The Secret History of the Mongols

Scholars acquainted with the seminal masterpiece of Mongolian literature and history have long wished for an English translation that is “(a) unabridged and faithful; (b) in readable English; (c) adequately but not excessively annotated; (d) provided with an informative introduction; and, last but not least, (e) available as a reasonably priced book.”1 As the first person to complete the checklist that he himself aired over two decades ago, Christopher P. Atwood has produced a landmark translation of the text of the Secret History of the Mongols supported by a generous array of expert elucidations.Composed by an unknown author in the thirteenth century in the Middle Mongolian language and intended as the private family narrative of the life and early posterity of Chinggis Khan (1162?–1227), the lost original text has been precisely reconstructed based on a Ming-era phonetic transcription into Chinese characters (the Hanlin recension) and other Mongolian, Chinese, and Persian textual witnesses: an endeavor of many hands and many years that Atwood calls “one of the great stories of modern scholarship” (xvii; retold in the afterword and condensed into a stemmatic diagram, cxv). Though its story of steppe nomadic life possesses great charm and immediacy, still the text of the Secret History demands uncommon erudition of its interpreters.Underlying Atwood's translation is his advanced conception of the Middle Mongolian utterance one finds clothed in the reconstructed text (the author's numerous prolegomena are listed in the bibliography; publication of his own text edition is to be eagerly awaited). Mongolists are aware that Atwood's stimulating views on the Secret History often contradict the late Igor de Rachewiltz, author of the highly celebrated 2004 scholarly translation and commentary.2 It is of no small interest that the scholars responsible for the now two indispensable English translations of the Secret History in the twenty-first century are in fundamental disagreement over questions of the date, composition, and nature of the text. The Mouse (Rat) year of composition stated in the colophon could be 1228 (de Rachewiltz's view), 1240, or 1252—with profound implications for the political context and ideological thrust of the narrative. By arguing forcefully for the 1252 dating (lv–lviii, appendix A), Atwood presents the Secret History not as groundwork for Ökodei's relatively placid succession in 1229, with added material from a demonstrably later date, but rather as an artful justification, done in one go by a single author and bristling with its disparate sources’ textual traces, of Möngke's bloody coup in 1251, which overthrew the Ökodeids and shattered the ideal of political unity among the descendants of Chinggis Khan. The verse passages, to Atwood's eye, are not an old, oral-derived, epic kernel of discourse upon which the prose was accreted (the common view), but the opposite: the Secret Historian's own virtuosic finishing touches. “Epic Chronicle” the work certainly is not (that phrase in de Rachewiltz's subtitle comes from Pelliot). Atwood's thoughts on what the Secret Historian did create, in what genre, and whether that author was a man or a woman, make for engaging hermeneutical adventures that distill his previous scholarship (lix–lxxxvi).In his translation, Atwood succeeds by thoughtful, consistent method in representing a wonderfully powerful Middle Mongolian prose style that is “nuanced yet grounded, complex yet consistent in derivation and phonology, capable of great abstraction yet constantly coming back to the concrete” (179–80). The style of the translation is straightforward and close to the original without sounding primitive or reductive. Atwood takes particular care to impart political connotations in, for example, the term “subject households,” rendering irgä(n), where other translators have said simply “people” or “kinsmen.” Yet managing silences in a text is a delicate undertaking for any translator. As a small example taken almost at random, in the section numbered §93, when a man's adolescent son has disappeared without a word, leaving him distraught, then after several days returns safely, “Suddenly he showed up and, seeing his son, he cried for joy one time and he yelled at him one time” (24). Here de Rachewiltz's translation reads, “When they suddenly arrived and he saw his son, he began both to wail and to scold.”3 Atwood has helpfully supplied “for joy” in translating uila– “to cry, sob, weep” but resists doing more with English style to stage the drama of the parent's confused mixture of emotions. Whether to supply that pathos, as it were an integral part of the message, is the translator's choice; that Atwood sometimes leaves the final assembly to the reader (when it's manageable) is entirely in keeping with his rigorous, deliberate approach to the translation. There are generous but not overwhelming notes to clear up more significant issues, as when the social or political background of the overt text is a crucial part of the meaning. In these notes and other parts of the commentary, Atwood takes a great deal of care to show readers the text's subtleties of attitude, mood, and intention, and its profound moments of circumspection. When a Mongolian idiom is difficult to understand, the translation bends a little closer to the reader, and there is a note to explain the literal sense of the original wording. Brackets sometimes signal that words have been added for clarity, but not so frequently as to break the spell of reading.Indeed, readers will find here a translation that is easy to get into and hard to put down. The flavor of the original is pervasive, even in the numerous verse passages. Constituting over a third of the text, the verses are metrical, alliterative, and parallelistic—and in the great majority of these passages Atwood has meticulously rendered all three of these features. Several short stretches of prose alliterate rhythmically as well. This is a staggering, unprecedented feat of stylistic veracity in translating the Secret History. That the strict constraints in this type of composition did not prove unworkable is a testament to the mettle of a heroic translator. Those who do not already savor the alliterating diction and strong-stress meter of, say, Gerard Manley Hopkins may need to give extra concentration to digesting these remarkably authentic verses.Besides the introduction (xi–cv), the translation (3–161), and the afterword (“The Transmission and Translation of the Secret History,” 163–84), the book consists of a “Note on Spellings and Pronunciation” (cvi–cix; the novel transliteration system, once learned, affords some understanding of Mongolian phonology), four charts (cxi–cxv), three maps (cxviii–cxiii), four appendixes (185–211; one on dating the text, two on sociopolitical organization, and one listing chronologies of foreign conquests), the bibliography (213–20), notes on the translation (221–303), and a glossary of names that also serves as an index (305–54). Perhaps Atwood's most impactful single act of generosity to readers and teachers is simply his division of the narrative not into the irrelevant dozen or so fascicles (juan) of the Chinese recensions but into eight logical chapters and a total of forty-four subchapters all supplied with clear titles.Reception, including comparative study, of the Secret History of the Mongols as a work of both literature and history should proceed from full recognition of its unique status. This book authoritatively and clearly communicates the Secret History's status, its wholeness, and its nature as the product of one of the great creative minds of medieval letters. Atwood's infectious curiosity about the text's mysteries—linguistic, literary, historiographic—should please Mongolists for opening an appealing, accessible, reliable new portal into the field for students. More importantly, this handy volume will give the pleasure of broadened horizons to those good friends of Penguin Classics and of the world, educated general readers.