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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
by 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 agoYes, 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 agoHow does that work? Where's the negation?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jhedwards 2y agoThey 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 agoThis 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.
- canjobear 2y agoInterestingly 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.
- xarope 2y agothe way has many ways yet are not the way (I'm sure someone can put on their yoda hat and do even better!)
- t-3 2y agoMy long-aborted attempt at a poetic translation of the first few lines: The road which can be walked is well trodden The name which can be said is said often The universe was born with no witness But we can know the origin of everything in it
- mbivert 2y ago> Now how do we translate this into ten or more English words? I think it's fair to say that written Chinese simply allows to encode more information than English. So it's "physically impossible": translation from Chinese is a lossy operation. We can only provide a reasonable approximation. Even at the character level, some information just can't get through. "道" for example contains both "辶" (to walk) and "首" (head, 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").
- jerf 2y agoNative 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.
- mbivert 2y ago
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago> 道 -- dao, it means literally a road or path; metaphorically, it used to mean a spiritual way of life 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=greek&can=lo%2Fgos0#lexicon https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=lo%2Fgos&la=gre... [1] https://a.co/d/0btyDy8i https://a.co/d/0btyDy8i
- solidsnack9000 2y agoThat is not really translation, though, once you start doing that.
- theonemind 2y agoOne 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.
- j45 2y agoThank 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 https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu01.html
- nine_k 2y agoI 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_and_lexicon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_an...
- canjobear 2y agoIt was a bona fide spoken language at the time the Daodejing was written. Likely sounding very little like modern Chinese.
- otabdeveloper4 2y agoIt was likely an inflected language at the time it was spoken, and they just left the tedious grammar bits out when writing.
- solidsnack9000 2y agoWell, 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.
- canjobear 2y agoThe 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.”
- oneshtein 2y agoThe Dao is beyond words. The reality is ineffable.
- SpaceGlow 2y agoSo... Roadable road?
- noufalibrahim 2y agoThe 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.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThis 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.
- noufalibrahim 2y agoIt'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.
- mbivert 2y ago> Something is lost or at least becomes ambiguous without an interpreter or a teacher or at the least, a detailed commentary The problem with teachers or detailed commentaries, is that they may not agree with each others, or could be too narrow or even wrong: as as student looking for knowledge, you wouldn't be able to distinguish valuable interpretations from limited ones. I think it might be judicious to look as ambiguity more as a feature than as a bug. Classical Chinese authors seems to have purposefully relied on it for example.
- keepamovin 2y ago> So much is lost when translating from Chinese. 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?
- mbivert 2y ago> I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true. > or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullshit and not true. Well, as stated a few moments ago in a previous comment: A picture is worth a thousand words. 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. > The path that can be walked is not the AllPath. The word that can be said is not the AllWord. Well, aren't you for example losing here the echo to the daiji? With all its "philosophical" significance? > 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? 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).
- clickglue 2y agoThank 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.
- lawrenceyan 2y agoI 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.