Four Failed Likenesses – When 四不像 Becomes the Word for the Unclassifiable | Great Four

四不像：当「四」成为不可译之物的代名词
Four Failed Likenesses — When 四不像 Becomes the Word for the Unclassifiable

English

At seven in the evening on a patch of open concrete between two tower blocks, forty people are facing the same direction and moving in the same slow circle. Music comes from a speaker on a folding stool. Nobody has paid. Nobody has been invited. Nobody is performing — there is no audience, only participants. Some of them are there for their blood pressure, some for the company, some because the alternative is four walls and a television.

English has a name for this, and the name is wrong. Square dancing is what English already meant before anyone in China danced on concrete: four couples, a caller, a barn, a folk tradition from the British Isles carried into North America. The word fits the syllables and misses the thing. Nothing here is square, and nobody is dancing with a partner.

The honest English description is a sentence, not a word: an open-air group exercise performed to recorded music in public space. Accurate, and entirely lifeless. Between the wrong name and the dead sentence, there is a gap — and Chinese has a single word that lives in it: 四不像.

中文

傍晚七点，两栋塔楼之间一块露天的水泥地上，四十个人朝着同一个方向，以同一种缓慢的圆圈移动。音乐来自折叠凳上的一只音箱。没有人付钱，没有人被邀请，没有人在表演——这里没有观众，只有参与者。其中一些人是为血压来的，一些人为有人作伴，一些人只是因为另一个选项是四面墙和一台电视。

英文为它准备了一个名字，而这个名字是错的。Square dancing 在中国人在水泥地上起舞之前，英文里已经有着自己的意思：四对舞伴、一位喊口令的人、一座谷仓，一项从不列颠群岛带去北美的民俗传统。这个词对上了音节，却没对准那件事。这里没有什么是方的，也没有人是与舞伴共舞。

诚实的英文描述是一个句子，而不是一个词：在公共空间随录音进行的户外集体健身。准确，但毫无生气。在错的名字与死的句子之间有一道空隙——而中文有一个词就住在那道空隙里：四不像。

The animal behind the word

这个词背后那头兽

English
四不像 began as a name for a specific animal. The creature is 麋鹿 — Elaphurus davidianus, a deer endemic to China, whose common English name is Père David’s deer. It is a large, marsh-dwelling deer with a long face, wide splayed hooves for soft ground, backward-branching antlers, and the longest tail of any deer — a tail so long it works as a fly-whisk.

The name is a description, and it is built out of four failures:

  • 角似鹿非鹿 — antlers like a deer’s, but not a deer’s
  • 面似马非马 — face like a horse’s, but not a horse’s
  • 蹄似牛非牛 — hooves like an ox’s, but not an ox’s
  • 尾似驴非驴 — tail like a donkey’s, but not a donkey’s

Four attempts. Four failures. The animal kept for itself only the negative half of each comparison.

中文
「四不像」起初是一个具体动物的名字。这头兽是麋鹿——Elaphurus davidianus，中国特有鹿种，英文俗名 Père David’s deer（大卫神父鹿）。它体型大，栖于沼泽，脸长，蹄宽而分开以适于软地，角枝向后分叉，尾巴是鹿类中最长的一条——长到可以当拂尘驱赶蚊蝇。

这个名字是一条描述，而它由四次失败搭成：

  • 角似鹿非鹿 —— 角像鹿，却不是鹿
  • 面似马非马 —— 脸像马，却不是马
  • 蹄似牛非牛 —— 蹄像牛，却不是牛
  • 尾似驴非驴 —— 尾像驴，却不是驴

四次尝试，四次失败。这头兽只留下了每一次比较里否定的那一半。

Why the number has to be four

为什么这个数字必须是四

English
This is the part that a translation cannot carry, and it is worth being precise about why.

In 四不像, the 四 does not count features. It counts how thoroughly classification has been tried and has failed. One likeness that failed could be accident — the light was bad, the observer was careless. Four likenesses that all failed is a verdict: this animal has been offered to the four nearest categories and has declined all of them. The number measures the completeness of the failure, not the number of body parts.

Four is the number that makes the failure exhaustive. Three would still leave a door open. Four, in a language where four means 四方 and 四时 — a space fully surveyed, a cycle fully counted — closes the set.

