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。
The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
I'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 to be quite similar. Wang Bi, the oldest commentary writer and popularizer of the Daodejing, argued that the text supports a large number of divergent meanings. 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.
On another topic, translators usually translate the text as poetry when most of the text is best translated as prose. The text itself is a work of philosophy and not poetry, hence the author's name ending in 子 and the subject matter about correctly running a state and following the Dao. Although the text is doubtlessly more mystical than other Chinese philosophy texts such as The Analects of Confucius, in China today, the Daodejing is correctly placed next to the other great philosophers of ancient Chinese philosophy: Confucius, Mencius, and Zhuangzi.
And finally, it's important to note that classical Chinese rarely used punctuation marks like those we find it modern reproductions like you see here: https://www.daodejing.org/1.html . Commas and periods are usually modern additions to aid in reading but usually did not appear in the original. Importantly, we have evidence that even the chapter breaks are themselves mostly inserted, that the original Laozi did not put them there. If we take out these punctuation marks, the text lends itself to still more possible translations and interpretations. And this ignores the inherently inexact and inferential nature of classical Chinese, which itself supports many translations.
Someday in the distant future we'll have a hundred unique lenses on this text, but today we have relatively meager pickings. And they all sort of sound like Ursula Le Guin's translation.
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.
Do you feel as strongly about king James version of the bible?
How is that relevant? Unlike Le Guin, the translators of the KJV knew the original languages.
To a degree. But a lot of the weirdness of the KJV (like how it mentions "unicorns" nine times despite the ancient Hebrews having no concept of that mythological beast) seem to be because the translators were also using a lot of the existing Latin Vulgate translation (where the Hebrew word now believed to mean "auroch" was mistranslated as "unicornis" as the Hebrew literally means "horned animal")
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.
contempt /kən-tĕmpt′/ noun
The feeling or attitude of regarding someone or something as inferior, base, or worthless; scorn.
The state of being despised or dishonored. "was held in contempt by his former friends."
Open disrespect or willful disobedience of the authority of a court of law or legislative body.
None of these definitions match with your usage of contempt and is an inappropriate use of the word. Your post "shows contempt" for English. Ironic.
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.
If you all pardon an off topic digression...
IMHO, Euclid's definition of a straight line in today's terms would be "a line that has the same direction on its entire length". His definition of a plane angle would be "a plane angle is the difference between the directions of two straight lines that have a common end in one point".
What are Playfair's and Hilbert's definitions?
The problem I have with that version of Euclid's definition is that direction is not defined.
Playfair interprets Euclid as follows, I am using my own words here, a straight line is that figure which has the property that if it intersects its moved copy at 2 points it necessarily coincides with it everywhere. "Movement" is undefined, it has to be an isometry.
Hilbert's is more abstract and based upon sets. Line is a primitive (undefined name) that interacts with two other undefined names (points and planes) according defined relations (lies on, lies between and is_congruent).
Just to nit-pick, I think he meant number of different translations, not number of languages it was translated into. I doubt there are multiple translations of Little Prince into each of those languages.
What makes it important for this book is that the source is from classical Chinese which is far more ambiguous than say the French that Little Prince was written in.
Consider the first sentence: 道可道非常道 名可名非常名. It's written as two parallel structures, with 道 replaced by 名 in the second half. In both halves, 道/名 could be functioning as a verb or a noun in any of its usages.
Let's consider 道: amongst other things, 道 as a noun could mean road, path, way, principle, reason, skill, art, but also as a general class of objects like rivers, barriers, etc. 道 as a verb can mean to travel, to say, to express, etc. And of course, as a result of this text, 道 stands as a shortcut for the entire text - more than just a principle, but The Principle, more than just a way, but The Way.
Even the other words aren't simple. 可 is often just thought of as part of 可以 to mean may nowadays, but 可 itself means can, may, able to, to approve, to permit, to suit, certainly, etc. 非常 is an odd one, as I'm sure the modern day meaning (extremely) completely throws you off track. 非 on its own means not, wrong, to not be, to blame, etc. 常 means always, ever, constant, often, frequently, common, general, etc.
