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 . 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.
> 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?
I 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.
I 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?
I wasn't sure it was public domain (likely not) but I went to the same source as the others, made a fork, and added the first 10 of her's in this handy Tao Te Ching side-by-side comparison tool a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951207
I love Le Guin's writing in general, and her version of the Tao Te Ching, but it's very misleading to call it a "translation". There's even an endnote saying as much:
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
The foreward (or was it an afterword?) in the edition I have on my shelf has quite a bit on how she produced it, and it is very interesting.
It was a process of very intensively studying and comparing all existing English translations she could find, using the Carus Chinese character-by-character translation as a sort of rosetta stone. While of course using her own literary sensibilities to phrasing too, as an author.
I could easily believe this would result in a product that is a more faithful conversion to English than many translations. It's interesting to think about how this in some ways can combine and synthesize various subjectivities over time in a way that you actually couldn't do if you read the original language and believed your "own" take on the original translation was the "correct" one!
In the forward she also names a scholar of the Tao Te Ching (who was able to read and study in the original language) she had been in communication with for advice, who had complimented and supported her work. (although of course LeGuin takes responsibility for all errors or misconceptions!)
I wonder if any other conversions/renditions/translations have been done of other works through similar method, I guess if any they would be to other ancient texts (the bible?) that have had many translations. [I don't think we really have a good word for what she did, since it's not really a thing done much, so I understand the poster using the word "translation" although OP does not and just says "English version by" -- but we jump to figure that means a "translation", right?]
It doesn't look like the foreward (I think unless it was an afterword, I don't have the book in front of it me!) that discusses this is included in this online (and presumably copyright-violating pirated?) copy? If you can find a copy (pirated or not I don't judge) of the foreward, which isn't very long, where she describes her process, I definitely recommend it! (Or is it here?)
Something about the process seems especially interesting to the HN crowd to me... I want to say it's perhaps about "abstraction"?
If you were to take Le Guin's rendition and compare it with any other English language translations of your choice, it would be in the spirit of her project, and I'm sure she would approve and think it would lead you to greater understanding of the work!
Ezra Pound translated Chinese poetry using a somewhat similar method. [0] He did not know Chinese at all. Le Guin was likely aware of his work as the translations were well known and even today are included in anthologies of his poems.
Great points, thought provoking! I think LLMs are about to usher in a new era for academic translation. Obviously they have their faults, but philosophy in particular suffers to a much greater degree from language barriers than the layman might guess, so I think there’s a lot of room for improvement. In particular, many German and French authors have works that haven’t been translated yet, and, more relevantly, Chinese philosophy is still only tangentially related to European philosophy. When books do get translated, they often are translated with a significant delay, obviously leading to issues for people trying to form a scientific consensus.
I think the work of both great thinkers like Husserl and more underappreciated ones like Edith Stein would benefit greatly from LLM-assisted term-standardization and overall synchronized translation, with their original German-language works fed in alongside the translations we do have, for automated comparison purposes.
The academy is efficient, but IMO we’re about to see a scientific revolution in the humanities — aka cognitive science.
Ezra Pound did an awful lot of translation from Japanese, though he didn't know the language. He got rough word-for-word translations from friends, and used them as a starting point.
When poets translate poetry, I believe that this is usually the case.
A relevant quote from Harold Bloom (from the introduction to Le Guin’s Collected Poems):
> Le Guin in her version certainly captures the terseness and the aesthetic sensibility of the Tao. Scholars tell me that her work is disputable, but I see nothing to dispute. Her total aspiration is meaning, and her transpositions, as she calls her versions of the text, strengthen meaning.
How true this all is, I really don’t know. Le Guin herself admits that, for the first chapter at least, ‘A satisfactory translation […] is, I believe, perfectly impossible’. I personally like the aesthetics of her version, at least.
I 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.
> 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").
Native 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.
My 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
They 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.
This 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.
> 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.
One 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.
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.”
The 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.
This 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.
I am just reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuang_Zhou now (author of Zhuangzi). At the beginning of every chapter (in Lathe of Heaven) is a quote or extract from Zhuang Zhou's writing.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058843 for a link to a text-only version; however, IMO their "translation" lies as much in Jane English's photos and the entire book presentation, as it does in the purely English language rendition of the text. I prefer other translations (including Le Guin's) for just the words, but Feng/English is still my favorite overall.
There's a very interesting book related to this called "Christ the Eternal Tao" by Hieromonk Damascene that looks at the Tao Te Ching from the perspective of Orthodox Christianity.
While we're recommending other works by Le Guin, The Child and the Shadow is near the top of my personal list of Essays That Would Change the World if Only Enough People Would Read Them. It's a deep dive interpretation of a somewhat obscure Hans Christian Andersen story, and her insights about the nature of evil and what it means to grow up shook me and then reshaped my life.