So 四不像 does not mean “I cannot tell what this is.” It means: I have told you four times what it is like, and four times it was not that.

中文
这正是翻译带不走的部分，值得把原因说清楚。

在「四不像」里，「四」数的不是特征，而是归类的尝试被进行了多少次、又失败了多少次。一次相似而失败，可以是偶然——光线不好，观察者粗心。四次相似而四次失败，则是一句判决：这头兽被递到四个最近的类别面前，而它把四个都拒绝了。这个数量的是失败的彻底程度，不是身体部位的数量。

四是使这次失败彻底化的数字。三还会留一扇门。四，在一种「四」意味着四方与四时的语言里——一片被完整清点的空间，一个被完整数尽的循环——把这个集合关上了。

所以「四不像」的意思不是「我说不出这是什么」，而是：我已经四次告诉你它像什么，四次都不是。

From an animal’s name to a judgment

从一个兽名到一句评判

English
The word escaped its animal quickly. In ordinary Chinese, 四不像 now means anything that has fallen between categories and cannot be picked up: a building that is neither a museum nor a shopping centre, a job that is neither management nor labour, a book that is neither scholarship nor fiction. The usual gloss is 不伦不类 — without category, without kind.

And the word carries a sneer. It is not neutral. To call something 四不像 is to say that it tried to be something and did not arrive — that it is a failure of form, not merely a puzzle for the classifier. The mockery is aimed less at the thing than at the categories: four boxes were available, and this thing could not get into any of them.

中文
这个词很快离开了它那头兽。在日常中文里，「四不像」如今指任何掉进类别缝隙、捡不起来的东西：一座既非博物馆又非商场的建筑，一份既非管理又非执行的工作，一本既非学术又非小说的书。通行的解释是「不伦不类」——没有伦，没有类。

而这个字带着一丝嘲笑。它不是中性的。称某物为「四不像」，是说它试图成为某样东西却没有抵达——说它是形式上的失败，而不只是给分类者出的一道难题。这嘲笑与其说是冲着那件东西，不如说是冲着那些类别：四个盒子摆在那里，这东西一个也进不去。

A note on English: it built the same machine, out of different parts

关于英文的一点说明：它用不同的零件造了同一台机器

English
English has no word for 四不像. But English has an idiom that arrived at the same place by its own road, and the idiom is neither fish nor fowl.

Its history is a history of a list getting longer. An early appearance, in the 1528 satire Rede me and be nott wrothe, is only two items: “nether flesshe nor fisshe.” John Heywood’s 1546 collection of proverbs has three: “She is nother fishe nor fleshe nor good red hearyng.” Shakespeare’s Falstaff, insulting Mistress Quickly in Henry IV, Part 1, uses two: “shees neither fish nor flesh, a man knowes not where to haue her.” Later variants restore the third item and add a fourth — neither fish, nor flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring.

The items come from an old division of food: fish for those who abstained from meat, flesh for those who could afford it, red herring for the poor. To be none of them is to belong to no table at all.

Two things about this are worth noticing. First, the idiom is built by the same method as 四不像: enumerate the available categories, then negate every one. Second, in its fullest form the English list also stops at four — not because English borrowed from Chinese, but because a negation that reaches four has nowhere left to go. Two languages, working independently, reached for a list of four to say the same thing: this thing has been offered to every box we have, and it belongs to none.

The difference is in what gets counted. 四不像 counts attempts at likeness — four tries, four misses. Neither fish nor fowl counts rejected boxes — four categories, four refusals. One describes the speaker’s effort; the other describes the world’s empty shelves.

中文
英文没有对应「四不像」的词。但英文有一个习语，走自己的路到达了同一个地方，这个习语是 neither fish nor fowl。

它的历史是一份名单不断变长的历史。1528年的讽刺作品 Rede me and be nott wrothe 中，它最早的样子只有两项：”nether flesshe nor fisshe”（既非肉也非鱼）。约翰·海伍德1546年的谚语集里有三项：”She is nother fishe nor fleshe nor good red hearyng”（她既不是鱼，也不是肉，也不是好红鲱）。莎士比亚笔下福斯塔夫在《亨利四世》上篇中辱骂快嘴桂嫂时用了两项：”shees neither fish nor flesh, a man knowes not where to haue her”（她既非鱼也非肉，叫人不知拿她怎么办）。后出的变体恢复了第三项，并添上第四项——neither fish, nor flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring。