I'm not saying any of these examples I'm giving now are good translations, but you could, for example, have translations that are diverse and extreme as "the road which could be traveled is not often traveled", "to travel on something that could be a road is rarely the correct way", "travelling on something that might be a road but was not always a road", "the road you may travel on is often not a road" or "the road you may travel on is never the right way". None of these are like any existing translations I've seen, but that was done on purpose, because they're all legitimate (but unlikely) interpretations of the original.
If you look at the meanings given in this translation: "The way you can go isn’t the real way." In the same repo, Jane English's version is "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." My bilingual version translates it as "The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao" (James Legge, 1815-1897).
You can see that the linked-to translation has chosen a quite different approach to at least two others. Which is correct? Perhaps all of them, perhaps none of them. There's a reason why these texts are considered so enlightening - there's no one correct answer, you have to really meditate on the meaning and come to your own conclusion.
But anyway, back to the point - the nature of the text means that if you're reading a translation it'll miss a lot of the inherent ambiguities of the text and instead direct your thinking down specific lines. That's why, for this text the number of different translations is more important than number of languages it's translated into.
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.
difficult to believe a single definitive reading was intended
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.
I've dabbled in classical chinese as well. The language is quite ambiguous and the text is as well, you could look at it with very many angles. The straightforward explanation is that other translators probably influenced each other a lot and that caused the translation similarities
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?
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 translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
The foreward (or was it an afterword?) in the edition I have on my shelf has quite a bit on how she produced it, and it is very interesting.
It was a process of very intensively studying and comparing all existing English translations she could find, using the Carus Chinese character-by-character translation as a sort of rosetta stone. While of course using her own literary sensibilities to phrasing too, as an author.
I could easily believe this would result in a product that is a more faithful conversion to English than many translations. It's interesting to think about how this in some ways can combine and synthesize various subjectivities over time in a way that you actually couldn't do if you read the original language and believed your "own" take on the original translation was the "correct" one!
In the forward she also names a scholar of the Tao Te Ching (who was able to read and study in the original language) she had been in communication with for advice, who had complimented and supported her work. (although of course LeGuin takes responsibility for all errors or misconceptions!)
I wonder if any other conversions/renditions/translations have been done of other works through similar method, I guess if any they would be to other ancient texts (the bible?) that have had many translations. [I don't think we really have a good word for what she did, since it's not really a thing done much, so I understand the poster using the word "translation" although OP does not and just says "English version by" -- but we jump to figure that means a "translation", right?]
It doesn't look like the foreward (I think unless it was an afterword, I don't have the book in front of it me!) that discusses this is included in this online (and presumably copyright-violating pirated?) copy? If you can find a copy (pirated or not I don't judge) of the foreward, which isn't very long, where she describes her process, I definitely recommend it! (Or is it here?)
Something about the process seems especially interesting to the HN crowd to me... I want to say it's perhaps about "abstraction"?
If you were to take Le Guin's rendition and compare it with any other English language translations of your choice, it would be in the spirit of her project, and I'm sure she would approve and think it would lead you to greater understanding of the work!
I could easily believe this would result in a product that is a more faithful conversion to English than many translations. It's interesting to think about how this in some ways can combine and synthesize various subjectivities over time in a way that you actually couldn't do if you read the original language and believed your "own" take on the original translation was the "correct" one!
The problem with that is that you can "creatively interpret" meaning into the text that wasn't there in the original. [ADDED: Not trying to imply she was deliberately mistranslating it, just that it's very easy to think about a word's varied meanings in your own language and not only miss the connected meanings in the other language, but also see false connections that were never there.] Leaving aside the problems with classical Chinese for a moment, the problem is that words in languages map to concepts in our heads, and these rarely correspond exactly to another word in another language. Take "computer", we might say "ordinateur" in French or "电脑" (literally "electric brain") in Mandarin but neither of these translations are able to capture the older meaning in English of a person who calculates something, which would be "calculateur" in French or "计算着" (lit. "person who calculates") in Mandarin.