This paragraph is as decent a tl;dr as can exist, but you really should read the whole essay:
> The normal adolescent ceases to project so blithely as the little child did; he realizes that you can't blame everything on the bad guys with the black Stetsons. He begins to take responsibility for his acts and feelings. And with it he often shoulders a terrible load of guilt. He sees his shadow as much
blacker, more wholly evil, than it is. The only way for a youngster to get past the paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimples and claws and all – to accept it as himself – as part of himself. The ugliest part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. The guide inward and out again; downward and up again; there, as Bilbo the Hobbit said, and back again. The guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.
Someone here quoted Kafka the other day who said you should only read books that sting you, and affect you like a blow to the head.
From your essay:
> Now that is an extraordinarily cruel story. A story about insanity, ending in humiliation and death. Is it a story for children? Yes, it is. It's a story for anybody who's listening.
In a sea of all those fluffy “stories made for kids”, that are just reflecting back to children the kinds of things authors think children want to hear and give a child nothing solid, nothing to grapple with, this is such a relief for me to read.
> I hated it when I was a kid. I hated all the Andersen stories with unhappy endings. That didn't stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering them.
What an awesome insight. Pretty much mirrors that Kafka quote.
Taste is subjective, and if you find her style boring I can't dispute that, but it doesn't match my experience at all.
I think judging her by the most popularly-upvoted snippets on Goodreads is doing her a tremendous disservice. Her language is not particularly flowery, and she writes using simple words, which are often the ones that have the vaguest meanings and the most room for nuance. If you take a single sentence like that from a story or novel, and remove it from its surrounding context, you strip away a lot of that nuance. By reading the sentence in isolation, you only see a pale shadow of its intended meaning.
Maybe this is a bad analogy, but it makes me think of how you wouldn't think there was anything interesting about Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture if all you heard was the cannon volleys by themselves, even though they're what make the piece complete.
I think Earthsea and Hainish are both great, but I don't like any of her other stuff, and don't like this TTC (or really any of the English translations I've seen) either. They all lose the poetry which is obvious at a glance in the original. I only know a few words of Mandarin and can't read the glyphs at all, but I've picked my way through with a dictionary and MTL - the structure of the original is obviously not reflected in any of the English translations. I think English is just too explicit and doesn't have enough "overloading" to capture the depth.
Hard disagree. I find Le Guin's prose breathtakingly gorgeous. And then it hits you like a brick wall.
> The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got threequarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.
I can't imagine anyone loving "the idea" of Le Guin who hasn't read her books. What an idea. It's not like she's famous enough to have acolytes who spout her stuff without having read it. And what's "the idea" of Le Guin? Just that she's a female sci fi writer? I'm missing the implication.
I love her books and have for over 20 years.
And I can't imagine that any author looks good when subjected to the "GoodReads snippets" treatment. Can you find an example of an author coming off well? What snippets get upvoted by people? It's all going to sound like trite stuff, for any author.
Can't say I love any books, but I greatly enjoy sci-fi (especially when they respect orbital mechanics). ULG's style reminds me of Strugacky brothers, maybe that was just typical in that era?
It might be that my memory is playing tricks on me, it was over 10 years since I read any of them (except for one non-sci-fi ULG book). But generally the writing style evolves end deeply personal style is much more common now then it was before. (I think I've read most of ULG and maybe half of B&A Strugackie's books).
A lot of prose in the Dispossessed is great and there's nothing impersonal or robotic about it, quite the opposite.
"We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere"
From the same book, the "it is our suffering that brings us together" passage has burned itself into my mind and has often been a comfort in dark times. I can't imagine finding it impersonal or robotic. Frank and unadorned, perhaps. And both of these quotes are spoken by a person who is specifically noted to have a very blunt, concrete way of speaking. She could be more poetical when she chose to be.
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 . 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.
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_nu...
I'm not really familiar with the Tao Te Ching. But isn't the straightforward explanation here that Wang Bi was wrong?
https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,jc,rh,uklg/...
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
It was a process of very intensively studying and comparing all existing English translations she could find, using the Carus Chinese character-by-character translation as a sort of rosetta stone. While of course using her own literary sensibilities to phrasing too, as an author.
I could easily believe this would result in a product that is a more faithful conversion to English than many translations. It's interesting to think about how this in some ways can combine and synthesize various subjectivities over time in a way that you actually couldn't do if you read the original language and believed your "own" take on the original translation was the "correct" one!
In the forward she also names a scholar of the Tao Te Ching (who was able to read and study in the original language) she had been in communication with for advice, who had complimented and supported her work. (although of course LeGuin takes responsibility for all errors or misconceptions!)
I wonder if any other conversions/renditions/translations have been done of other works through similar method, I guess if any they would be to other ancient texts (the bible?) that have had many translations. [I don't think we really have a good word for what she did, since it's not really a thing done much, so I understand the poster using the word "translation" although OP does not and just says "English version by" -- but we jump to figure that means a "translation", right?]