这些条目来自一套古老的饮食划分：鱼给戒肉的人，肉给吃得起的人，红鲱给穷人。一样都不是，就是不属于任何一张餐桌。

其中有两点值得注意。第一，这个习语是用与「四不像」相同的方法造出来的：把可用的类别一一列举，然后把每一个都否定掉。第二，英文这名单在最完整的形式里也停在四——不是因为英文借自中文，而是否定到了四，就再也没有地方可去了。两种语言各自独立地伸手取用「四」这个数列，说的是同一件事：这东西被递到我们所有的盒子面前，一个也不属于。

区别在于数的东西不同。「四不像」数的是相似的尝试——四次尝试，四次落空。Neither fish nor fowl 数的是被拒绝的盒子——四个类别，四次拒绝。一个描述说话者的努力，另一个描述世界里空掉的架子。

When the West met its own 四不像

当西方遇到它自己的「四不像」

English
It would be tidy to leave the comparison there, with Chinese having the more thorough word. Tidy, and wrong. Western science had its own encounter with an animal it could not file, and the encounter is recorded in scissors marks.

In 1799 George Shaw, keeper of the natural history collections at the British Museum, received a dried pelt from the colony of New South Wales. It had a duck’s bill, a mole’s fur, webbed clawed feet and a beaver’s tail. Shaw did not believe it. He took a pair of scissors to the skin and cut where the bill met the fur, looking for the seam of a taxidermist’s hoax — a trade in composite specimens, monkey torsos stitched to fish tails and sold as mermaids, was doing brisk business at the time. He found no thread and no glue. He published the animal anyway, in The Naturalist’s Miscellany, as Platypus anatinus — flat-footed, duck-like.

Even the name failed to hold. Platypus had already been given to a genus of ambrosia beetles. The animal was renamed Ornithorhynchus paradoxus — paradoxical bird-snout — and settled eventually as Ornithorhynchus anatinus. Then came the question that took the better part of a century: did it lay eggs? Aboriginal Australians had said so all along, and European science declined to accept it without a specimen. The argument ran roughly eighty-five years, until William Hay Caldwell found a platypus egg in Queensland in 1884 and cabled six words to a scientific meeting in Montreal: “Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.”

Here is the quiet detail worth keeping. Chinese calls this animal 鸭嘴兽 — duck-billed beast. Both languages named it by compounding two animals it resembles, and neither language succeeded in naming what it is. But Chinese compounded it out of household creatures — 鸭, duck; 兽, beast. English compounded it out of Greek — ornitho-, bird; -rhynchus, snout. The Chinese name puts a familiar face on the problem; the English name puts a learned label on it. Both are 四不像. One admits it in the language you speak at home; the other hides it behind a classical education.

中文
把比较停在这里、让中文拿着那个更彻底的词，会很整齐。整齐，但是错的。西方科学也曾与一头无法归档的兽相遇，而这次相遇被记录在剪刀留下的痕迹里。

1799年，大英博物馆自然史藏品的管理人乔治·萧（George Shaw）收到一张来自新南威尔士殖民地的干皮。它有鸭子的嘴、鼹鼠的毛、带爪的蹼足和河狸的尾巴。萧不信。他拿起剪刀，在喙与毛交界处剪开，寻找标本师造假的接缝——当时用猴子上身缝鱼尾冒充美人鱼的拼接标本生意正做得红火。他没有找到线，也没有找到胶。他还是发表了这个动物，刊于 The Naturalist’s Miscellany，命名为 Platypus anatinus——扁足的、像鸭的。

连名字都没能站住。Platypus 早已被一个蛀木小蠹的属名占用。这头兽被改名为 Ornithorhynchus paradoxus——悖论般的鸟喙——最后定为 Ornithorhynchus anatinus。接着是一个耗去大半个世纪的问题：它下蛋吗？澳大利亚原住民从头到尾都说是，而欧洲科学在没有标本之前拒绝接受。争论持续了大约八十五年，直到1884年威廉·海·考德威尔在昆士兰找到一枚鸭嘴兽的蛋，向蒙特利尔的学术会议拍去六个词：”Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.”（单孔类卵生，卵为不全裂。）

这里有个值得留下的安静细节。中文管这头兽叫「鸭嘴兽」。两种语言都用「把两个它相似的动物拼起来」的方式为它命名，两种语言都没能说出它是什么。但中文用的是家常的动物——鸭、兽；英文用的是希腊词根——ornitho-（鸟）、-rhynchus（喙）。中文的名字给这个问题安了一张熟脸，英文的名字给它贴了一张学问的标签。两者都是四不像，一个用你在家里说的话承认这一点，另一个把它藏在一门古典教育后面。

Four moves a translator can make

译者的四步可走

English
Someone translating 四不像 has four options, and each one pays for what it buys.

