Chapter 0: Introduction: General Presentation

One of the best ways to understand the mathematical reasoning of Chinese treatises is to work through translations, not because translations transpose a discourse from one language to another, but because they fail to do so. However, I am deeply indebted to many wonderful works translating Chinese mathematical texts. Without them, this present study would have not been possible. But the peculiarity of the Chinese treatise I present here is that it reaches the limits of translation and of language. More concretely, as a translator, I have tried to be faithful to what Humboldt calls das Fremde in his preface to the translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. There is transformation in translation. Meaning is always movement. The strangeness of language can be seen strikingly in the work of translation here. Humbold uses the term fremdheit (translated as “foreignness”, or “strangeness”) to describe the sense of reader has when the translator seems to have chosen what sounds strange or odd, as though a mistake has been made in translation. Das Fremde (translated as the “strange”, or “unfamiliar”) describes the reader’s sense of reading something that is recognisable, that has been translated appropriately, but that gives the feeling of reading that word for the first time [Eco (2004)]. Humboldt showed that a proper understanding of language in its original form is not transparent or unproblematic. Das Fremde always disturbs the reader. The present study aims to translate some written excerpts of a mathematical treatise, but also to translate the invisible part of the same treatise…