It doesn't look like the foreward (I think unless it was an afterword, I don't have the book in front of it me!) that discusses this is included in this online (and presumably copyright-violating pirated?) copy? If you can find a copy (pirated or not I don't judge) of the foreward, which isn't very long, where she describes her process, I definitely recommend it! (Or is it here?)
Something about the process seems especially interesting to the HN crowd to me... I want to say it's perhaps about "abstraction"?
If you were to take Le Guin's rendition and compare it with any other English language translations of your choice, it would be in the spirit of her project, and I'm sure she would approve and think it would lead you to greater understanding of the work!
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathay_(poetry_collection)
I think the work of both great thinkers like Husserl and more underappreciated ones like Edith Stein would benefit greatly from LLM-assisted term-standardization and overall synchronized translation, with their original German-language works fed in alongside the translations we do have, for automated comparison purposes.
The academy is efficient, but IMO we’re about to see a scientific revolution in the humanities — aka cognitive science.
That being said, I'm glad both of them exist. They are interesting and feel much different to me than the literal translations.
When poets translate poetry, I believe that this is usually the case.
Only if you completely abandon most people's understanding of the word. I don't understand the point of this comment.
> Le Guin in her version certainly captures the terseness and the aesthetic sensibility of the Tao. Scholars tell me that her work is disputable, but I see nothing to dispute. Her total aspiration is meaning, and her transpositions, as she calls her versions of the text, strengthen meaning.
How true this all is, I really don’t know. Le Guin herself admits that, for the first chapter at least, ‘A satisfactory translation […] is, I believe, perfectly impossible’. I personally like the aesthetics of her version, at least.
I don't know Chinese but the language is closer to Zen koans and Buddhist texts in English. That helps in internalizing thing in an easier way.
[0]: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html
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?
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_an...
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").
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.
yet are not the way
(I'm sure someone can put on their yoda hat and do even better!)
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.
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.
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=gre...
[1] https://a.co/d/0btyDy8i
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.
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
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.
Maybe if I pull the right strings, I can get reincarnated as one of Luisito's nose hairs, https://luisurrea.com/2018/01/tolfink-was-here-on-ursula-k-l...
> Then she terrorized us by bringing Toni Morrison into the room to meet us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daf1FH7fWFk
I just found a short chat by Kim Stanley Robinson where he mentions Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atf7wvPmhjo
This paragraph is as decent a tl;dr as can exist, but you really should read the whole essay:
> The normal adolescent ceases to project so blithely as the little child did; he realizes that you can't blame everything on the bad guys with the black Stetsons. He begins to take responsibility for his acts and feelings. And with it he often shoulders a terrible load of guilt. He sees his shadow as much blacker, more wholly evil, than it is. The only way for a youngster to get past the paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimples and claws and all – to accept it as himself – as part of himself. The ugliest part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. The guide inward and out again; downward and up again; there, as Bilbo the Hobbit said, and back again. The guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.
> "Lucifer" means the one who carries the light.
https://johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf
From your essay:
> Now that is an extraordinarily cruel story. A story about insanity, ending in humiliation and death. Is it a story for children? Yes, it is. It's a story for anybody who's listening.
In a sea of all those fluffy “stories made for kids”, that are just reflecting back to children the kinds of things authors think children want to hear and give a child nothing solid, nothing to grapple with, this is such a relief for me to read.
Thank you for sharing.
What an awesome insight. Pretty much mirrors that Kafka quote.
https://oshoworld.com/tao-upanishad-by-osho-01-127/
Hindu are a people.
Care to explain why you think it’s bad or share a better alternative?
Look at her most famous quotes for a snippet:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/874602.Ursula_K_Le_G...
I think judging her by the most popularly-upvoted snippets on Goodreads is doing her a tremendous disservice. Her language is not particularly flowery, and she writes using simple words, which are often the ones that have the vaguest meanings and the most room for nuance. If you take a single sentence like that from a story or novel, and remove it from its surrounding context, you strip away a lot of that nuance. By reading the sentence in isolation, you only see a pale shadow of its intended meaning.
Maybe this is a bad analogy, but it makes me think of how you wouldn't think there was anything interesting about Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture if all you heard was the cannon volleys by themselves, even though they're what make the piece complete.
> The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got threequarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.
(The Dispossessed)
I love her books and have for over 20 years.
And I can't imagine that any author looks good when subjected to the "GoodReads snippets" treatment. Can you find an example of an author coming off well? What snippets get upvoted by people? It's all going to sound like trite stuff, for any author.
The one exeption to this, for my taste, might be Earthsea, parts of it definitely fell short of its reputation as far as I am concerned.
It might be that my memory is playing tricks on me, it was over 10 years since I read any of them (except for one non-sci-fi ULG book). But generally the writing style evolves end deeply personal style is much more common now then it was before. (I think I've read most of ULG and maybe half of B&A Strugackie's books).
"We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere"
Missed that in the mission statement.