Use the animal, lose the insult. Père David’s deer, or the international name Milu. The animal arrives; the judgment does not. Anyone who has never seen the deer will read a zoological term where the original wrote a sneer.

Use the idiom, lose the count. Neither fish nor fowl. Method and tone both survive — a negation by enumeration, with a shrug inside it. What is lost is the four: the English reader hears two or three rejected categories, where the Chinese reader heard four failed likenesses and understood that the failure was exhaustive.

Use a phrase, lose the word. Neither one thing nor the other, a mongrel, a hodgepodge, hard to classify. Accurate, readable, and entirely flat. The mockery is gone. So is the animal.

Keep the sound. Translate it as sibuxiang and explain in a sentence. This is the choice that preserves the most — and it is the choice that the animal itself eventually forced on the world. After the last Chinese herd was destroyed in 1900, the eighteen survivors were bought by Herbrand Russell, the eleventh Duke of Bedford, and grazed at Woburn Abbey; their descendants came home to Nanhaizi in Beijing in August 1985. Today the species’ international name has been returned to the Chinese sound: Milu. The animal that no category would accept ended up being called by its own syllable, because no translation had ever fitted.

中文
翻译「四不像」的人有四步可走，每一步都要为买到的东西付钱。

用兽名，丢评判。 Père David’s deer，或国际通用的 Milu。兽来了，评判没来。没见过这头鹿的读者，会在原文写着嘲笑的地方读到一个动物学术语。

用习语，丢数量。 Neither fish nor fowl。方法与语气都留下了——用列举来否定，里面带着一耸肩。丢掉的是「四」：英文读者听见两三个被拒绝的类别，而中文读者听见的是四次失败的相似，并明白这次失败是彻底的。

用短语，丢词。 Neither one thing nor the other、a mongrel、a hodgepodge、hard to classify。准确、好读，而且完全平淡。嘲笑没有了，那头兽也没有了。

保留声音。 音译为 sibuxiang，再用一句话解释。这是保留最多的选择——也正是这头兽最终强加给世界的选择。1900年中国最后一群麋鹿覆灭之后，幸存的十八头被英国十一世贝福特公爵买下，放养于乌邦寺庄园；它们的后代于1985年8月回到北京南海子。如今这一物种的国际名称已改回中文的音：Milu。那个没有任何类别肯收下的动物，最后以它自己的音节被称呼——因为从来就没有一个译名合身过。

The word turned against translation

这个词反过来对准了翻译

English
There is one last turn, and it is the one that makes the subject uncomfortable.

In Chinese, 四不像 is also a standing insult aimed at translations. A translated sentence that is too English to read as Chinese and too Chinese to read as English is called 四不像 — not because it resembles nothing, but because it resembles too many things at once. It is like the source language, and is not it. It is like the target language, and is not it. The accusation is that the translator reached for four models and matched none of them.

So the word for the unclassifiable is also the word for the failed translation, and the translation of the word is itself liable to become 四不像. The subject bites its own tail. Which is, perhaps, the most honest outcome available: a term about the failure of categories, applied to the craft that moves things between categories, arriving at its own failure.

中文
还有最后一个转折，而这个转折让题目变得不太舒服。

在中文里，「四不像」也是一句常备的、冲着翻译去的骂语。一个太像英文而不像中文、又太像中文而不像英文的译句，会被叫做「四不像」——不是因为它什么都不像，而是因为它同时像太多东西。它像源语，却不是源语；它像译语，却不是译语。这句指责说的是：译者伸手取了四个范本，一个也没对上。

于是，「不可归类之物」的名字，同时也是「失败的翻译」的名字，而这个词的翻译本身也难免变成四不像。题目咬住了自己的尾巴。这或许是可得到的最诚实的结果：一个关于类别失败的词，被用在那个搬运类别的手艺上，然后抵达了它自己的失败。

A closing note

尾声

English
The concrete square has emptied by eight. The speaker is carried away on the same folding stool. Whatever the forty people were doing has no name in English that fits, and a name in Chinese that does not describe it either — 四不像 says what it is not, four times, and stops.

