Should be mandatory reading for corporate managers.
Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
11–20 of 106 posts
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#12I remember reading Stephen Mitchell's version waaaay back in 1991, when I was still young and impressionable. There was one line that really blew me away in his translation, and I might be remembering it slightly incorrectly: "The Tao is older than God".
Stephen Mitchell's translation is excellent.
I also like Ursula K Le Guin's. It's not a good general-purpose text, but it's quite interesting which meanings she draws out of the text.
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#13I've said this here before, but Ursula Le Guin's rendition is one of the best
I started by reading Michael LaFargue version, and it is pretty good delivering a basic understanding of the text. I can understand acient Chinese text pretty well, and the original, somehow still feels different from all these translations, but I guess this does not matter that much to a taoist.
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Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#14For me it's the DC Lau translation. Straightforward and clear, or as clear as you can get with this thing.
For the real deal, see https://ctext.org/dao-de-jing?en=off
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#15My personal favorite is Kerson and Rosemary Huang's translation, which includes some of the historical background for the hexagrams and is a very spare rendition that always seemed to me the closest in spirit to the original.
The book with the hexagrams is the I Ching, not the Tao Te Ching.
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#16I remember reading Stephen Mitchell's version waaaay back in 1991, when I was still young and impressionable. There was one line that really blew me away in his translation, and I might be remembering it slightly incorrectly: "The Tao is older than God".
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/litthe/article-abstract/34/4/486/60...
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#17I remember reading Stephen Mitchell's version waaaay back in 1991, when I was still young and impressionable. There was one line that really blew me away in his translation, and I might be remembering it slightly incorrectly: "The Tao is older than God".
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…
9 is my favorite, too.
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#18[deleted]
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#19I've said this here before, but Ursula Le Guin's rendition is one of the best
She had the humility to admit she knew little about ancient Chinese and the courage to go ahead and venture a translation anyway, striving to touch something deeper than language.
Her success is extremely laudable for this reason.
Re: Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989)
#20None of these translations work if you really want to understand the work itself and not the author's interpretation. For example, in the Analects,『學而優則仕』is translated by Legge as "The student, having completed his learning, should apply himself to be an officer." This isn't what the sentence says. It could be what it means but that should be up to the reader. (This is a common phrase in Chinese and has a completly different meaning today although it's hard to say if this meaning comes from the understanding of this text or if the text is simply being used as a source for the current meaning of the phrase.)
This is an issue with translations in general but is more of an issue in classical Chinese. Tao Te Ching is particularly bad in this regard. Just read more than one translation and you will see.