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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/...
Is this in the public domain?
No, it is still in print. Buy a copy! https://www.amazon.com/Lao-Tzu-Ching-about-Power/dp/16118072...
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> 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.
Agreed, it rarely is with these kinds of stories and teachings. The Iliad comes to mind. I tried multiple translations but they all feel (horribly) off. I put some of them side by side and started "cherry picking" sentences that felt better together.
The challenge and beauty of these kinds of writing is the brutal subjective experience of (personal) horror and enlightenment which can be destroyed with a few words that don't fit the 'phenomenal' flow of the reader, who is tracking through the writers narration of the readers (personal) space-time experience and his perception of (inter-personal) life. It's (sorry) fucking insane to translate these books, I'd finish and start again over and over.
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Thank you for your reply. Let me think about it when I have time and get back to you! :) Are you Chinese, btw? I don't know if that's relevant, I'm just curious
My pleasure; no, I'm not Chinese at all: I'm actually French
Chinese glyphs don't really tell a story, any more than the etymology of words in other languages tell a story; if a language was really "more expressive" it should display results consistent with that, such as, for example: it is significantly harder to learn (then we must consider Finnish or Hungarian as more expressive than Chinese, say); also, speakers of it should be significantly more accomplished and as a group occupy a higher standard of living/intellectualism than speakers of other languages; ethnic groups where those languages dominate should be "genetically superior" to ethnic groups where less expressive languages dominate.
Obviously all such tests are problematic haha! :) But I think we can see that by playing such thought experiments there isn't really any difference between all human languages. However, we could compare the "language" of chimps, or other beings who we have ascribed language to, to rank "below" human languages on these scales and see clear and significant trends consistent with the tests, for example, outlined above.
I could go on, but I think it's fairly easy to make various cases for the essential expressive equivalence of large majorities of human languages. And I think it's harmful, abusive and bigoted to pretend superiority of one language/culture over others especially without basis.