A translation can carry what a thing resembles. It cannot carry the number of times it failed to resemble. And in 四不像, the number was the point.

What cannot be classified is eventually called by its own sound — because sound, unlike meaning, has nothing to be sorted into.

中文
八点之前，那块水泥地空了。音箱连同那张折叠凳一起被拎走。四十个人所做的那件事，英文里没有合身的名字，中文里那个名字也并不描述它——「四不像」只是四次说出它不是什么，然后停下。

翻译能带走一件东西像什么，带不走它「像而不像」的次数。而在「四不像」里，那个数字才是重点。

无法归类的东西，最后以它自己的声音被称呼——因为声音不像意义，没有可供归档的类别。

References / 引用出处

English
1. The four-part description of 麋鹿 (角似鹿非鹿、面似马非马、蹄似牛非牛、尾似驴非驴) — standard in Chinese sources, including those of the Beijing Municipal Forestry and Parks Bureau; the same nickname is also applied to 驯鹿 and other animals in some regional accounts.
2. Scientific name Elaphurus davidianus Milne-Edwards, 1866; the 1865 sighting by Armand David at the Nanhaizi imperial hunting park; the 1866 purchase of two skins and skulls; identification in Paris — recorded in Chinese museum and science-communication sources.
3. Destruction of the last Chinese herd in 1900; the animals bought by Herbrand Russell, eleventh Duke of Bedford; their grazing at Woburn Abbey; the return of twenty-two animals to Nanhaizi on 24 August 1985; later international use of Milu.
4. The distinction between 四不相 — the mount of Jiang Ziya in Fengshen Yanyi — and the animal-name 四不像, drawn from Chinese local scholarship; this site follows that caution and does not identify them.
5. George Shaw’s 1799 description in The Naturalist’s Miscellany; his cutting into the pelt; the pre-emption of Platypus by a beetle genus; Blumenbach’s Ornithorhynchus paradoxus; the roughly eighty-five-year debate over egg-laying; Caldwell’s 1884 telegram.
6. The English idiom: the 1528 instance, John Heywood’s 1546 wording, Shakespeare’s use in Henry IV, Part 1 (3.3), the ecclesiastical-food explanation, and the later four-item variant neither fish, nor flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring.
Interpretations of what each option loses in translation are the author’s own readings, offered as one view among several.

中文
1. 麋鹿的四句描述（角似鹿非鹿、面似马非马、蹄似牛非牛、尾似驴非驴）为通行的中文表述，见于北京市园林绿化局等来源；同一俗称在部分地方记载中也用于驯鹿等其他动物。
2. 学名 Elaphurus davidianus Milne-Edwards, 1866、1865年阿芒·大卫在北京南海子皇家猎苑的窥见、1866年购得两套皮骨标本、以及在巴黎的鉴定，见于中国博物馆与科普来源。
3. 1900年中国本土最后一群的覆灭、被英国十一世贝福特公爵购入、在乌邦寺庄园的放养、1985年8月24日二十二头运抵南海子、以及后来国际通用的 Milu。
4. 《封神演义》中姜子牙坐骑「四不相」与兽名「四不像」之间的区别，采自中国地方研究的辨正；本站依此审慎处理，不作同一认定。
5. 乔治·萧1799年在 The Naturalist’s Miscellany 上的描述、他为寻找缝线而剪开标本、Platypus 属名被一属甲虫占用、布卢门巴赫的 Ornithorhynchus paradoxus、围绕卵生持续约八十五年的争论、以及考德威尔1884年的电报。
6. 英文习语：1528年的用例、约翰·海伍德1546年的措辞、莎士比亚在《亨利四世》上篇（3.3）中的使用、教会饮食划分的解释、以及后出的四项变体 neither fish, nor flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring。
关于各译法所失的解读，属作者本人的读法，仅为诸家之说中的一种。

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