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

[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.