Book 17: 《陽貨》 Yang Huo
《陽貨》 Passage 17.26
Legge Translation (1861)
The Master said: "When a man at forty is the object of dislike, he will always continue what he is."Word by word
- 子曰 zǐ yuē
the Master said
- 子 master, teacher — honorific title for Confucius
- 曰 said, spoke
- 年 nián
age, years of age
- 四十 sì shí
forty
- 四 four
- 十 ten
- 而 ér
still, yet
- 見惡 jiàn wù
to be disliked, to be hated
- 見 passive-voice marker for the following verb
- 惡 to hate, dislike (verb, read wù)
見 here marks the passive voice (‘to be —ed’), not ‘to see’; 惡 is read wù, ‘to hate, dislike’, as the verb undergoing that passive.
- 焉 yān
resumptive final particle: thereby, in this regard
- 其 qí
his, that person's
- 終 zhōng
end, final condition
Translators split between reading 終 as the temporal endpoint (‘until the end of his days’) and as durative fixity (‘he will always continue what he is’, ‘nothing is going to change’).
- 也已 yě yǐ
terse finality: that's all, that's the end of the matter
- 也 final particle marking assertion or identity
- 已 final particle of finality: that's all, that's the end of it
Stacking two final particles marks emphatic closure; several translators render this terseness as evaluative hopelessness (‘no hope’, ‘hopeless’) rather than as bare finality.
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