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Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

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Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#61

Post by noufalibrahim »

racktash wrote: post #41
noufalibrahim wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a period in my life in my early 20s when I dabbled heavily in taoism. The book was a staple read for me and I tried to adjust my Outlook accordingly for a long time. Finally though, i dropped it and went back to who I was. Your comment makes me wonder if the specific translation of the book I read was a big factor.

I can relate to this comment. The Tao Te Ching had a profound influence on me. Reading it was the first time I engaged on a "spiritual" level with life (I'm a fairly pragmatic and reductionist guy, perhaps to a fault). But this also wore off for me and I returned to being my usual mostly unspiritual self after a couple of years boring my friends trying to tell my friends about the Tao... Without describing it. I do f…

Interesting. I have always been a religious person but wandered from my own traditions for a while. Those days, my main attraction was taoism. But, like I mentioned, i dropped it.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#62

Post by vitiral »

imchillyb wrote: post #57
vitiral wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html 4 The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I don't know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. My favorite, although my favorite depends on the season 9 Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money a…

It’s almost as if they’re saying: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and grasping of the wind… “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God,” -‭‭Ecclesiastes‬

IIUC much of the bible's "wisdom" is taken from older root traditions. According to Mitchell's (the same Mitchell, he IS an expert in ancient Hebrew) translation of Job the entire book isn't even about a Jew but is far older.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#63

Post by vitiral »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #45
ilkke wrote: post #36

I find it extremely valuable that there are so many translations available to begin with. With this type of subject matter, where words are but crude pointers to insight, having different phrasing helps to reclaim the insights when words become too familiar.

If we need this to understand technological things (did you learn Docker from just one manual/article for example?) we certainly must need it for spiritual things.

Many would say we need fewer concepts to understand spiritual things, and Taoism is the attempt to unlearn your grasping mind.

Instead we always have more. So it goes.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#64

Post by yorwba »

suoduandao3 wrote: post #55
Podgajski wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the Bible, you should read Young’s literal translation. It blew me away how much liberties that king James version took in their interpretation.

Is there a difference between '-th' and '-s' suffixes in English? I thought 'seeth' was just an old fashioned way of saying 'sees' but now I'm wondering if this is saying something about tenses that I'm missing.

saith is to says as says is to sez, in the sense that each spelling is an attempt to represent English pronunciation in writing and their progression tells us something about how the pronunciation changed over time, but not everyone who uses a certain spelling necessarily also pronounces the word the way one might naïvely expect based on the spelling.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#65

Post by vitiral »

Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #23
raincole wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically you can say this to most text. You can even say practically no one alive never read The Bible.

I've read eg. different translations of Crime and Punishment written more than 100 years between each other and I still feel that I read the same book and the meaning, even if somewhat blurred, as been perserved. There is no definite meaning to many passages in classical Chinese so all you have is the text itself. It's not a question of if the author can take the meaning from the original and use that to write a new…

It's funny to say there is "no definite meaning" when the action proposed is non-action, the meaning defined is un-meaning, the way is wuwei.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#66

Post by vitiral »

stillconfused wrote: post #29
vitiral wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html 4 The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I don't know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. My favorite, although my favorite depends on the season 9 Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money a…

Here is Red Pine's translation of both, in case you are interested. He spent ~20 years including substantial time in monasteries studying Chinese classics. His translation is much more tightly linked to the actual work. 4: The Tao is so empty those who use it never become full again and so deep as if were the ancestor of us all it dulls our edges unties our tangles softens our light and merges our dust it's so clear…

Are there two versions in the same translation? You gave two versions to number 9 in this very post!

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#67

Post by woolion »

namelosw wrote: post #24

I've seen Tao Te Ching's translation on the HN front page for several times. It seems people are interested in it. The thing with Tao Te Ching is it's too ambiguous because: 1) The Chinese language is very overloaded and thus very ambiguous. 2) Classical Chinese is even more so. 3) Tao Te Ching is intentionally filled with clever puns which makes it more ambiguous. The problem with translations is the translator has…

I got to read, shortly after the Tao, a book that compiled for part of the texts something like 4 of the 'best'[0] translations. It was very enlightening to see how different yet similar they could be. If you think of it as semantic vectors, I would say the meaning is probably the common part between all translations. It is definitely a recommended exercise to read different ones.