Going to the text again, the main word is 道 which means way, path, principle, etc. and many more. These are usually translated as way for this text, but just that word alone has many other meanings in English that wouldn't be translated back into Chinese as 道 - for instance "way" in English could mean "method" or "possibility", but neither would make sense as a translation for 道. Another way of looking at it might be the colour chart for men vs women, which is meant as a joke but has a serious side showing that some groups of people split up and categorise things very differently.
What I dislike about her first line is the word "real". The translation is already kind of "out there" a bit (in line with some of the ones I listed in another post as possible interpretations due to the textual ambiguities, but which differed a lot from how most people interpreted the text). To me, "real" isn't implied by any of the words. I can see how she got there, because 道 is understood as "the one true way", but as a mental abstraction from a physical path that you should walk done to live life safely, to the "path" that you should walk spiritually to "not stray off the path". The problem is that none of the words in the text are concerned about truth vs lies, reality vs imaginary, rather this abstract concept of "the way". To translate "isn't the real way" she is using 非 for "not/isn't", seemingly completely ignoring 常 "always, constant, often, usual" and imbuing the already ambiguous 道 with another meaning that isn't really there.
[ADDED 2: Just re-reading this again, and it sounds a bit too critical. I think my point is not that her translation is "bad" or anything like that, and it can definitely be used to think about the text in ways that other translations might not lead you to. But I wouldn't use this as my primary source, and where her translation differs substantially from others it should be an indication that there's something particularly difficult to translate, and so you definitely need to consider other translations at that point and ask yourself why they are different.]
Thanks for your comments!
I'm afraid I'm not in the city where my copy of the Le Guin version is on my bookshelf, but the printed version has per-chapter authors notes at the end for many chapters where she often discusses her word choices -- I'm not sure if the notes included in this online version capture those or not? If I remember right, there were a few footnotes (which i'm thinking may be what's captured in OP), but then separately additional notes at the end which I'm not sure are captured here.
I'm curious if she says anything additional in foreward or notes about her choice of "real". Obviously she was aware it was not a choice other translators typically made. When I'm back home, I'll look!
Googling, the scholar who approved of Le Guin's work and worked with her somewhat on it (in some places I see him credited as a contributor to the Tao Te Ching rendition), is J. P. "Sandy" Seaton, who on his own seems to have produced plenty of other well-regarded translations of classical chinese poetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_P._Seaton
Ezra Pound translated Chinese poetry using a somewhat similar method. [0] He did not know Chinese at all. Le Guin was likely aware of his work as the translations were well known and even today are included in anthologies of his poems.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathay_(poetry_collection)
Great points, thought provoking! I think LLMs are about to usher in a new era for academic translation. Obviously they have their faults, but philosophy in particular suffers to a much greater degree from language barriers than the layman might guess, so I think there’s a lot of room for improvement. In particular, many German and French authors have works that haven’t been translated yet, and, more relevantly, Chinese philosophy is still only tangentially related to European philosophy. When books do get translated, they often are translated with a significant delay, obviously leading to issues for people trying to form a scientific consensus.
I think the work of both great thinkers like Husserl and more underappreciated ones like Edith Stein would benefit greatly from LLM-assisted term-standardization and overall synchronized translation, with their original German-language works fed in alongside the translations we do have, for automated comparison purposes.
The academy is efficient, but IMO we’re about to see a scientific revolution in the humanities — aka cognitive science.
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.
"In prose, the translator is a servant to the original.author; in poetry, a rival" (don't remember the attribution).
but it's very misleading to call it a "translation"
Only if you completely abandon most people's understanding of the word. I don't understand the point of this comment.
The author said it herself.
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...
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 generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere"
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.
