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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
by 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?
- qazxcvbnm 2y agoI 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.
- ziggyzecat 2y ago> 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.
- MarceColl 2y agoI'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
- jimlikeslimes 2y agoI 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?
- karencarits 2y ago> 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_number_of_translations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_works_by_nu...
- srean 2y agoThanks 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.
- mci 2y ago> 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?
- srean 2y agoThe 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). More here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_axioms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_axioms
- mjd 2y ago> 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. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0qtj.12 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0qtj.12
- sorokod 2y agoDo you feel as strongly about king James version of the bible?
- mjd 2y agoHow is that relevant? Unlike Le Guin, the translators of the KJV knew the original languages.
- jhbadger 2y agoTo 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")
- bubblyworld 2y agoI don't think Ursula Le Guin ever called it a translation herself - she was pretty clear about it being a rendition of existing translations.
- Smaug123 2y agoIndeed, 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.
- nataliste 2y ago