Robinson, Douglas (2015): The Dao of Translation: An East-West Dialogue. London/New York: Routledge, 256 p.

As the title suggests, Douglas Robinson’s The Dao of Translation: An East-West Dialogue applies Chinese Daoism and Confucianism to examine some theoretical topics in translation studies during a particular era of epistemological, ideological and social transformation. It is a major contribution that investigates the often complex and constantly accelerating interactions between the East and the West. It mobilizes two radically different readings of the Dao: the traditional “mystical” reading, according to which the Dao is an unearthly force that cannot be comprehended, and a more updated reading put forward by sinologists Roger Ames and David Hall, to the effect that the Dao is simply the way things happen. As the eight chapters in this book amply demonstrate, there have never been “lines” or impassable barriers between Daoism and Confucianism on the one hand and Western philosophy on the other in approaching translation theory and practice. Indeed, Daoism is gaining popularity in the academic world in recent years as evidenced by the frequent use of “The Dao of X” in book titles: The Tao of Programming (Geoffrey James 1986), The Dao of Rhetoric (Steven C. Combs 2005), The Tao of the Dude (Oliver Benjamin 2014), and so on. This may be attributed to the increasing interest of scholars worldwide in China and its traditions as this country becomes more transparent and open and some of its philosophies remain largely unmined in a modern sense. The author of The Dao of Translation: An East-West Dialogue, Douglas Robinson, has tactfully and intriguingly “set up an East-West dialogue to show not only how ancient Chinese thought can help us understand translation more ecologically, but also how ecological approaches to the study of translation can help us understand ancient Chinese thought more clearly” (p. 5). The book’s point of departure is the brief introduction to Dao, “something that precedes and undergirds conscious awareness of verbal intentions or expressions” (p. 11). In an attempt to put superficially divergent yet interestingly congruent perspectives into dialogue, Robinson goes on to analyze Abductive Translation Studies: The Art of Marshalling Signs, the doctoral dissertation of Ritva Hartama-Heinonen, a Finnish translation scholar. He argues that Hartama-Heinonen’s conception that translation is passive, receptive, spontaneously surrendering to the sign and acting without effort is largely homologous to Laozi’s concept of wuwei: acting without doing things and Mengzi’s instruction wu zhu zhang or ‘don’t help grow’ (p. 21). Suggesting that Hartama-Heinonen’s critique is baffling and potentially incoherent without the grounding of wuwei (p. 21), he ventures to remedy the critique. Robinson then illustrates the possible “genetic” influence of traditional Chinese philosophy on Romantic and Idealist Thought and Western thinkers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. In chapters 3 and 4 Robinson shifts his critical perspective to examine firstly Peirce’s Tensions between Habit and Surprise and then Saussure’s Structuring Force in/of Language. In chapter 6 and 7, the author focuses on the analysis of the Dao of Habitus from the perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu’s Body Automatism and Daniel Simeoni’s Submissive Translator. The final part of this book summarizes the Dao as “habit, or the functioning of collectivized habit in society and the functioning of collectivized habit” (p. 175) in everything, translation included. As the former Dean of the Arts Faculty of Hong Kong Baptist University, Robinson has great insight into Chinese culture and enormous interest in exploring the interrelationship between Eastern and Western philosophy (another book of his, The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle, is forthcoming). However, it is all too easy for the structure of such a book to spiral out of control and …