Hard disagree. I find Le Guin's prose breathtakingly gorgeous. And then it hits you like a brick wall.
The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got threequarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.
(The Dispossessed)
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).
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.
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.
I strongly disagree. Her essays (?!) and short story might be a good place to demonstrate the breath and width of her style.
The one exeption to this, for my taste, might be Earthsea, parts of it definitely fell short of its reputation as far as I am concerned.
so is KSR's but I still love the worldbuilding and what-if exploration of the scifi.
I can't imagine anyone loving "the idea" of Le Guin who hasn't read her books. What an idea. It's not like she's famous enough to have acolytes who spout her stuff without having read it. And what's "the idea" of Le Guin? Just that she's a female sci fi writer? I'm missing the implication.
I love her books and have for over 20 years.
And I can't imagine that any author looks good when subjected to the "GoodReads snippets" treatment. Can you find an example of an author coming off well? What snippets get upvoted by people? It's all going to sound like trite stuff, for any author.
The best translation of Tao Te Ching is from OSHO. Hands down a hidden gem --
Can I confirm this is only in Hindu? Just wanted to make sure I'm not missing an English link on the page.
They're in both Hindi and English
Then I can't seem to find the English versions.
Hindi is the language.
Hindu are a people.
It iss… asssertainly… de bessssssst
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.
That’s a beautiful essay, thank you very much.
Christ, I think it might’ve taken me to my late 30s to really do that work - that’s a hell of a succinct summary of the art of growing up.
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.
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.
I love Ursula Le Guin's writing so damn much. I am reading, "Lathe of Heaven" right now, such a great book to come off of Sula by Toni Morrison.
Maybe if I pull the right strings, I can get reincarnated as one of Luisito's nose hairs, https://luisurrea.com/2018/01/tolfink-was-here-on-ursula-k-l...
Then she terrorized us by bringing Toni Morrison into the room to meet us.
Coincidentally - or perhaps not! - Le Guin borrowed the title for The Lathe of Heaven from an awkward late-1800s translation of the Zhuangzi.
I am just reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_Zhou now (author of Zhuangzi). At the beginning of every chapter (in Lathe of Heaven) is a quote or extract from Zhuang Zhou's writing.
I just found a short chat by Kim Stanley Robinson where he mentions Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atf7wvPmhjo
Highly recommend checking out Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle. Some of the best fantasy I have ever read.
I recently started reading it and I love it. Her style of storytelling is very unique. It feels very meandering in a way, but rather than that making reading feel like a drag, I feel like I end up getting more color on the world she built.
And, depending on when you read it, there may be more because she returned to it years later. In total there are five novels and nine short stories.
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...
I already own a copy! I was just wondering whether it was against HN guidelines to post the entirety of a copyrighted work. Perhaps I should have been more direct.
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/...
Why hello there!
My personal preference in TTC translation is by Gia Fu Feng and Jane English.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058843 for a link to a text-only version; however, IMO their "translation" lies as much in Jane English's photos and the entire book presentation, as it does in the purely English language rendition of the text. I prefer other translations (including Le Guin's) for just the words, but Feng/English is still my favorite overall.
I listened to the audiobook version of this and Ursula Le Guin narrated the book herself. EXCELLENT!
A six minute sample from her reading, https://soundcloud.com/shambhala-publications/tao-te-ching-b...
Read this translation as a kid when I read the texts of the major world religions. I never "got into it" but I found Kau chim[0] helps to relax when you are nervous about the future, even if you know it doesn't work.
My favorite bit from Taoism: https://thedailyzen.org/2015/05/27/the-empty-boat-by-chuang-...
I made a moderately popular website to compare the different translations: https://ttc.tasuki.org/
I made an interactive app with Jeff Pepper’s translation; I really enjoyed how he did step by step translations with literal English, this was the inspiration for the app.
HN: Friend to Pirates.
Missed that in the mission statement.
I would recommend Derek Lin's translation[0].
