On August 9, I got this hair-brained idea to go through the Tao Te Ching line by line. Throwing caution to the wind, I embarked on this journey. Here we are 4 months later and I have only completed 15 verses plus one line from Verse 16. That's less than 20% (18.5% to be more precise) through the whole book!!
In fact, if we consider ONLY verses 15 and 16, it will take one month to get through these two verses alone.
What was I thinking? :-D
Actually, I'm enjoying this endeavor. It necessitates that I be more disciplined in my writing. With this series AND the Tao Bible going on simultaneously, there always is something to research and write about each day. It has also led to much thinking and pondering.
I hope you're getting as much out of it as I am.
In fact, if we consider ONLY verses 15 and 16, it will take one month to get through these two verses alone.
What was I thinking? :-D
Actually, I'm enjoying this endeavor. It necessitates that I be more disciplined in my writing. With this series AND the Tao Bible going on simultaneously, there always is something to research and write about each day. It has also led to much thinking and pondering.
I hope you're getting as much out of it as I am.
I most definitely am!
ReplyDeleteIt's a great series, good to see the various translators' take on the verses, important for a language like Chinese, which is supposedly tricky to translate.
ReplyDeleteCopy editor attack:
ReplyDeleteThe phrase is hare-brained.
And I still recommend to you Jonathan Star's wonderful book. It would help you to parse some of this stuff.
At some point, if you don't look at the characters, it just becomes comparisons of translation and interpretations of interpretations. Star's book is quite edifying.
But I'm still with you at your moments of one-ness!
Baroness,
ReplyDeleteIt's on order and should arrive any day.
What's the good, though, of looking at characters that you don't understand? I never understood how that helps.
ReplyDelete@Brandon--If one is serious about this, and drilling down the way RT is here, one will most definitely want to study Chinese at some level. The book I have been recommending to RT has a line-by-line concordance that lists all the possible meanings of a character and its various interpretations. The only drawback (for me) is that it uses Wade-Giles Romanization (e.g., Peking) instead of pinyin (e.g., Beijing), which is where some confusion can arise (as I pointed out in the valley/cave/hole gu/ku post). You have to be familiar with both systems (most modern Chinese dictionaries are pinyin/English). If you are an iPAD user, there is a very nice app called Pleco that is interesting if you know the pinyin.
ReplyDeleteI might say it's a little like Bible study--at some point, it is useful to look at the original Hebrew or Aramaic: otherwise you are always at the mercy of other translators' interpretations and translation errors (and point of view--are they mystics and meditators? are they Tao-of-Whatever types? are they new age psychologists? ).
Learning Chinese is a little like code-breaking, but once you begin to see sense in the characters, the illusion of gobbledygook is parted like a veil. It provides another level of apprehension of the text. Still, translating poetic Chinese is almost always 20 percent translation, 80 percent interpretation. It is helpful to have a Chinese-speaking teacher or friend available. And a few good quality Chinese-produced dictionaries (not just Lonely planet phrasebooks).
@RT--Glad to hear you ordered it. I think it may appeal to your analytic sensibilities. I was going to send it to you for Solstice; now I need to think of something else. I lost your PO Box # from the other package. Can you email it to me?