Medicine, Zurich and translation
Born Cary Fink in Mexico City, Baynes grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Vassar and received a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, although she did not practise medicine. In 1921 she moved to Zurich to study with Jung, becoming personally and professionally close to both Carl and Emma Jung.
Her work included transcriptions, seminar organisation and translation. She collaborated with her second husband, the psychiatrist Helton Godwin Baynes, and later took an editorial role in the Bollingen Foundation. Her English version of Wilhelm’s German I Ching appeared in 1950. Correspondence preserved in her archive records a sustained intellectual life extending well beyond the completion of individual translations.
Making The Golden Flower available in English
In The Secret of the Golden Flower, Baynes translated a German presentation of a Chinese religious text. Wilhelm’s historical account and translation are distinct from Jung’s psychological commentary. Her own translator’s preface explains how the English book was assembled, including the addition of Jung’s memorial address after Wilhelm’s death and a change in the commentary’s position.
Baynes also acknowledges help with the English forms of Chinese terms and supplies summaries to clarify connections between concepts. These decisions make her editorial presence visible within a book that has crossed several languages. The work offers an encounter with a Chinese tradition through Wilhelm and Jung; Baynes’s contribution gives that already interpreted material a further life in English.
