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

[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.