Striving for Perfection: The challenge of translating Sanskrit into Tibetan
19 November 2009
16:00 – 17:30 hrs
Leiden, the Netherlands
Buddhist Studies Lecture by Prof. Michael Hahn, (Professor of Indology and Tibetology at the Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany)
Venue: IIAS, Rapenburg 59 (room 004), 2311 GJ Leiden
The translation of a substantial portion of the Indian Buddhist literature into classical Tibetan is one of the greatest achievements of intercultural transfer in pre-modern times, both for the size of the corpus and the generally high quality of the translations. Both aspects are extremely important insofar as the majority of the Indian originals do not survive.
Work done during the last one hundred years to establish reliable editions enables us to give fairly correct characterizations of individual sections of the Tibetan canon, individual teams of translators or even periods of translations. The works translated during the period between the end of the eighth and the middle of the ninth century CE are closest to the ideal that was formulated at the beginning of the 9th century, that good Tibetan style is more important that superficial literalness. In contrast, the translations done from the beginning of the 10th century on are characterized by much greater literalness that in many cases entailed the violation of good Tibetan style and correct syntax. Nevertheless, because of their literalness even these translations can become very helpful for the correction of faulty Sanskrit manuscripts and indispensable when there is no other testimony of an Indian work.
Studies of the last century have shown that the canonical editions of the Tibetan translations cannot be taken at face value. Mosty belong to the 18th century while the actual translations date from up to 900 years earlier. Often an originally correct translation has suffered in the course of its intra-Tibetan transmission. The lecture will describe these problems in detail and illustrate them by selected examples.
If you have any questions with regard to the Buddhist Studies Lectures, please do not hesitate to contact IIAS at iias@iias.nl or T +31-71 527 2227.
The Buddhist Studies Lectures are organised by: IIAS and Prof. Jonathan Silk (Prof. in the Study of Buddhism, Leiden University).