Lao Tzu

[randy_byers]

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

-- Lao Tzu (trans. S. Mitchell)

When I find myself in times of trouble, Taoist masters come to me. A few years ago I read several translations of Chuang Tzu. Now I'm starting to look at Lao Tzu more closely. One thing that immediately becomes apparent is that the Chinese text is a kind of Rorschach test for English translators. The sense of it varies vastly from one translation to another, and every translator projects their own preoccupations. There are also a huge number of English translations of Lao Tzu. Does anybody have any favorites? I've got one by Moss Roberts that includes commentary on the Chinese words, which I think is the kind of thing I'm looking for at the moment. I want to get a sense of the problems/ambiguities the translator is wrestling with. Some interesting comments on various translations here.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Ursula LeGuin did a translation/interpretation a few years ago, which has been languishing on my TBR shelves ever since. I'd be happy to lend it to you when next we meet.

It's not a translation as such; she worked with a translator, and based her choices on her skill as a writer and her experience with several translations of the text. (If I recall correctly, that is.)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'd love to borrow that, thanks. Here's Crispin Sartwell's comment (linked above): "Similar in some ways to Mitchell's version, this has beautiful English, as one would expect of such an accomplished writer. It also has a sort of terseness and a sprightly rhythm that distinguish it from Mitchell, and emphasizes the feminist aspects of the text: the privileging of the female and the residual goddess thing it's got going. Very low on intro and commentaries, but what there is is sharp, and of course a clean presentation of the text is a valuable project as well."

I actually have read a bit of it already (in a bookstore).

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

And hey! It slowly percolates through my brain that we'll see each other -- tomorrow! I'll get it off the shelf right now.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Thanks, dude!

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I have no specific thoughts about the I Ching, but recall that a major subject of discussion in my Chinese Characters class at Berkeley, c. 60 years ago, was a vigorous debate on whether translating Chinese is 3, 5, or 10 % Perspiration, with the rest being Inspiration -- and that's ordinary literary text -- with no-one holding that it's less than 90% Inspiration. Lao Tzu would, I think, be likely to be closer to 1% literal. (Well... yes, I may be exaggerating for effect... but perhaps not too excessively.)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

(Tao Te Ching, not I Ching.)

I'm seeing similar sentiments expressed elsewhere about translating Chinese characters. One version of Lao Tzu that I'm going to pick up actually has a character-by-character commentary that I think will be very useful in helping me to understand the various -- and varied -- translations.

Yesterday I discovered a website that included some character-based commentary. It pointed out that the very first characters include a pun: the same character means both "Tao" and "say" and is used in both senses right at the start. This is commonly translated along the lines of "the Tao that can be spoken" (with the rest of the line being "is not the constant Tao"). There's no way to get the wordplay across in English, although yesterday I was playing around with "The Way that you can say" or "The Way that you can weigh".

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Oops! Yup, Tao te, rather than I. Not that I'm qualified to comment on the latter, either.

But yes, Chinese (& also Japanese) Literature tends to be packed with puns, ambiguities, and allusive references (with the latter being particularly difficult -- or impossible -- to appreciate unless you're steeped in The Classic Literature and almost subconsciously recognize that some particular phrase implies other aspects of the work (poem, usually) with which cultured people associate it. For me, poring over a word-by-word Commentary would be necessary for anything approaching real understanding & appreciation.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Better letters. We need better letters. But these ones on the computer screen are not them.

And no, actually, I don't have the patience, but that doesn't do me much good does it now? How long, o lord.

Thanks for the link. I'll get back to you.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I got a letter from D West recently, if that helps. Although I suspect you're talking about calligraphy. Again!

[maryread.livejournal.com]

well, yeah. calligraphy is far more lively as an art form in other cultures than the western, and the expressive possibilities of hand-made letters are integrated with the arts of painting and poetry in a way that western letters have hardly begun to approach. to make a gross & sweeping generality.

if you can imagine: the people who make the lettering for greeting cards being also poets (instead of the words and lettering and images all separate work for hire) and honored as artists and national treasures.

ask john berry about the typography of the net sometime.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Although even on paper typography can only approximate the expressiveness of calligraphy, no? But you give me lots to think about there. One of the editions of the Tao Te Ching I looked at yesterday advertised its hand-drawn Chinese characters, although they were pretty much purely ornamental -- i.e., single characters out of a single verse. It didn't even occur to me to be interested in that.