[0]: https://taoism.net/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-pdf-embed...
A relevant quote from Harold Bloom (from the introduction to Le Guin’s Collected Poems):
Le Guin in her version certainly captures the terseness and the aesthetic sensibility of the Tao. Scholars tell me that her work is disputable, but I see nothing to dispute. Her total aspiration is meaning, and her transpositions, as she calls her versions of the text, strengthen meaning.
How true this all is, I really don’t know. Le Guin herself admits that, for the first chapter at least, ‘A satisfactory translation […] is, I believe, perfectly impossible’. I personally like the aesthetics of her version, at least.
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...
As someone who just finished reading her book City of Illusions, this is a fun coincidence. The first chapter of (her interpretation of) the Tao Te Ching features in the book, and the bit about "two things, one origin, but different in name" is a central aspect of the book.
City of Illusions is one of her earlier works, but I found it a great read, and definitely could see the throughline to The Left Hand of Darkness, which would be published a couple years later.
„So the wise soul governing people would empty their minds, fill their bellies, weaken their wishes, strengthen their bones, keep people unknowing, unwanting, keep the ones who do know from doing anything.“
That is Putinism in a nutshell.
Plug for Lin Yutang’s translation and his writing in general. Very enjoyable translation for English speakers.
I 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.
There's a very interesting book related to this called "Christ the Eternal Tao" by Hieromonk Damascene that looks at the Tao Te Ching from the perspective of Orthodox Christianity.
I quickly searched the comments and noticed there there is no mention of the James Legge translation. I checked them side-by-side for the first couple of pages, and I like the Legge translation more (not trashing Le Guin's though).
For anyone who may be interested: https://sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm
I find it somewhat interesting and providing European perspective. Perhaps the text is hard to translate due cultural frame of reference being so obscure and distant: more that Homer and enmeshed in society was isolated from the West for millenia.
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?
How does that work? Where's the negation?
This is not even getting to that; but that is actually pretty simple, to be fair.
The negation is: 非常道
非 -- fei, this has been a negator for a very long time in Chinese
常 -- chang, this means something like common, usual, normal, or nominal (I suspect that translating this as "eternal" is a creative move on the part of some westerner)
道 -- dao, the way again
Nowadays, 非常 as a compound is used to mean "extraordinary" ("not normal", "exceptional"); but it is not hard to see how it might be taken to negate 道 here.
Interestingly the 常 was originally 恒, meaning “constant,” in the oldest manuscripts. It got changed to 常 because it was taboo to write any character appearing in the given name of an Enperor, and Emperor Wen of Han had the given name 恒.
They left out the second half of the sentence: 非 [not] 常 [eternal] 道 [way]
Classical Chinese is highly contextual, and characters take on different meanings depending on the position in the sentence and the narrative context, hence the second instance of 道 meaning "speak, expound" instead of "way, method".
My favorite instance of this is from the Zhuangzi: 物 [thing] 物 [thing] 而 [and/under those conditions] 不 [not] 物 [thing] 于 [among] 物 [things]
Which translates to "treat the things of the world as things, but don't be a thing among them" which means that you should use strategic thinking to avoid becoming a victim of circumstances.
I suppose that wenyan is not a normal spoken language [1], but a form of a literary encoding, more like poetry meeting stenography, and a way to crystallize the meaning without excessive syntax.
English translation requires many more words because a "normal", vernacular Chinese rendition would also require many more words.
My suggestion is to assume quotes:
"Dao which is 'dao' is not true dao", that is, the mere word "dao" (and, by extension, any more descriptive and explanatory words) is insufficient to convey the meaning of true dao.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_an...
It was a bona fide spoken language at the time the Daodejing was written. Likely sounding very little like modern Chinese.
Well, probably not, no -- I'm pretty sure the Daodejing was written in a literary language quite distinct from any spoken language at that time. This used to be something readily found all over the world.
