From the bottom:
> 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 Library of Congress very generously provides a scan of the Paul Carus translation [1].
The transliteration of the Tao starts on page 159 and consists of columns of the characters each with a literal meaning and occasional comments by the translator. I found the first few chapters in that presentation very interesting, like a kind of puzzle (I don't read Chinese to any extent at all).
Having done a similar "rendition" to a book of poetry, I agree it is not the same as translating directly. It does open up a question about the fuzziness of "what is even translation?"
Especially when we talk about translating historic writing. Yes, not knowing the source language is a huge barrier. But so is not knowing specific cultural touchstones or references in the text. In-depth translations usually transliterate as a part of the process. Many words and language patterns are untranslatable, which is why perfect translations are impossible.
When translating poetry, issues of meter and rhythm are even more important. It comes down to what the purpose of a translation is meant to achieve. Yes, there are ideas and themes but there is no hiding the fact that translators always imprint their own perspective on a work - it's unavoidable and personally shouldn't even be the goal.
Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.
I like the term "rendition" because it throws away the concept of the "authoritative translation". I like to think of translations the same way as cover songs. The best covers may be wildly different from the original but they share the same roots.
As a reader, if you can't ever "hear" the original because you don't know thr language you can still appreciate someone's "cover version", or triangulate the original by reading multiple translations.
Beautifully, this reads like it came right out of Le Guin's rendition of the Tao Te Ching:
Most translators of popular texts look closely at other translations to "triangulate" on meaning and authorial intent. Older translations may use archaic writing but have historical understanding, well-researched translations may be more precise about tricky words or concepts. More "writerly" translations tend to rebuild the work from the building blocks and produce a more cohesive whole. None of these are wrong approaches.
For those with a passing interest in this topic and quite some patience, "le ton beau de Marót" by Douglas Hofstadter is a whole book of musings about translation, particularly of poetry.
It's a fun book full of interesting linguistic trivia.
The patience would be needed to get through the 50 or so translations of the same poem, all different and "wrong" in some way.
also recommended: After Babel by George Steiner.
Honestly, even if you know Chinese, it's very hard to translate Tao Te Ching into English.
Hell, it's hard to translate it into Chinese. Even the first paragraph is controversial. For example this rendition says:
> The name you can say
> isn’t the real name.
However, in a 5th century interpretation[0], it's more akin to:
> The fame and wealth the mortals praise are not a natural state.
(My extremely simplified paraphrasing)
I didn't encounter the Dao de Jing until later in life, but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me. I first saw it as "the way that can be described is not the Way", but also "the way that can be traveled is not the eternal Way". That is, the eternal (spiritual) Way cannot be concretized, just as a name is not the real thing. Or, given that this is HN, "the software development methodology that can be executed like a program is not software development methodology". ("The Agile that can be PM'd is not Agile.")
However, I think it might require some life maturity to recognize that. Certainly a recovery from Englightenment rationalism. My person experience is that an understanding that "the name that can be named/identified is not the eternal Name" and "the way that can be walked is not the eternal Way" took me until around my 40s to appreciate.
Daoism also appears to have taken a literalist turn (ironically). The book "Taoism: the Parting of the Ways" [1], by (former) Harvard Professor Holmes Welch, interprets the text as being a guide to a mystical way of living, similar to St. John of the Cross (minus the Christian part), which is fascinating. Then he describes how the two main factions took the text literally, and how that evolved.
[1] I have a summary at http://geoffprewett.com/BookReviews/TaoismThePartingOfTheWay...
> but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me
the a/symmetry of the opening bits in Chinese, visually echoes a taiji:
> 道可道，
> 非恆道；
> 名可名，
> 非恆名。
given the diversity of translations available for those bits, I think it's fair to say that there's room for debate regarding their exact meaning − dare I say
amusingly, by being certain one understand what it means, somehow one really does not. Lao-Tseu may have been way, way wiser than average.
> it's hard to translate it into Chinese.
It's a text about non-duality, among other things. Like the Heart Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra, or 101 Zen Stories, it's not supposed to make sense in an ordinary way. A successful translation is, like the original, intended to catalyze a shift in awareness.
EDIT: For those with a nerdy or scholarly bent, I suggest Red Pine's translation[0], which includes translation of historically relevant commentaries.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lao-tzus-Taoteching-Lao-Tzu/dp/155659...
Thank you, this there is the first version I see that feels like it's got solid cultural context. I like Ursula's version and have read her books over the years, but for example when she write "mystery" in there I always felt she was dropping the ball a bit.
