Tao Te Ching, Verse 2, Part I

“When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty,
there arises the recognition of ugliness.
When they all know the good as good,
there arises the recognition of bad.

Therefore being and non-being produce each other;
difficult and easy complete each other;l
ong and short contrast each other;
high and low distinguish each other;
sound and voice harmonize with each other;
beginning and end follow each other.

Therefore the wise manage affairs without interfering
and teach beyond the words.

All things rise, and they do not turn away from them.
They give them life, but do not take possession of them.
They act, but do not rely on their own ability.
They accomplish, but claim no credit.
Because they claim no credit,their accomplishment remains with them.”
(Tao Te Ching, Verse 2, Beck Translation)

Now seems a good time to bring up the issue of translation. According to Russian translator, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.” Translation is always difficult, but the difficulties become nearly exponential when it comes to classical Chinese.

According to Wikipedia:

“The Tao Te Ching is written in classical Chinese, which can be difficult to understand completely, even for well-educated native speakers of modern Chinese. In fact, in learning classical Chinese, native speakers can be at a disadvantage relative to non-native speakers, as native speakers often have difficulty with Chinese characters whose older meaning differs from the modern language. Classical Chinese relies heavily on allusion to a corpus of standard literary works to convey semantic meaning, nuance, and subtext. This corpus was memorized by highly-educated people in Laozi's time, and the allusions were reinforced through common use in writing, but few people today have this type of deep acquaintance with ancient Chinese literature. Thus, many levels of subtext are potentially lost on modern translators. Furthermore, many of the words that the Tao Te Ching uses are deliberately vague and ambiguous.”

Classical Chinese, in other words is full of nuance and layers of allusion and meaning and thus very difficult to translate into English. A friend of mine once told me that he’d come across a classical Chinese scholar who'd said that if you read every single English translation of the Tao, you will have only the beginning of an inkling of the true meaning of the text. There are well over one hundred English translations of the Tao. In fact there are 112 English translations of the Tao on a website devoted to collecting translations of the Tao.



I’m out of time for now – more tomorrow.