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Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)

262 points by martythemaniak 2y ago

SSJPython 2y ago
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.
glial 2y ago
Is this in the public domain?
- spicymaki 2y ago
  No, it is still in print. Buy a copy! https://www.amazon.com/Lao-Tzu-Ching-about-Power/dp/1611807247 https://www.amazon.com/Lao-Tzu-Ching-about-Power/dp/16118072...
  - glial 2y ago
    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.
primitivesuave 2y ago
My personal preference in TTC translation is by Gia Fu Feng and Jane English.
- eigenhombre 2y ago
  See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058843 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.
teraflop 2y ago
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.
- ericra 2y ago
  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.
  - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    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.
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    - nine_k 2y ago
      "In prose, the translator is a servant to the original.author; in poetry, a rival" (don't remember the attribution).
- jrochkind1 2y ago
  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!
bradrn 2y ago
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.
hotdogscout 2y ago
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_Guin https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/874602.Ursula_K_Le_G...
- deleted 2y ago
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- cagenut 2y ago
  so is KSR's but I still love the worldbuilding and what-if exploration of the scifi.
- nestorD 2y ago
  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.
- teraflop 2y ago
  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.
- wafflemaker 2y ago
  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).
max4c 2y ago
Highly recommend checking out Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle. Some of the best fantasy I have ever read.
- kej 2y ago
  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.
- michaelmior 2y ago
  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.
mbivert 2y ago
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。 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.
- solidsnack9000 2y ago
  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?
  - sdwr 2y ago
    How does that work? Where's the negation?
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    - jhedwards 2y ago
      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.
    - solidsnack9000 2y ago
      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.
lolinder 2y ago
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. https://johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf https://johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf
- roughly 2y ago
  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.
- leobg 2y ago
  > 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.
- leobg 2y ago
  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.
thadk 2y ago
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951207 https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh,uklg/section:1 https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh,uklg/...
- tasuki 2y ago
  Why hello there!
sitkack 2y ago
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-le-guin-and-me/ 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daf1FH7fWFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daf1FH7fWFk
- duskwuff 2y ago
  Coincidentally - or perhaps not! - Le Guin borrowed the title for The Lathe of Heaven from an awkward late-1800s translation of the Zhuangzi.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    I am just reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_Zhou 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atf7wvPmhjo
mark_l_watson 2y ago
I listened to the audiobook version of this and Ursula Le Guin narrated the book herself. EXCELLENT!
- sitkack 2y ago
  A six minute sample from her reading, https://soundcloud.com/shambhala-publications/tao-te-ching-by-lau-tzu-and https://soundcloud.com/shambhala-publications/tao-te-ching-b...
ergonaught 2y ago
HN: Friend to Pirates. Missed that in the mission statement.
shashanoid 2y ago
The best translation of Tao Te Ching is from OSHO. Hands down a hidden gem -- https://oshoworld.com/tao-upanishad-by-osho-01-127/ https://oshoworld.com/tao-upanishad-by-osho-01-127/
- msephton 2y ago
  Can I confirm this is only in Hindu? Just wanted to make sure I'm not missing an English link on the page.
  - j45 2y ago
    Hindi is the language. Hindu are a people.
  - shashanoid 2y ago
    They're in both Hindi and English
    - msephton 2y ago
      Then I can't seem to find the English versions.
- leobg 2y ago
  It iss… asssertainly… de bessssssst
aksss 2y ago
Plug for Lin Yutang’s translation and his writing in general. Very enjoyable translation for English speakers.
sophyphreak 2y ago
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 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.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > 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?
profsummergig 2y ago
[flagged]
- eigenqwertz 2y ago
  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?
__rito__ 2y ago
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. [0]: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html
HenryBemis 2y ago
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 https://sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm
awanderingmind 2y ago
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-ching-by-an-llm.html https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2024-01-14-tao-te-chin...
d-z-m 2y ago
I would recommend Derek Lin's translation[0]. [0]: https://taoism.net/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-pdf-embed/pdfjslight/web/viewer.html?v=2&file=https://taoism.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Accurate-Translation-of-the-Tao-Te-Ching.pdf https://taoism.net/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-pdf-embed...
kgdiem 2y ago
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. https://dailydao.app/ https://dailydao.app/
8474_s 2y ago
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.
willcipriano 2y ago
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-tzu/ https://thedailyzen.org/2015/05/27/the-empty-boat-by-chuang-... [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kau_chim https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kau_chim
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amai 2y ago
„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.
armoredkitten 2y ago
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.
tasuki 2y ago
I made a moderately popular website to compare the different translations: https://ttc.tasuki.org/ https://ttc.tasuki.org/