Interesting. Your comparison reminds me of something from Lacanian psychoanalysis: the idea that people often mistake themselves for the symbolic labels they occupy, their title for instance. Like a doctor who would praise himself for being a doctor, a president a president. From that perspective, both versions of the Tao Te Ching line point to the same thing: what can be named, praised, or socially recognized isn’t the true underlying reality. Different phrasing, but the same structural idea.
More generalized, any kind of symbol representing something is not the something. The social labelling is very accessible, true now and true then.
There’s a Zen koan about that (with Zen coming from Chang which came from a meeting of Buddhism and Taoism in China) — about the finger pointing to the moon, and how all but one student looked at the finger.
In a different example, there is the distinction of virtue signaling and virtue (the “Te” in “Tao Te Ching”)
I have a hard copy of that book.
She’s captured the poetry and beauty of the received text very well. (I’ve tried my own hand at a translation and read a few other translations).
To call Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching a translation is misleading—she knew little Chinese. Le Guin leaned heavily on existing translations, alongside her intuition for Taoist philosophy.
From the her postscript:
> 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.
For the interested, the original paperback contains diligent notes about her sources and word choices.
I also reference Le Guin's rendition a bunch here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/taoism-minus-the-nonsense
This is one of my favorite versions, mostly for nostalgic reasons. My initial exposure to the Tao te Ching was this "rendition" and Stephen Mitchell's version. Comparing the two was always very thought provoking; the approach is very different between them.
I often come to this site and compare chapters across multiple versions: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh
Some are more poetic, some are more literal, and keeping with the theme, both of them are just as important.
I picked up Tao Te Ching as an American teenager and was moved by how it cuts against the American faith in visible dominance and self-assertion, proposing a form of strength that is low, quiet, and unseen. It's much more than that of course, but that aspect had immediate impact on my thinking.
Reading the Tao te Ching makes it clear why the best engineers are the soft-spoken individuals who refrain from talking until the end of the meeting.
That’s because good engineering is mostly listening to the system.
If you talk too early, you end up arguing abstractions. If you listen long enough, the constraints introduce themselves.
By the end of the meeting, the quiet person isn’t trying to win the room — they’re just reporting what reality already said.
This is wonderful. Ursula K. Le Guin is a great thinker and I’d highly recommend her novels. I’ve read Ken Liu’s, who many here probably know at least from translating The Three Body Problem and Death’s End, Tao Te Ching and it was remarkably poetic. Excited to read another person’s interpretation.
Agreed! I really liked Ken Liu's translation of T3BP. I don't speak any Chinese or Asian-based lingo for that matter, but am a fan of the culture and rich history. Some of us that don't know the lingo, have issues with reading subtitled movies, for example, can only enjoy the art via audio dubbing. Godzilla Minus 1 comes to mind, as a good example of a movie that generated some controversy when translated and people claimed that it lost something in the translation. I'm sure they were right, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and was glad when it was dubbed into other languages.
Osho on Tao the pathless path is also pretty amazing! - https://oshoworld.com/tao-the-pathless-path-vol-1-by-osho-01...
> I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you can see it rightly, it contains everything.
I'm a simple man. I see Borge, I upvote
What a crazy coincidence seeing this on HN; I just started reading this today!
Ron Hogan's Getting Right with Tao is another interesting rendition: http://www.beatrice.com/TAO.pdf
my first exposure to the Tao Te Ching was listening to the audiobook 'the tao of pooh', which I was listening to on an airplane and found myself doubled-over gobsmacked with the simple complexity it was exposing to me, and how I had already absent mindedly followed a few of their principles, and nowadays it's all I see, is don't think, just do; go back to the beginning; become an uncarved block. it's all so great.
HN seems to like Tao Te Ching.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I found these. Others?
Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40886419 - July 2024 (118 comments)
Tao Te Ching – Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English Translation (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38058843 - Oct 2023 (99 comments)
Tao Te Ching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37686713 - Sept 2023 (170 comments)
175 translations of of the Tao Te Ching - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945605 - July 2020 (1 comment)
Translations of the Dao De Jing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16953938 - April 2018 (59 comments)
I would add "The Tao is silent" by Raymond Smullyan to this list. It's not a translation, or even a rendition, but I should guess anyone with a real interest in the Tao will find that book interesting as well.
In one of those threads a user, thadk, posted their really cool tool that shows a side by side comparison of English translations for each verse
https://thadk.net/sbs/#/display:Code:gff,sm,jhmd,uklg,jc,rh/...
I wish HN would align itself with the Dao instead of just liking the Dao.
Up voting and down voting comments is an affront to the Dao.
