff published a long article paraphrasing The Iliad in Dongxiyang kao meiyue tongjizhuan 東西洋考每月統紀傳 in 1837. Yet the most ambitious Protestant missionary to promote Homer was Joseph Edkins, an English priest who in 1857 not only wrote the first essay on Greek literature, with Homer as one of his heroes, but also published a biography of the epic poet in the same year in Liuhe cungtan 六合叢談. Edkins’ work discusses the life of Homer and his epics and even analyzes the prosody of Homer’s epics in Chinese. For Catholic missionaries in the transitional period between the Ming and the Qing, Homer was chiefly a poet who wrote allegorical stories. But for Protestant missionaries in the 19th century, Homer became a great epic poet. Edkins’ inclusion of Homer in a book about Greek history even demonstrates the perception that he was relevant to the political reforms of the Qing. For Edkins interpreted the Homeric epics as textbooks that taught oligarchy as an early form of democracy. Yet no matter how Homer’s role in traditional China changed, no missionary thought it appropriate to put his epics into Chinese. Gützlaff, in his China Opened, even suggests that due to rhetorical discrepancies, it would be “impracticable” to render Homer’s epics into Chinese. Before the Republican era, only retellings of Homeric stories such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls had been translated into Chinese. The translator of this book, a professor named M. E. Tsur at the “Higher Normal College, Tsinanfu,” however, was a Chinese rather than a Christian priest. No authentic translation of Homer, whether by Christian priests or by Chinese writers, existed at the turn of the 20th century.
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Sep 1, 2022
Tingting Liu + 1
Open Access
