Do Not Let Words Obscure the Author’s Intent

‘Do not let individual words damage the sense of a phrase, or let a phrase obscure the author’s intent’ appears in Wan Zhang I of the Mengzi. Mengzi is explaining how to read the Book of Odes: a reader should not cling to one word at the expense of the sentence, or to an isolated sentence at the expense of the poem’s larger purpose.

He notes that if the line from Yun Han saying that none of Zhou’s people remained were treated as a literal report, it would mean not one person survived. It is instead the forceful language of a drought poem. Context still guards against quotation out of context today. Yet ‘meeting the author’s intent through one’s understanding’ is not licence to invent a private meaning; the whole text, its genre and historical evidence must constrain the inference.

https://ctext.org/mengzi/wan-zhang-i