It's not unique to taoist texts either, as I recommend to check different translations of works such as Dante's Comedy, Beowulf, or Goethe's Faust. When there is meaning, style, sub-meanings and connotations, a translation can only convey some parts accurately. Different translations will usually make different trade-offs.

[0] Note that 'best' is a term that markedly changed meaning these last two centuries, for anyone who would read more in-depth about the subject. For instance some of the earliest translators dismissed more modern taoist authors as having strayed too far from the Tradition, but the attitude changed in a few generations.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#68

Post by OfSanguineFire »

vitiral wrote: post #60
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stephen Mitchell has no real training in Old Chinese.[0] His “translation” is simply repackaging or distorting what was found in earlier, informed translations, for the sake of a publishing industry keen to cash in on “wisdom lit”. He is an analogue of Coleman Barks the Rumi “translator” who doesn’t know Persian, and Brooks Haxton the Heraclitus “translator” without a background in Greek. [0] https://academic.oup.com…

He has translated many works from other ancient languages and is a trained Zen monk. In the spirit of Taoism he is likely a better translator than an intellectual. The work is brief. There is room for multiple translations and interpretations.

> He has translated many works from other ancient languages

Not really. Most of his other "translations" from ancient languages were made the same way as with the Tao te ching: he simply rewrote existing translations. As far as I can tell, the Book of Job translation is the only one made from the source text. I don’t think you understand how notorious Mitchell has been within the field of literary translation for decades now.

> is a trained Zen monk.

Zen and Taoism are different philosophical systems. As the linked paper underlines, choosing someone with a background in Zen to translate that foundational work of Taoism, was peculiar, but it is understandable within the context of a Western publishing market that wants to cash in on wisdom lit and doesn’t really care about the details of Asian religions.

> There is room for multiple translations and interpretations.

Attention is finite and marketing is dishonest. There are myriads of people out there for whom the Mitchell Tao te ching is the only one they will be exposed to, and they won’t even be aware that it isn’t a real translation and they will need to consult other translations in order to make up for that.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#69

Post by gizajob »

stillconfused wrote: post #29
vitiral wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html 4 The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I don't know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. My favorite, although my favorite depends on the season 9 Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money a…

Here is Red Pine's translation of both, in case you are interested. He spent ~20 years including substantial time in monasteries studying Chinese classics. His translation is much more tightly linked to the actual work. 4: The Tao is so empty those who use it never become full again and so deep as if were the ancestor of us all it dulls our edges unties our tangles softens our light and merges our dust it's so clear…

It seems like his is a much more zen-infused translation, which given his other work isn’t surprising. It’s great to have so many takes on the translation though, I’ll be appreciating this text for the rest of my life. Already have been for a good 15 years already, and whoever old Lao Tze was, they were likely one of the greatest geniuses in history.

Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)

#70

Post by imchillyb »

vitiral wrote: post #62
imchillyb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost as if they’re saying: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and grasping of the wind… “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God,” -‭‭Ecclesiastes‬

IIUC much of the bible's "wisdom" is taken from older root traditions. According to Mitchell's (the same Mitchell, he IS an expert in ancient Hebrew) translation of Job the entire book isn't even about a Jew but is far older.

Ecclesiastes was written by King Solomon, King David's son.

The wisdom of Solomon was so great, the Queen of Bathsheeba made a year-long journey just to hear him.

The time of Solomon, and his accomplishments, are not taken from older traditions but from the man himself.

Perhaps read some for yourself. The Bible doesn't indoctrinate people do that. The Bible has so much wisdom and knowledge packed within its pages I'm not sure why people are so reticent to peruse or even read through it.

The Bible doesn't bite, but it certainly does cut to the quick.

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