Manchu
The Jurchen chieftain Nurhaci was an avid reader of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, learning all he knew about Chinese military and political strategies from them.[30][31][32] Thus, when his descendants founded the Qing dynasty and became the rulers of China, the book was one of the first Chinese books to be translated into their Manchu language along with military manuals.[33][34][35][36] Indeed, it is one of only two Chinese novels that had a Manchu translation put into print during the Qing dynasty (the other being Jin Ping Mei).[35]
A Manchu translation of the Romance, known in Manchu as Ilan gurun-i bithe (ᡳᠯᠠᠨᡤᡠᡵᡠᠨ ᡳᠪᡳᡨᡥᡝ), was first attempted in 1631 by the eminent scholar Dahai (達海; 1595–1632), but he died the following year before it could be finished. A complete translation based on the 1522 edition of the novel was done in 1647 and published in 1650 by a team of high-ranking officials including Kicungge (祁充格; d. 1651) and Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), commissioned by the prince-regent Dorgon.[35][37] This is the first translation of the Romance that could be dated with certainty in any language.[38]
The Manchu translation was itself translated into a number of languages including Xibe, Mongolian, Korean, Tibetan and French (the first translation of the novel into a European language). It was also back-translated into Chinese in a bilingual Manchu-Chinese edition during the Yongzheng period (1723–1735).[35]
English
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has been translated into English a number of times.
Excerpts and abridgements
The first known translation was performed in 1907 by John G. Steele and consisted of a single chapter excerpt that was distributed in China to students learning English at Presbyterian missionary schools.[7] Herbert A. Giles included an excerpt in his 1923 Gems of Chinese Literature.[39] Z. Q. Parker published a 1925 translation containing four episodes from the novel including the events of the Battle of Red Cliffs, while Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang published excerpts in 1981, including chapters 43–50.[7] In 1976, Moss Roberts published an abridged translation containing one fourth of the novel including maps and more than 40 woodblock illustrations from three Chinese versions of the novel.[7] Roberts's abridgement is reader-friendly, being written for use in colleges and to be read by the general public.[7]
Unabridged
- A complete and faithful translation of the novel was published in two volumes in 1925 by Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor, a long time official of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service.[7] The translation was well written, but lacked any supplementary materials such as maps or character lists that would aid Western readers; a 1959 reprint was published that included maps and an introduction by Roy Andrew Miller to assist foreign readers.[7]
- After decades of work, Moss Roberts published a full translation in 1991 complete with an afterword, eleven maps, a list of characters, titles, terms, and offices, and almost 100 pages of notes from Mao Zonggang's commentaries and other scholarly sources.[7] Roberts's complete translation remains faithful to the original; it is reliable yet still matches the tone and style of the classic text.[7] Yang Ye, a professor in Chinese Literature at the UC Riverside, wrote in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (1998) that Roberts's translation "supersedes Brewitt-Taylor's translation and will no doubt remain the definitive English version for many years to come".[7] Roberts's translation was republished in 1995 by the Foreign Languages Press without the illustrations.[40]
- In 2014, Tuttle published a new, three-volume translation of the novel, translated by Yu Sumei and edited by Ronald C. Iverson (ISBN 978-0804843935). According to its publisher, this translation is an unabridged "dynamic translation" intended to be more readable than past English translations of the novel.[41]
