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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)
#62While 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 ca…
Someone here quoted Kafka the other day who said you should only read books that sting you, and affect you like a blow to the head.
From your essay:
> Now that is an extraordinarily cruel story. A story about insanity, ending in humiliation and death. Is it a story for children? Yes, it is. It's a story for anybody who's listening.
In a sea of all those fluffy “stories made for kids”, that are just reflecting back to children the kinds of things authors think children want to hear and give a child nothing solid, nothing to grapple with, this is such a relief for me to read.
Thank you for sharing.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#63While 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 ca…
> I hated it when I was a kid. I hated all the Andersen stories with unhappy endings. That didn't stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering them.
What an awesome insight. Pretty much mirrors that Kafka quote.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#64I'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.
The way i look at it is that written language itself is a translation of an idea onto a page. Something is lost or atleast becomes ambiguous without an interpreter or a teacher or at the least, a detailed commentary.
This is not that much of problem for a casual piece of text but for something that has much more potential impact, it's huge.
Translating laws or perhaps the constitution of a country can all but change it. Religious or spiritual texts too have this problem.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#65I like the Stephen Mitchell translation. [0]
I don't know Chinese but the language is closer to Zen koans and Buddhist texts in English. That helps in internalizing thing in an easier way.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#66I've studied classical Chinese. Ursula Le Guin's translation does not retain much feeling or meaning from the original. I don't fault her on this though because most translations of the Daodejing are like this. I recommend Philip J. Ivanhoe's translation, which has its own flaws as well. If we want to go out into the weeds a bit, I think this text is ethereal in the original but despite this, most translations tend t…
> If this is true, we should expect translations to be vastly different from one another. But despite the Daodejing being the second most translated book in history after the Bible, most translations keep the feel and content of the others. I'm not really familiar with the Tao Te Ching. But isn't the straightforward explanation here that Wang Bi was wrong?
I believe the best answer may be to read the original text. Given the style of the text and the mentioned incredibly contextual structure of Classical Chinese, its very difficult to believe a single definitive reading was intended, or even possible.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#67[flagged]
While I understand that this is an emotional topic for you and others, your comment does not really add anything.
Care to explain why you think it’s bad or share a better alternative?
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#68I 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...
A lot of prose in the Dispossessed is great and there's nothing impersonal or robotic about it, quite the opposite. "We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no gene…
From the same book, the "it is our suffering that brings us together" passage has burned itself into my mind and has often been a comfort in dark times. I can't imagine finding it impersonal or robotic. Frank and unadorned, perhaps. And both of these quotes are spoken by a person who is specifically noted to have a very blunt, concrete way of speaking. She could be more poetical when she chose to be.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#69While 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 ca…
That’s a beautiful essay, thank you very much.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#70I've studied classical Chinese. Ursula Le Guin's translation does not retain much feeling or meaning from the original. I don't fault her on this though because most translations of the Daodejing are like this. I recommend Philip J. Ivanhoe's translation, which has its own flaws as well. If we want to go out into the weeds a bit, I think this text is ethereal in the original but despite this, most translations tend t…
I have a feeling that Le Guin didn't speak or read Chinese when creating her version, I think she outlines the process in the preface. That might explain the similarities you've noticed?