Translations are interpretations that pretend to stand in for the real thing; they are mediators for texts that in their original voice would probably go unnoticed by those who speak other languages. In the case of the multiply-translated Analects — a collection of sometimes cryptic sayings attributed largely to the historical figure of Confucius, and believed to have been compiled by his disciples in the centuries following his death — the relevant question is no longer to what degree the translator retained fidelity to the original text, but what the translation enables the reader to see. Although often depicted as a dusty pedant — especially by adherents of competing doctrines in imperial times, or by extreme modernizers in the twentieth century — Confucius as he appears in existing records did not lack social skills or a sense of humor. Burton Watson restores this more personable, spontaneous character in his translation. Like his many other translations for the Translations from the Asian Classics series of Columbia University Press — dating back to the early 1960s — Watson's work on the Analects delivers readability and accessibility. Reminding us in his introduction that the original text attempts to represent the conversational style of the period (6), Watson often uses free, colloquial English to suggest the informal style of the original.

What emerges from Watson's translation is a humanistic Confucius, not a religious one. Painting everyday scenes in lively, fresh prose, Watson reveals Confucius' skills as conversationalist, who is by turns acerbic, witty, and sympathetic. Watson's translation for the most part sticks carefully to the word order of the original classical Chinese, sometimes jarring an English ear but more often avoiding the circumlocutions and unjustified inferences that mark many other translations. One good example is his rendering of Analects 9.17, one of the most famous passages in the text, in which Confucius reflects on the meaning of a flowing stream. Rather than ascribe a metaphorical subject to Confucius' musings — Rosemont and Ames' translation, for example, inserts “life's passing” (The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation, 130) — Watson retains the terse polyvalence of the original text: “Standing by a stream, the Master said, It flows on like this — does it not? — never ceasing, day or night.” Inviting the reader to speculate on this ambiguity, Watson asks bluntly in a footnote, “what does it mean?”(62)

Watson's Confucius is always deeply engaged by the situations and the company in which he finds himself, concerned more with people in the here and now than with what may follow after death. Watson insists in his introduction that Confucius “has little to say about religious faith in general,” (p. 10) and his choice of words throughout avoids ascribing to Confucius any sense of transcendent belief. For example, in passage 6.10 in which Confucius attributes the immanent death of a friend to “fate,” (ming), Watson eschews personifying the concept as capital-D “Destiny” as D.C. Lau has done (The Analects, Hong Kong, 1992 ed., p. 49), and opts instead for the more commonplace and less personifying “fate.” His translation here, as in other passages, is nevertheless skillful in its ambivalence: He downplays the role of fate, but does not completely ignore the presence of the world altogether, as Rosemont and Ames do in their self-professedly “pragmatic” approach to the text.

Given Watson's extensive background translating other classical Chinese and Japanese texts, it is a little disappointing that neither his introduction nor his translation indicate the mutually fructifying relationships — linguistically and intellectually — that developed between early Daoism, Legalism, and later Confucian understandings of the Analects. He does mention the possibility that multiple translations of any given passage are possible (13), but unfortunately gives no indication to the non-Chinese-speaking reader what those translations may be or how they may skew a given interpretation of the text as a whole. The introduction is nevertheless both concise and readable, providing enough information to understand the ideas and the historical background to which the text refers without excessive editorializing.

With each new translation of the Analects, we get a new Confucius and a new outlook on the thought his life inspired. Fortunately, Confucius' multi-dimensionality continues to sustain increasing numbers of translations that would, for a lesser figure, quickly become exercises in redundancy. Where Bruce and Taeko Brooks rendered Analects suitable for technical historians (The Original Analects), and Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont one for philosophers, Watson offers us one for readers. He preserves the literary simplicity and beauty of the text, allowing us to see it as a vehicle not only for theoretical reflection on politics or ethics but also as a source of literary models, educational insights, and plain living — all of which functions the Analects served, to different people and different times, throughout Chinese and Asian history. In that sense, he is faithful to a central but often overlooked aspect of a text whose complete richness belies any single attempt to render it.