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Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

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Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#11

Post by teraflop »

hotdogscout wrote: post #8

I have a feeling people who love Le Guin love the idea of her and didn't actually read her books. Her style is impersonal, robotic and kind of boring. Look at her most famous quotes for a snippet: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/874602.Ursula_K_Le_G...

Taste is subjective, and if you find her style boring I can't dispute that, but it doesn't match my experience at all.

I think judging her by the most popularly-upvoted snippets on Goodreads is doing her a tremendous disservice. Her language is not particularly flowery, and she writes using simple words, which are often the ones that have the vaguest meanings and the most room for nuance. If you take a single sentence like that from a story or novel, and remove it from its surrounding context, you strip away a lot of that nuance. By reading the sentence in isolation, you only see a pale shadow of its intended meaning.

Maybe this is a bad analogy, but it makes me think of how you wouldn't think there was anything interesting about Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture if all you heard was the cannon volleys by themselves, even though they're what make the piece complete.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#13

Post by wafflemaker »

hotdogscout wrote: post #8

I have a feeling people who love Le Guin love the idea of her and didn't actually read her books. Her style is impersonal, robotic and kind of boring. Look at her most famous quotes for a snippet: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/874602.Ursula_K_Le_G...

Can't say I love any books, but I greatly enjoy sci-fi (especially when they respect orbital mechanics). ULG's style reminds me of Strugacky brothers, maybe that was just typical in that era?

It might be that my memory is playing tricks on me, it was over 10 years since I read any of them (except for one non-sci-fi ULG book). But generally the writing style evolves end deeply personal style is much more common now then it was before. (I think I've read most of ULG and maybe half of B&A Strugackie's books).

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#14

Post by t-3 »

hotdogscout wrote: post #8

I have a feeling people who love Le Guin love the idea of her and didn't actually read her books. Her style is impersonal, robotic and kind of boring. Look at her most famous quotes for a snippet: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/874602.Ursula_K_Le_G...

I think Earthsea and Hainish are both great, but I don't like any of her other stuff, and don't like this TTC (or really any of the English translations I've seen) either. They all lose the poetry which is obvious at a glance in the original. I only know a few words of Mandarin and can't read the glyphs at all, but I've picked my way through with a dictionary and MTL - the structure of the original is obviously not reflected in any of the English translations. I think English is just too explicit and doesn't have enough "overloading" to capture the depth.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#17

Post by mbivert »

I'll always remember from when I was a teenager, the visual symmetry of the first two sentences of the Tao Te Ching, echoing the "yin-yang symbol"

  道可道，
  非常道。

  名可名，
  非常名。
Here's a translation:

  The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao;
  The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
So much is lost when translating from Chinese.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#18

Post by lolinder »

While we're recommending other works by Le Guin, The Child and the Shadow is near the top of my personal list of Essays That Would Change the World if Only Enough People Would Read Them. It's a deep dive interpretation of a somewhat obscure Hans Christian Andersen story, and her insights about the nature of evil and what it means to grow up shook me and then reshaped my life.

This paragraph is as decent a tl;dr as can exist, but you really should read the whole essay:

> The normal adolescent ceases to project so blithely as the little child did; he realizes that you can't blame everything on the bad guys with the black Stetsons. He begins to take responsibility for his acts and feelings. And with it he often shoulders a terrible load of guilt. He sees his shadow as much blacker, more wholly evil, than it is. The only way for a youngster to get past the paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimples and claws and all – to accept it as himself – as part of himself. The ugliest part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. The guide inward and out again; downward and up again; there, as Bilbo the Hobbit said, and back again. The guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.

> "Lucifer" means the one who carries the light.

https://johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#19

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

ericra wrote: post #7
teraflop wrote: post #5

I love Le Guin's writing in general, and her version of the Tao Te Ching, but it's very misleading to call it a "translation". There's even an endnote saying as much: > This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a…

Yes this is similar to the popular Stephen Mitchell "translation" in that neither spoke the original language. That being said, I'm glad both of them exist. They are interesting and feel much different to me than the literal translations.

Ezra Pound did an awful lot of translation from Japanese, though he didn't know the language. He got rough word-for-word translations from friends, and used them as a starting point.

When poets translate poetry, I believe that this is usually the case.

Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

#20

Post by thadk »

I wasn't sure it was public domain (likely not) but I went to the same source as the others, made a fork, and added the first 10 of her's in this handy Tao Te Ching side-by-side comparison tool a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951207

https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh,uklg/...

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