It was likely an inflected language at the time it was spoken, and they just left the tedious grammar bits out when writing.
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, chief, first (occasion, thing, etc)). In addition to the usual meanings, we could derive some further meanings, coherent in this context, with a "philosophical" approach to life (e.g. "the state of mind of someone who moves forward, one step at a time, without rushing").
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 poetical traditions, and many other quirks.
It isn't just Chinese -> English that loses information. The other direction does too. They are two languages that spent thousands of years estranged from each other, so, unlike the European languages which are all different but coevolved, they are both different from each other in a lot of ways. The richness of languages that have grown apart from each other inhibits translations in both directions not just because the concepts in the original language are not precisely present in the other, but also because you can't help but invoke the rich concepts of the target language that don't match.
I'm sure a Chinese person reading just this very post could write about the implications carried in the word "continent" and how that is wrapped around a lot of cultural assumptions around how things are separated (if you don't know what I mean, google around for discussions around "how many continents are there"), the etymology of "quirk" and its many nuances, the connotations embedded in the word "estranged" and why I chose that one over, say, the more neutral "separated", the implications behind "coevolved", and make English sound as amazing as English speakers make Chinese sound... and that would be because both are correct.
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.
Yes, definitely. People who think studying "dead" languages is a loss of time are foolish.
There's even a somewhat "gain" of information which can chaotically appear in translation. For example if we decompose "道" as "walking" and "head" and translate it in French we get "une tête qui marche", which means both "a walking head" or more interestingly, "a working head."
But it's not because English is richer than commonly believed than Chinese isn't still more spacious, which I do believe for multiple reasons, one of them being that it's a pictographic language:
Some of the "etymology" is more readily available, so to speak. But we could also consider "hidden etymology" -- ancient character forms -- which, as for Western languages, would enrich the interpretations.Some relate Tao to Logos from the Greek, and as in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. The meaning of Logos is quite complex[0], and the typical translation into most languages as "word" is grossly inadequate.
And so, if Christ is the Incarnate Logos, and Tao is Logos, then Christ is the Incarnate Tao. And John 14:6 reads "I am the _way_, and the truth, and the life.". (Hieromonk Damascene has written a book on exactly this subject[1].)
These have also been related to Rta, Asha, and Ma'at.
[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=lo%2Fgos&la=gre...
[1] https://a.co/d/0btyDy8i
One big difference, if I understand correctly, considering that I think I understand Tao better than Logos, is that Tao is definitely purposeless and kind of pluralistic, which seems rooted in Chinese culture, whereas Logos seems to me to lean more toward purposive and not pluralistic. Like, Chinese culture has a big thing for filial piety--one's ancestors, as your creators, with the lack of a 'central power', seem to catch up some of the sovereignty that logos would attribute closer to the divine. In Chinese culture, it's not some weird divine abstract thing you owe existence to, it's just your ancestors.
Taoism seems to talk of 'heaven and earth', but 'heaven' seems like the collective of little sovereignties like the emperor, your parents, and simple the pattern of nature itself, the pluralistic part. 'Heaven' doesn't seem like a monolithic entity.
In regard to being purposeless, purpose seems acknowledged as emergent, and subservient, like 'the way that can be named is not the eternal way'--there's naming, purpose, and then subservience. It's harder to think of more concrete examples, and it's a bit easy to confuse an acknowledgment of pattern with purpose, but taoism seems rather critical of purposive action on the whole.
That is not really translation, though, once you start doing that.
the way has many ways
yet are not the way
(I'm sure someone can put on their yoda hat and do even better!)
My long-aborted attempt at a poetic translation of the first few lines:
The Dao is beyond words. The reality is ineffable.
Thank you for sharing this
I was gifted with one translation of the Tao Te Ching. While a translation in hindsight I found it to be one that resonated the most.
I am pretty sure this is an online version of it but will have to check.
“ The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.”
https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu01.html
The really impossible thing to translate into English here is that 道 was also the verb “to say.” So 道可道 is a pun that could mean “the way that can be trod” or “the way that can be said.”
