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.
> 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!
The problem with that is that you can "creatively interpret" meaning into the text that wasn't there in the original. [ADDED: Not trying to imply she was deliberately mistranslating it, just that it's very easy to think about a word's varied meanings in your own language and not only miss the connected meanings in the other language, but also see false connections that were never there.] Leaving aside the problems with classical Chinese for a moment, the problem is that words in languages map to concepts in our heads, and these rarely correspond exactly to another word in another language. Take "computer", we might say "ordinateur" in French or "电脑" (literally "electric brain") in Mandarin but neither of these translations are able to capture the older meaning in English of a person who calculates something, which would be "calculateur" in French or "计算着" (lit. "person who calculates") in Mandarin.
Going to the text again, the main word is 道 which means way, path, principle, etc. and many more. These are usually translated as way for this text, but just that word alone has many other meanings in English that wouldn't be translated back into Chinese as 道 - for instance "way" in English could mean "method" or "possibility", but neither would make sense as a translation for 道. Another way of looking at it might be the colour chart for men vs women, which is meant as a joke but has a serious side showing that some groups of people split up and categorise things very differently.
What I dislike about her first line is the word "real". The translation is already kind of "out there" a bit (in line with some of the ones I listed in another post as possible interpretations due to the textual ambiguities, but which differed a lot from how most people interpreted the text). To me, "real" isn't implied by any of the words. I can see how she got there, because 道 is understood as "the one true way", but as a mental abstraction from a physical path that you should walk done to live life safely, to the "path" that you should walk spiritually to "not stray off the path". The problem is that none of the words in the text are concerned about truth vs lies, reality vs imaginary, rather this abstract concept of "the way". To translate "isn't the real way" she is using 非 for "not/isn't", seemingly completely ignoring 常 "always, constant, often, usual" and imbuing the already ambiguous 道 with another meaning that isn't really there.
[ADDED 2: Just re-reading this again, and it sounds a bit too critical. I think my point is not that her translation is "bad" or anything like that, and it can definitely be used to think about the text in ways that other translations might not lead you to. But I wouldn't use this as my primary source, and where her translation differs substantially from others it should be an indication that there's something particularly difficult to translate, and so you definitely need to consider other translations at that point and ask yourself why they are different.]
I'm afraid I'm not in the city where my copy of the Le Guin version is on my bookshelf, but the printed version has per-chapter authors notes at the end for many chapters where she often discusses her word choices -- I'm not sure if the notes included in this online version capture those or not? If I remember right, there were a few footnotes (which i'm thinking may be what's captured in OP), but then separately additional notes at the end which I'm not sure are captured here.
I'm curious if she says anything additional in foreward or notes about her choice of "real". Obviously she was aware it was not a choice other translators typically made. When I'm back home, I'll look!
Googling, the scholar who approved of Le Guin's work and worked with her somewhat on it (in some places I see him credited as a contributor to the Tao Te Ching rendition), is J. P. "Sandy" Seaton, who on his own seems to have produced plenty of other well-regarded translations of classical chinese poetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_P._Seaton
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.
> 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.