Julie Lee Wei’s Translation of Nineteen Lectures Now Available

Julie Lee Wei, who has been embroiled in a long-running copyright dispute over her translation of Mou Zongsan’s Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosopy, has decided to post her complete, 490-page translation on the internet:

http://nineteenlects.com

(One technical note: for reasons I cannot explain, sometimes the links on this site have not worked for me, but I find that if clicking on a link gives you a url of this form — http://ninteenlects.com/page.php?p=Titlepage — then changing that to this form (note the “nine” instead of “nin”) will work — http://nineteenlects.com/page.php?p=Titlepage)

As Ms. Wei explains there, a few years ago her translation was accepted for publication by Columbia University Press, but the copyright dispute has put that on indefinite hold. During a stretch of time when she and Columbia believed that they had secured permission, though, I was asked to write an Introduction to the translation, which I did. That essay has languished along with Ms. Wei’s translation, and I have chosen to make it freely available on my own website:

Stephen C. Angle, “Mou Zongsan and his Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy”

I hope that my essay, and especially the translation, prove useful to those who would like to engage more deeply with this extremely important twentieth-century Confucian philosopher.

10 replies on “Julie Lee Wei’s Translation of Nineteen Lectures Now Available”

  1. Well, Mou’s Nineteen Lectures may not be so good as some people suppose. If you can read in Chinese, you may be able to find that out.

  2. My thanks to Steve Angle for his post on Nineteen Lectures in Warp, Weft, and Way.
    Legal counsel has advised me that I do not need permission to publish my translation of Mou’s Nineteen Lectures myself, non-commercially.

  3. Thank you Julie Lee Wei for this great source. I’m thoroughly enjoying the read and if you ever get the book out I’ll definitely snatch it up.

  4. Theodore Brooks, you’ve made my day. I’m so happy that you are finding the translation useful. ( I have discovered some new typos, and am in the process of weeding them out. Sometimes the cursor flies around and does things without one’s knowledge.)
    Please do not hesitate to let me know if you find mistranslations. I try to weed them out too. Thank you again for your kind message.

    • (When my cursor leaps it’s because my thumb has got too close to the touchpad.)

    • In the top right hand of the the touchpad there should be a circular indent, tap this twice and the touchpad should become non-receptive. tap it twice again and it’ll become receptive again.

  5. Theodore Brooks, Thanks for the tip, but I use a MacBook (older one) and the touchpad has no circular dent.

  6. p.s. In my “Translator’s Preface”, I have just corrected the word “homonyms” to “synonyms”.

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