So... Roadable road?
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.
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 ambiguity more as a feature than as a bug. Classical Chinese authors seems to have purposefully relied on it for example.
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.
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]).
Out of curiosity, do you mean that well-known disagreements among scholars have structured the legal system in essentially-Islamic regions?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Heaven
I'm not sure about legal systems but the religion itself has several positions on many questions. The way this happens is that 2 or more qualified scholars disagree on a ruling based on their reading and analysis of primary texts. This results in two or more rulings. Sometimes, they're equally valid and this more or less created the 4 schools of practice in Sunni Islam. Sometimes, even within a school, there are differences of opinion. The distinctions are usually minor but for someone who is observant, it gives them options when following the stronger position is exceedingly difficult. The technical term for this is a Rukhsa (dispensation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rukhsa
This is probably why we put so much emphasis on precedent over the actual text of the law. Likewise with the bible, perhaps not as much with the christians at least these days, but the Jews have their talmud that interprets the book ad nauseum through centuries of rabbis spitballing their interpretation of the base text, ending up with things like a string hung from telephone polls to represent the walls of the temple to loophole around sabbath laws.
It's there in Islam too but the interpretive techniques are mostly confined to finding rulings about things that didn't exist back then. eg. Commerce over the internet, Alms calculation on money (as opposed to wealth) etc.
I have heard something about the Jewish history of making these kinds of interpretations to "work around" scriptural laws. I think it was in a book by Israel Shahak where I first came across it.
In any case, yes. Precedent is important and even though it's not fully reliable, we will usually have a lot of stuff that cancels out errors.
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.
I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true. It all depends on how your mind works, or what statement you have.
Do you require ambiguity, and inferentialness to be explicitly clothed as such, as in Chinese, or can you take the words themselves, that can be concrete meanings, and use them as a jumping point to infer on your own? As in English.
There's also a very strong way in which this statement is not true, because if we assume that the text contains transcendental universal truths, saying that it can only be accurately expressed in Chinese, is suggesting either that it's a uniquely Chinese truth, so it's not universal, or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullshit and not true.
So I think rather than thinking of a translation, think instead of what statement do you have of the truths reflected in a particular form in that original Chinese text. What statement do you have of those truths in whatever material you're working with, be it a language or something else?
And it's funny to talk about much being lost, because the text itself readily and repeatedly admits that the truths it talks about cannot be accurately expressed. In fact, it highlights the limitations of language, of the original Chinese it was written in, to accurately and fully convey what it is talking about.
So I think it's nonsense to say that, “oh, so much is lost when translating from Chinese”, and it's entirely the wrong way to talk about it, and kind of a lazy worshipfulness that's unworthy of that, I think, in this context entirely.
So liberated from those constraints, I think you can be free to consider, well, what is it talking about? And also to think about that and come up with your own translation.
So back to the original point, I don't think you have to lose something when you're putting it in English. Here's my attempt:
The path that can be walked is not the AllPath. The word that can be said is not the AllWord.
Btw, What does your regular Chinese person think about this book? I know it’s very popular in the west. Is it popular in Chinese speaking regions as well? What do people think about it?
Well, as stated a few moments ago in a previous comment:
I'd be (genuinely) curious if you had more precise inputs as to why Chinese language (pictographic) wouldn't be more expressive than Western's (alphabet-based): I think there's reasons to not be so quickly dismissive.Well, aren't you for example losing here the echo to the daiji? With all its "philosophical" significance?
A few isolated data points: most Chinese persons I know consider classical Chinese "old unreadable stuff" and don't seem to care much for it. But plenty of Westerners (Europe) don't care much for old Western texts either (e.g. Iliad, Plato, Bible).
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
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.
Thank you so much for this insight! I like to understand it as a comment on language itself: our words and names will never be enough to actually capture the eternal. The eternal can never be trimmed down to words.