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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. |
I know this is difficult to quantify accurately, but Wikipedia lists Daodejing behind the Little Prince and Pinocchio
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_works_by_nu...