道德经

choi

Stephen R Platt, Finding the Way. The elusive wisdom of a Chinese sage is widely quoted but challenging to understand. Each attempt at translation confronts its enigmas anew. Wall Street Journal, Nov 9, 2024, at page C12.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ao-de-jing-7266ce40

Note:
(a) This is a review on three translations:
• Brook Ziporyn, Daodejing. Liveright, Jan 17, 2023
• Li-Young Lee and Yun Wang, Dao De Jing. Norton, October 2024
• JH Huang, The Dao De Jing; Laozi's book of life: A new translation from the ancient Chinese. on sale Nov 5, 2024
(i) Brook A Ziporyn. Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought, Divinity School, University of Chicago undated
https://divinity.uchicago.edu/directory/brook-ziporyn
is MALE.
(ii) Li-Young Lee  李立揚
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Young_Lee
(nprn in "1957[] is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His maternal great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father [李国元], who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959 the Lee family fled Indonesia to escape widespread anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964")
(iii) Yun Wang  王云
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yun_Wang
(She is "A senior research scientist at California Institute of Technology since 2015 * * * was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012")

Yun Wang. Senior Scientist, (IPAC), California Institute of Tecgnology, undated
https://www.ipac.caltech.edu/science/staff/yun-wang
is FEMALE.
(iv) "JH Huang 黃柱華[:] My husband’s innovative new translation
THE DAO DE JING: LAOZI’S BOOK OF LIFE
will be published by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in Summer 2025[.] Discover the truth.")
https://www.madamehuang.com/j-h-huang

Click "Home" at the top of the Web page, you will reach "費凱玲 [Carolyn PHILLIPS (who is Jewish, with a Church of England mother and a Jewish father, oer her website)] = 黃媽媽[.] * * * Chinese daughter-in-law * * * I Ching: The Book of Changes for Modern Readers by my husband J H Huang and myself ['coming soon from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins': per her website]")

(b) "variant editions of the 'Dao De Jing' that archaeologists have unearthed over the past half-century, including the Guodian bamboo slips, discovered in 1993, which date to roughly 300 BC. * * * One major difference is that much of the received text simply does not appear in the Guodian version."
(i)
(A) 郭店楚简[本]
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/郭店楚简
("湖北省荆门市沙洋县纪山镇 [郭店村 ('南距楚故都纪南城约9公里': 百度百科] 編號為郭店一號的楚國墓室中發現 * * * 成书于战国中期")
(B) 战国时期
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/战国时期
(前475年/前403年—前221年; section 1 历史, section 1.1 起始年份: 前475年 = 周元王元年; "北宋司马光成书的编年史《资治通鉴》则以三家分晋一事代表周礼崩坏，群雄竞逐，而定战国始于前403年")

"郭店楚简本，是目前所发现的距今年代最久远的《道德经》版本，与老子成书年代仅相差百年。": from the Web.
(ii) received
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/received
is used in received wisdom, Received Pronunciation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
("RP is a non-rhotic accent")


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The foundational text of Daoism, known as the “Dao De Jing,” allegedly composed by the sixth-century B.C. Chinese sage Laozi, begins by denying its own comprehensibility. In the first line, it insists that any Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao [道可道，非常道]. That is, the truths the text seeks to impart are impossible to capture fully in language. “My words are so easily comprehended, so easily put into practice,” reads one passage, “yet people cannot comprehend them, nor can they put them into practice [吾言甚易知，甚易行。天下莫能知，莫能行].” It is a book of mysteries, of opaqueness, of natural imagery and counterintuitive oppositions. Water, it observes, is the softest and weakest of all substances, yet it can carve away the strongest of rocks [天下莫柔弱于水，而攻坚强者莫之能胜]. The usefulness of a pot lies not in the material from which it is made, but from the emptiness inside of it [埏（yàn）埴（zhì）以为器，当其无，有器之用]. There is strength to be found in weakness, and weakness in strength. As Brook Ziporyn, a professor at the University of Chicago, puts it in his recent translation, the “Dao De Jing” is “one of the most ambiguous cultural objects in world history.”  

“But,” he adds, “that might be precisely the point of it.”

The worldview of this text is complex and counterintuitive, but its meaning is embedded in the classical Chinese language in which it was written. Among the great difficulties facing any translator of the “Dao De Jing” are the changes in usage of Chinese characters over time, the double meanings of the text and its opacities. Given how difficult these are to comprehend in Chinese, how can they be accurately captured in English?

Perhaps for this reason, the “Dao De Jing” is reputed to be the most translated book in the world after the Bible. In English alone there are more than 500 versions of it, by translators ranging from scholars with profound knowledge of the book’s classical Chinese context to amateurs who couldn’t read the original at all. The book has long been a staple of Western imaginings about “Eastern wisdom,” part of the same New Age smorgasbord as yoga and meditation. But it is also a sacred religious text to the followers of Daoism, one of the pillars of Chinese philosophy and a treatise on government that—as some of the translations reveal—has aspects that may appear stunningly dark to a modern reader.

