An interview with Yiyang Zhuge - Jack Miller Center

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An interview with Yiyang Zhuge

JMC Resident Historian Elliott Drago sat down with JMC Fellow Yiyang Zhuge to discuss her Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia. Ms. Zhuge is a Political Theory PhD Candidate at Boston College, lecturer at Brandeis University, and the graduate assistant at the John Marshall Project at Boston College.

By Elliott Drago

September 9, 2025

ED: What inspired you to study political theory?

YZ: I entered Boston College having studied four years of Ancient Greek and Latin and as an undergraduate student of classics. I was deeply unsatisfied by the courses in the Classics Department, which were literature, philology and history surveys offered without explanation of why they should matter. I started taking random courses in different departments of the humanities and was tricked into taking Professor Susan Shell’s Kant’s Third Critique because she told me “It is about art, which you already know.” That graduate seminar was so insanely impenetrable for me that I would either cry like Achilles or fall asleep in class.

The late professor Robert Faulkner and friend of the Jack Miller Center was sitting in on that seminar and took an interest in me. He was already retired at the time, but kept an office on campus. I would go to his office and chat with him for hours every week about Shakespeare, Burke, Bacon, Aristotle, and Lincoln. Witnessing the incredible friendship between Shell and Faulkner also convinced me that studying political theory can give me friends like that. Starting the next semester, I took only political theory courses for the rest of my undergraduate studies and continue to study political theory to this day.

Bridging Worlds

ED: Congratulations on completing the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia—a work bridging two languages unfamiliar to most Americans. How did you approach such a challenging linguistic and cultural translation? Given that your secondary and higher education took place entirely in the United States, what motivated you to publish in Chinese?

YZ: Studying Aristotle with Professor Robert Bartlett, who produced the best English translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, set an exemplary model for me. He would teach his seminars just with the Greek text and sight read, which, for me, forces one to think like Aristotle every time when a question about the text is asked.

Yiyang’s translation of Plutarch’s Moralia

YZ: Allan Bloom, the greatest American translator of Plato and Rousseau, was the teacher of many of my professors. Professor Shell told me over lunch once that Bloom’s way of reading closely and carefully was to become a translator. I now understand what she means. Translating Plutarch means for me having to consider every word he uses, tracing every reference to Homer or Euripides, and since I cannot assume any prior Greek knowledge—especially from Chinese readers—I must explain in footnotes the context and reason for those literary works being cited, many of which I must admit I haven’t figured out.

Plutarch was a Greek living under the strongest empire the world has ever seen, which guaranteed unprecedented civil liberty to its citizens. He remained quintessentially Greek but developed a genuine love of Roman culture and history. He learned Latin as a second language in his late teens but became able to speak and write it so well that Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius would continue to cite him. He understood the Roman Empire better than most Romans. All these qualities distinguish Plutarch from his contemporaries but bring him close to my own life.

The American political culture and education system, with its unprecedented openness and excellent erudition, provided the structural conditions that allow me to pursue a relatively peaceful life of thinking and writing. I, like Plutarch, don’t take such protection for granted.

Bridging the gap

ED: Plutarch may seem distant to American readers—and even more so to Chinese audiences. How can educators bridge this cultural gap, and what is the value of teaching Western classics in non-Western contexts?

YZ: The Western tradition was imported into and voraciously absorbed by non-Western cultures (I am speaking specifically about East Asia) in the 19th and 20th century only in its revolutionary form. The West was first introduced in China in late 19th century as “Mr. Science,” “Mr. Democracy,” and “Ms. Freedom” in its Enlightenment progressivism, then in the form of Marxism, and now in the form of post-modernism. The Ariadne’s thread that links those three waves is clear if we see how eagerly open-minded Japanese, Korean, and Chinese intellectuals embrace and adopt those three stances sequentially. Needless to say, this is an impoverished understanding of the West.

YZ: And it is frankly bad for the West; because it has...