Since this thread is full of Tao Te Ching enthusiasts, someone might enjoy this blog post of mine: https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2024-01-14-tao-te-chin...
Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
91–100 of 125 posts
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#92I'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.
I had a conversation with Claude about this, and it mentioned:
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which use mathematics to prove limitations within mathematical systems, echo some of the self-referential aspects of the Dao De Jing passage.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#93I'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.
Yes, so much is lost. 道可道 This is three words: 道 -- dao, it means literally a road or path; metaphorically, it used to mean a spiritual way of life 可 -- ke, this generally is used today to indicate capability, actuality or acceptability: something is possible or something is actually true 道 -- same as the first one Now how do we translate this into ten or more English words?
The Dao is beyond words. The reality is ineffable.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Something is lost or at least becomes ambiguous without an interpreter or a teacher or at the least, a detailed commentary The problem with teachers or detailed commentaries, is that they may not agree with each others, or could be too narrow or even wrong: as as student looking for knowledge, you wouldn't be able to distinguish valuable interpretations from limited ones. I think it might be judicious to look as am…
That sounds sensible from the point of view regular scientific enquiry. However, from a religious perspective, I'd think that the student has more chance of being wrong than the combined total of the majority of scholars in the tradition especially when the claim is that the original text was revealed rather than written.
Otoh, even in cases where this is strictly held (eg. Islam), there at strong traditions which explicitly regard this as a feature (eg. Disagreements between scholars is a blessing to the common man) and a system of the strong positions and dispensations for many legal positions have been codified.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#95I'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…
> Religious or spiritual texts too have this problem.
That's not simply a function of translation between languages; some of the ideas in religious texts resist even translation into language. In the Buddhist tradition I used to be involved with, I was told that only texts with a continuous practice lineage reaching back to the author can be relied on, and even then, only if you have a teacher who has practiced in that lineage.
Accordingly, none of the sutras were considered reliable. Interesting, engaging, even beautiful, sure; but if the lineage is lost, then nobody can be sure what they mean. Texts by more recent authors, from whom there is still a living practice lineage, were preferred.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now how do we translate this into ten or more English words? I think it's fair to say that written Chinese simply allows to encode more information than English. So it's "physically impossible": translation from Chinese is a lossy operation. We can only provide a reasonable approximation. Even at the character level, some information just can't get through. "道" for example contains both "辶" (to walk) and "首" (head,…
Native English speakers, and especially native English speakers who do not have fluency in another language, also often have a "familiarity breeds contempt" situation going on with their own language and are not aware of the fact that English is also a rich language, filled with cultural allusions, subtleties in the connotations versus the denotations, rich histories than span continents behind many words, distinct p…
> not aware of the fact that English is also a rich language
Quite. For any given language, it’s always those who either least understand it (the ‘Japanese grammar is easy’ people) or speak it natively (the ‘English lacks the poetry of other languages’ types) who underestimate its complexity. Not to mention the additional effect of exoticism.
Anyone who says ‘[language] encodes more information than [language]’ is in most cases talking rubbish — especially when comparing two languages that seem to encode quite enough to be preferred by much of the word.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#97I would recommend Derek Lin's translation[0].
[0]: https://taoism.net/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-pdf-embed...
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Something is lost or at least becomes ambiguous without an interpreter or a teacher or at the least, a detailed commentary The problem with teachers or detailed commentaries, is that they may not agree with each others, or could be too narrow or even wrong: as as student looking for knowledge, you wouldn't be able to distinguish valuable interpretations from limited ones. I think it might be judicious to look as am…
That sounds sensible from the point of view regular scientific enquiry. However, from a religious perspective, I'd think that the student has more chance of being wrong than the combined total of the majority of scholars in the tradition especially when the claim is that the original text was revealed rather than written. Otoh, even in cases where this is strictly held (eg. Islam), there at strong traditions which ex…
> However, from a religious perspective, I'd think that the student has more chance of being wrong than the combined total of the majority of scholars in the tradition
Knowledge is a double edged sword: once you know about something, discovering new viewpoints about that thing becomes difficult. "子" (son, child, small thing, seed) is a respectful suffix in Chinese (e.g. 老子 (Laozi), 孔子 (Confucius), 天子[0]).
> and a system of the strong positions and dispensations for many legal positions have been codified.
Out of curiosity, do you mean that well-known disagreements among scholars have structured the legal system in essentially-Islamic regions?
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't fault her on this I do. She didn't know Chinese. For her to attempt a translation (by mashing up earlier translations) shows contempt for Chinese culture and literature. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0qtj.12
I don't think Ursula Le Guin ever called it a translation herself - she was pretty clear about it being a rendition of existing translations.
Indeed, she was very explicit that she interpreted it, and she specifically said several times in her rendition that this was not a translation because she only had word-by-word translations and other people's translations to go off.
Re: Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
#100I'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…
> the Daodejing being the second most translated book in history after the Bibl I know this is difficult to quantify accurately, but Wikipedia lists Daodejing behind the Little Prince and Pinocchio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_works_by_nu...
Thanks for the very interesting list.
I was expecting Euclid's Elements to be up there. Perhaps the filter "literary work" disqualified it.
If you all pardon an off topic digression, the nebulosity of the definition of a straight line in elements has always bothered me. I wanted something free of reference to a physical artifact (straight edge, taught rope etc) and free of algebra. Its sometimes defined in terms of reflections or rotations or translations, but then that begs the question what is a straight axis (or direction of translation). Playfair's version is almost satisfactory. The standard I guess is Hilbert's.