21–30 of 61 posts
There was another site that hosted 80+ versions that I scraped a long time ago and made this: http://tao.scrame.com It shows a random passage from a random translation, with an attribution link to the long dead parent site. I should probably dump the db back to the constituent pieces, enduring issues and all. Initially it was a test for rails, but I rewrote it in php ages echo.
A page about hair-splitting on translations of a philosophy whose chapter one paragraph one states the notion isn't possible to convey in words! The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the ma…
Ursula LeGuin has also published a nonliteral interpretation of the Tao Te Ching (derived from the work of several Chinese-to-English translations) that is absolutely wonderful. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C2WJQNM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/142657117089/philological-n... http://www.jstor.org/stable/2718364?s
Oh, let me plug Peter Boodberg's startlingly bizzare version, which begins "Lodehead lodehead-brooking : no forwonted lodehead"... It's such an alien approach to translation, you can see his logic, but the end product looks like something from a Markov chain. https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/142657117089/philological-n... http://www.jstor.org/stable/2718364?s
A page about hair-splitting on translations of a philosophy whose chapter one paragraph one states the notion isn't possible to convey in words! The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the ma…
I was attracted to the Dao De Jing at a fairly young age. It took over a decade, though (as I was reading a related text—I can't remember which one, maybe the Zhuangzi), for it to suddenly dawn on me how alien this was from the way of reasoning that's been ingrained in me through the culture I was brought up in.
I had been able to extract tons of enjoyment (and, hopefully, insight) from them already at that point. But from then on, the daoist classics suddenly looked very different to me. They took on a depth that I hadn't seen in them before.
A related book I would recommend is Edward Slingerland's Trying Not to Try[1]. A very interesting dive into the concept of Wu Wei. His interpretations of the old texts get a little one/two dimensional at times, but he also brings along a lot of insight.
There was another site that hosted 80+ versions that I scraped a long time ago and made this: http://tao.scrame.com It shows a random passage from a random translation, with an attribution link to the long dead parent site. I should probably dump the db back to the constituent pieces, enduring issues and all. Initially it was a test for rails, but I rewrote it in php ages echo.