Strategies of (Mis)Translation in Alexandre de la Charme’s Confucii Chi-King, Sive Liber Carminum

The French Jesuit Alexandre de La Charme (1695–1767) was the first scholar to translate the entire Shijing (The Book of Songs) into a European language. Though completed as early as 1737, his Latin Liber Carminum remained unpublished until 1830, when Julius Mohl (1800–1876) edited the manuscript in Paris. Drawing on previously unexamined archival sources, this article traces the genesis of La Charme’s neglected work and conducts an analysis of its translation strategy, which represents a marked departure from the approaches of earlier Jesuit interpreters of the Chinese classics. While La Charme himself, and other scholars since, have underlined the central role that a Manchu translation played in informing the Liber Carminum, the present article shows that this influence has been overstated; the oddities of La Charme’s translation are instead better understood in the context of his proselytising work, Xingli zhenquan (The True Explanation of Natural Philosophy), which argues against the validity of historical commentaries, thereby facilitating a deeply idiosyncratic reading of the Chinese classics.