The sentiment that I would like to express above all others in the Preface to the Chinese edition of the third volume of my nationalism trilogy, Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, translated into Chinese as 心智、现代性、疯癫： 文化对人类经验的影响, is deep gratitude to the Chinese public (including my readers, publishers, and, in the first place, translators) for their intellectual openness and interest. Among Western educated strata such intellectual openness and interest, i.e., openness and interest to new ideas and unorthodox interpretation of reality, however closely corresponding to actual facts, in the last three decades have been lost. Western societies are not at this moment societies conducive to free inquiry, in which science, especially social science, can flourish. And while Chinese students still flock to Western universities in search of inspiration, they may be better off staying at home and turning for enlightenment to their own classics.

Certainly, I cannot imagine a group of Western scholars from different universities and academic disciplines out of their own accord and desire to share with others a scholarly work they believe important combining into a team of translators and working for over nine years in their private time, without any remuneration, to render it in a language other than the one in which it was written. But this is what the translators of this book into Chinese did. In the 5 centuries of their hegemony Western societies contributed to humanity the sciences, first physics, the science of matter, and then biology, the science of life. A science of humanity – an honest, systematic, logically based and empirically tested exploration of perhaps the most significant aspect of empirical reality for all of us, which can produce objective knowledge about, and improve our common understanding of it — is not among the West’s legacies, for the so-called “social sciences” which stand for such a science never advanced beyond the pre-scientific stage of data collection and empty theorizing. Now that the Western world has exhausted its creativity, it is up to the other civilizations, the Chinese, first of all, to establish such a science. This book suggests the way to do it. Its translation into Chinese, therefore, is essential for a much larger and more consequential project, and the work of its selfless translators deserves more than my personal gratitude.

The translation of Mind, Modernity, Madness was an exceptionally difficult job. Linguistic history provided a considerable portion of the book’s empirical material, while its novel argument required a very careful conceptualization, that is, meticulous, even vigilant, work with words. There was often no ready Chinese vocabulary to accurately convey particular expressions and turns of phrase in their historical contexts and the intended meanings of scrupulously chosen terms in the context of the argument. Translators constantly faced hard choices none of which often was good.

One central example will suffice. I chose the word “madness” for the title because this 16^th century invention, a neologism, marked the addition to the English semantic space of a newly significant phenomenon: the functional mental illness which would later be called “depression,” “bipolar disorder,” and “schizophrenia.” Unlike numerous well-known mental illnesses, this new illness named “madness,” while similar in its presentation to some, was not related to age or infectious diseases and fever, and was chronic, making those who suffered from it “mad” for life. Individual cases of this disease could be found in history, but, being very rare, exceptional, did not require a name. It was the fact that suddenly the rate of its incidence and prevalence dramatically increased that made it a part of the English experience and demanded a new term to designate it.

The nature of the mental illness called in English “madness” was unknown when the term appeared. Some early observers thought of it as a disease of the body (“fengdian” — 疯癫 – in Chinese) and some as the disease of the spirit (which in Chinese would be rendered as “xinji” — 心疾). But no existing word in any language could be translated accurately as “madness” because this new word captured not the nature of the new noticeable disease but the experience of noticing – the expansion of the semantic space in England at a particular point in its history.

In the book, I dwelt in detail on the context in which the word “madness” was created and the specificity of the experience that led to its creation. I also showed how the lack of awareness of this experience resulted in the equation of “madness” with the French much older “folie,” conventionally used in France for “weak-mindedness,” which, in turn, both misled the emerging psychiatry and obfuscated the history of mental illness, contributing greatly to the misunderstanding of depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia and the inability of the Western psychiatric establishment to arrest the epidemic of mental illness at present hitting Western societies.

Nothing but extended explanations of terms can assure the perfect accuracy of translation: the contexts in which words emerge and are used are often as important for the transmission of meanings as the words themselves. Languages are not systems of interchangeable signs signifying universal meanings, they carry with them a huge cultural baggage rarely suggested by the vocabularies and reflecting the different historical experiences of different cultures. They are mutually translatable only to a limited extent. Translators have to do with the linguistic resources they have, they must resign themselves to the inherent inability of translation to transmit the intended meanings of the original with perfect accuracy.

The reader should keep this in mind. The central subject of this book is the cultural process. The cultural process is the most complex aspect of our reality, most difficult to understand – which, however, makes its understanding the most rewarding. The inevitable imperfection of translation is a reflection of the complexity of the cultural process. The reader cannot consume this text passively but is required to participate in the translators’ work, add to it, read deeply, thinking, being aware of the pitfalls of simple substitution of words in one language for those in another.

This could be too demanding for a Western audience. But it is not, I am sure, for the Chinese. You are carrying in your minds 5000 years of a great civilization. No mental work is above what you can do.