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.

glial 2y ago

Is this in the public domain?

spicymaki 2y ago
No, it is still in print. Buy a copy! https://www.amazon.com/Lao-Tzu-Ching-about-Power/dp/1611807247 https://www.amazon.com/Lao-Tzu-Ching-about-Power/dp/16118072...
- glial 2y ago
  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.

primitivesuave 2y ago

My personal preference in TTC translation is by Gia Fu Feng and Jane English.

eigenhombre 2y ago
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058843 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.

teraflop 2y ago

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.

ericra 2y ago
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.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - nine_k 2y ago
    "In prose, the translator is a servant to the original.author; in poetry, a rival" (don't remember the attribution).
jrochkind1 2y ago
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!

bradrn 2y ago

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.

hotdogscout 2y ago

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_Guin https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/874602.Ursula_K_Le_G...

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cagenut 2y ago
so is KSR's but I still love the worldbuilding and what-if exploration of the scifi.
nestorD 2y ago
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.
teraflop 2y ago
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.
wafflemaker 2y ago
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).

max4c 2y ago

Highly recommend checking out Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle. Some of the best fantasy I have ever read.

kej 2y ago
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.
michaelmior 2y ago
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.

mbivert 2y ago

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。 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.

solidsnack9000 2y ago
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?
- sdwr 2y ago
  How does that work? Where's the negation?
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  - jhedwards 2y ago
    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.
  - solidsnack9000 2y ago
    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.

lolinder 2y ago

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. https://johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf https://johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf

roughly 2y ago
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.
leobg 2y ago
> 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.
leobg 2y ago
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.

thadk 2y ago

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951207 https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh,uklg/section:1 https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh,uklg/...

tasuki 2y ago
Why hello there!

sitkack 2y ago

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-le-guin-and-me/ 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daf1FH7fWFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daf1FH7fWFk

duskwuff 2y ago
Coincidentally - or perhaps not! - Le Guin borrowed the title for The Lathe of Heaven from an awkward late-1800s translation of the Zhuangzi.
- sitkack 2y ago
  I am just reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_Zhou 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atf7wvPmhjo

mark_l_watson 2y ago

I listened to the audiobook version of this and Ursula Le Guin narrated the book herself. EXCELLENT!

sitkack 2y ago
A six minute sample from her reading, https://soundcloud.com/shambhala-publications/tao-te-ching-by-lau-tzu-and https://soundcloud.com/shambhala-publications/tao-te-ching-b...

ergonaught 2y ago

HN: Friend to Pirates. Missed that in the mission statement.

shashanoid 2y ago

The best translation of Tao Te Ching is from OSHO. Hands down a hidden gem -- https://oshoworld.com/tao-upanishad-by-osho-01-127/ https://oshoworld.com/tao-upanishad-by-osho-01-127/

msephton 2y ago
Can I confirm this is only in Hindu? Just wanted to make sure I'm not missing an English link on the page.
- j45 2y ago
  Hindi is the language. Hindu are a people.
- shashanoid 2y ago
  They're in both Hindi and English
  - msephton 2y ago
    Then I can't seem to find the English versions.
leobg 2y ago
It iss… asssertainly… de bessssssst

aksss 2y ago

Plug for Lin Yutang’s translation and his writing in general. Very enjoyable translation for English speakers.

sophyphreak 2y ago

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 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.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
> 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?

profsummergig 2y ago

[flagged]

eigenqwertz 2y ago
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?

__rito__ 2y ago

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. [0]: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html

HenryBemis 2y ago

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 https://sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm

awanderingmind 2y ago

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-ching-by-an-llm.html https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2024-01-14-tao-te-chin...

d-z-m 2y ago

I would recommend Derek Lin's translation[0]. [0]: https://taoism.net/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-pdf-embed/pdfjslight/web/viewer.html?v=2&file=https://taoism.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Accurate-Translation-of-the-Tao-Te-Ching.pdf https://taoism.net/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-pdf-embed...

kgdiem 2y ago

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. https://dailydao.app/ https://dailydao.app/

8474_s 2y ago

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.

willcipriano 2y ago

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-tzu/ https://thedailyzen.org/2015/05/27/the-empty-boat-by-chuang-... [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kau_chim https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kau_chim

deleted 2y ago

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amai 2y ago

„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.

armoredkitten 2y ago

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.

tasuki 2y ago

I made a moderately popular website to compare the different translations: https://ttc.tasuki.org/ https://ttc.tasuki.org/