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.
Just to nit-pick, I think he meant number of different translations, not number of languages it was translated into. I doubt there are multiple translations of Little Prince into each of those languages.
What makes it important for this book is that the source is from classical Chinese which is far more ambiguous than say the French that Little Prince was written in.
Consider the first sentence: 道可道非常道 名可名非常名. It's written as two parallel structures, with 道 replaced by 名 in the second half. In both halves, 道/名 could be functioning as a verb or a noun in any of its usages.
Let's consider 道: amongst other things, 道 as a noun could mean road, path, way, principle, reason, skill, art, but also as a general class of objects like rivers, barriers, etc. 道 as a verb can mean to travel, to say, to express, etc. And of course, as a result of this text, 道 stands as a shortcut for the entire text - more than just a principle, but The Principle, more than just a way, but The Way.
Even the other words aren't simple. 可 is often just thought of as part of 可以 to mean may nowadays, but 可 itself means can, may, able to, to approve, to permit, to suit, certainly, etc. 非常 is an odd one, as I'm sure the modern day meaning (extremely) completely throws you off track. 非 on its own means not, wrong, to not be, to blame, etc. 常 means always, ever, constant, often, frequently, common, general, etc.
I'm not saying any of these examples I'm giving now are good translations, but you could, for example, have translations that are diverse and extreme as "the road which could be traveled is not often traveled", "to travel on something that could be a road is rarely the correct way", "travelling on something that might be a road but was not always a road", "the road you may travel on is often not a road" or "the road you may travel on is never the right way". None of these are like any existing translations I've seen, but that was done on purpose, because they're all legitimate (but unlikely) interpretations of the original.
If you look at the meanings given in this translation: "The way you can go
isn’t the real way." In the same repo, Jane English's version is "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." My bilingual version translates it as "The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao" (James Legge, 1815-1897).
You can see that the linked-to translation has chosen a quite different approach to at least two others. Which is correct? Perhaps all of them, perhaps none of them. There's a reason why these texts are considered so enlightening - there's no one correct answer, you have to really meditate on the meaning and come to your own conclusion.
But anyway, back to the point - the nature of the text means that if you're reading a translation it'll miss a lot of the inherent ambiguities of the text and instead direct your thinking down specific lines. That's why, for this text the number of different translations is more important than number of languages it's translated into.
I was expecting Euclid's Elements to be up there. Perhaps the filter "literary work" disqualified it.
If you all pardon an off topic digression, the nebulosity of the definition of a straight line in elements has always bothered me. I wanted something free of reference to a physical artifact (straight edge, taught rope etc) and free of algebra. Its sometimes defined in terms of reflections or rotations or translations, but then that begs the question what is a straight axis (or direction of translation). Playfair's version is almost satisfactory. The standard I guess is Hilbert's.
IMHO, Euclid's definition of a straight line in today's terms would be "a line that has the same direction on its entire length". His definition of a plane angle would be "a plane angle is the difference between the directions of two straight lines that have a common end in one point".
The problem I have with that version of Euclid's definition is that direction is not defined.
Playfair interprets Euclid as follows, I am using my own words here, a straight line is that figure which has the property that if it intersects its moved copy at 2 points it necessarily coincides with it everywhere. "Movement" is undefined, it has to be an isometry.
Hilbert's is more abstract and based upon sets. Line is a primitive (undefined name) that interacts with two other undefined names (points and planes) according defined relations (lies on, lies between and is_congruent).
> 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've dabbled in classical chinese as well. The language is quite ambiguous and the text is as well, you could look at it with very many angles. The straightforward explanation is that other translators probably influenced each other a lot and that caused the translation similarities
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.
> difficult to believe a single definitive reading was intended
Agreed, it rarely is with these kinds of stories and teachings. The Iliad comes to mind. I tried multiple translations but they all feel (horribly) off. I put some of them side by side and started "cherry picking" sentences that felt better together.
The challenge and beauty of these kinds of writing is the brutal subjective experience of (personal) horror and enlightenment which can be destroyed with a few words that don't fit the 'phenomenal' flow of the reader, who is tracking through the writers narration of the readers (personal) space-time experience and his perception of (inter-personal) life. It's (sorry) fucking insane to translate these books, I'd finish and start again over and over.
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 do. She didn't know Chinese. For her to attempt a translation (by mashing up earlier translations) shows contempt for Chinese culture and literature.
Indeed, she was very explicit that she interpreted it, and she specifically said several times in her rendition that this was not a translation because she only had word-by-word translations and other people's translations to go off.
To a degree. But a lot of the weirdness of the KJV (like how it mentions "unicorns" nine times despite the ancient Hebrews having no concept of that mythological beast) seem to be because the translators were also using a lot of the existing Latin Vulgate translation (where the Hebrew word now believed to mean "auroch" was mistranslated as "unicornis" as the Hebrew literally means "horned animal")
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.