To this multitude of translations we can now add three more. Mr. Ziporyn, a specialist in Chinese philosophy and religion, seems both delighted and bemused by the technical impossibilities of the task he has undertaken. A pair of poets, Li-Young Lee and Yun Wang, describe feeling that the rhythmic language of the “Dao De Jing” had been lost in translation. J.H. Huang, an independent scholar, presents his translation as the culmination of 20 years of labor and disparages “pseudotranslators” of the past.

In justifying their translations, all of these writers refer to variant editions of the “Dao De Jing” that archaeologists have unearthed over the past half-century, including the Guodian bamboo slips, discovered in 1993, which date to roughly 300 B.C. Surprisingly, though, most of the earliest known forms of the text and the standard versions of it differ mainly in ways a casual reader would consider minor—reversals of chapters or books, some chapters combined with others, and other such editorial inconsistencies.

One major difference is that much of the received text simply does not appear in the Guodian version. Mr. Ziporyn thus argues that the “Dao De Jing” should be understood as an accretion over time, created by different contributors, rather than as a complete work handed down by an actual Laozi—there is, Mr. Ziporyn notes, no historical record to support his existence. Messrs. Huang and Lee and Ms. Wang, however, all have faith in a singular author of this work, with the latter two expressing skepticism toward “trendy” scholars who claim Laozi was not real.

So how do they treat the text differently? Consider the following, from the Lee and Wang translation: “The sage’s way: empty the mind of machinations. / With stomachs full, and bones strong, ambitions wane. [是以圣人之治，虚其心，实其腹，弱其志，强其骨]” This could be read as advice on self-cultivation through meditation: To be a sage one must attend to the needs of the body and let go of unhealthy striving. In the hands of Mr. Ziporyn, however, the same passage becomes something quite different:

        Just so does the governing, the treatment,
        administered by a sage
        empty hearts and minds
        but fill bellies,
        weakening aspirations
        but strengthening bones—

Here, it is clear that the one doing the emptying is the ruler, and those whose hearts and minds are being emptied are his people. This is not self-cultivation but a prescription for authoritarian rule: To control his people easily, the sagelike ruler empties their minds. If their bellies are full and they have no ambitions of their own, they will never challenge him.

Similar themes echo throughout the work. If there is nothing to covet, people will not be covetous. If there are no honors or rewards for the talented, people will not contend with one another [不尚贤，使民不争。不贵难得之货，使民不为盗；不见可欲，使民心不乱]. The list goes on. “Cut off skill and discard profit,” Mr. Ziporyn writes in one place. Here is Mr. Huang: “Forsake expertise, abolish profit and thieves and bandits will disappear ]绝巧弃利，盗贼无有].” Remove all incentives, and the people will be peaceful and content. It makes a world of difference whether one reads this as a vision of cultivating harmony within oneself or as a method of social control. The latter is difficult to reconcile with the gentle, meditative interpretations of the “Dao De Jing” that are more familiar to American readers. “The sage is not humane,” reads Mr. Ziporyn’s translation. “To him all the people are straw dogs [圣人不仁，以百姓为刍狗].”

Each of these new translations has value. Mr. Lee and Ms. Wang’s version is, as one might expect, the most poetic. They treat the “Dao De Jing” as a sacred text, a perfect whole they describe as “yogic” and “seraphic.” The text’s more menacing aspects soften in their hands. (Mr. Ziporyn’s “cut off skill and discard profit,” for instance, appears for them simply as “end scheming and exploitation”). For a reader seeking to be immersed in the mysterious beauty of the “Dao De Jing,” theirs is the most literary and inviting of these translations.

J.H. Huang’s version, like Mr. Ziporyn’s, pulls no punches. But unlike Mr. Ziporyn he offers a unified interpretation of the text. Mr. Huang’s translation is literal and spare, reflecting the brevity of classical Chinese, but he fills the margins with extensive running commentary to guide the reader through his own understanding of the text’s meaning. Readers hoping to ruminate on the ambiguities of the text may wish to peruse the Lee and Wang translation instead; Mr. Huang provides detailed classical citations to support his argument for the book’s correct meaning.

Brook Ziporyn’s evocative and deeply researched version is best for the reader who wants the rawest and least sentimental version of the text. He is the only one of these translators who makes no pretension about the definitiveness of his translation. To the contrary, he writes, “the disparity among translations should be celebrated and not decried.” As he sees it, exploring conflicting translations of the “Dao De Jing” may be the only way a reader who doesn’t know classical Chinese can start to apprehend the full range of its meanings. To reduce it to one reading is to contradict its very essence: The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao.

Mr. Platt, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.”