"Everybody on earth knowing that beauty is beautiful makes ugliness."
That resonates with so much of the discussion on this site. We're all trying to make good technology that helps people! Why does it so often fall short?
Love this version. I quoted the chapter about Leadership plenty of times at work.
`True leaders are hardly known to their followers.`
I am just noticing how those ideas are present in Wizard of Earthsea.
They're present in almost all of her work.
Eastern thought had quite a moment in the sun in the 60’s and 70’s. All I can say is lead poisoning does terrible things to the mind over time.
Sounds similar to some of the historic criticisms neo-Confucian had about Taoism.
Are you familiar with the Western non-dual traditions?
UKLG deliberately wrote Earthsea in the guise of a Western high fantasy, but its philosophical core is the Tao Te Ching. It was set in the archipelagos similar to SW Asia, with similar ethnicity.
The producers who made the movie casted the crew ignoring UKLG though I think contractually, they were supposed to listen to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they swapped out the philosophical core.
Ursula's notes really enrich the work. Fantastic ways to render insights in words.
"The way you can go isn’t the real way."
Nope. This ain't it.
The very first sentence misses the point. (It might be a literal translation. Perhaps. But that's not the essence.) I couldn't go (pun intended) beyond the first sentence. There are much more "essential" translations out there.
For people who like The Big Lebowski, there's "The Tao of the Dude"
Oh please stop.
Love, Someone who studied Daoism for 16 years.
The concept of *unlearning* in Chapter 48 and the Y Combinator (YC) model represent two fundamentally opposing approaches to action, leadership, and success. While C emphasizes accumulation, urgency, and overcoming obstacles to "win," Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching argues that true power comes from "shrinking," "not doing," and flowing like water to avoid obstacles entirely.
Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching draws a sharp distinction between conventional learning and the Way. Le Guin translates this as: "Studying and learning daily you grow larger. / Following the Way daily you shrink".
Y Combinator exemplifies "growing larger." It describes a process where founders "work intensively," "compress months of growth into weeks," and strive to build companies into massive entities like OpenAI ($500B) and Airbnb ($100B). This aligns with the worldly pursuit of accumulation and "being bright" or "keen," which Le Guin notes leads to the "greatest evil: wanting more".
Le Guin argues that to follow the Way, one must "get smaller and smaller" until arriving at "not doing". This "unlearning" is the removal of the "fuss," desire, and intellectual rigidity that creates resistance.
The relationship between Unlearning and Not Doing is that unlearning strips away the ego-driven need to force outcomes. The YC text quotes Paul Graham defining a formidable founder as "one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way." This defines success as the imposition of will upon the world—an act of force. In contrast, Le Guin’s commentary states that wei wu wei (Action by Inaction) is "power that is not force". A Taoist leader does not overcome obstacles by crashing through them; rather, like water, they go "right / to the low loathsome places, / and so finds the way". To the Taoist, the "formidable" approach of forcefully removing obstacles is dangerous because "Those who think to win the world / by doing something to it, / I see them come to grief".
The YC website highlights that "the sense of urgency is so infectious among founders" that it creates maximum productivity. Le Guin’s translation warns explicitly against this state—she writes: "Racing, chasing, hunting, / drives people crazy". Le Guin notes that "To run things, / don't fuss with them," and that "Nobody who fusses / is fit to run things". The "fuss" (or shi) is interpreted by Le Guin as "diplomacy" or "meddling"—essentially, the intense activity and "doing" that YC celebrates.
Instead of infectious urgency, the Taoist relies on "doing without doing," which Le Guin describes as "uncompetitive, unworried, trustful accomplishment".
The YC website describes "formidable founders" who do—they build, pivot, and acquire vast valuations through intense effort. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching suggests that this is the path of "growing larger". In the Taoist view, these founders are "doing something to" the world, which is a "sacred object" that should not be seized. While YC founders "get what they want," Le Guin observes that "the ever-wanting soul / sees only what it wants," blinding them to the "mystery" and the true nature of the Way. Unlearning, therefore, leads to not doing by dismantling the very ambition that drives a founder to become "formidable" in the first place.
Edit: TBH, IMHO, "the low loathsome places" are not dissimilar from the indignities which a founder should be prepared to suffer, and so maybe startups aren't completely anathema to the Dao.
This is most likely a copyright violation. I follow these translations and I’ve seen no evidence that the publisher put it in the public domain.
I'm imagining a hoard of angry Taoists led by the ghost of Le Guin very upset that the wisdom was not paid for in accordance with the inscrutable decisions made by capitalist lawmakers.
Well, her three children might care.
in accordance with the inscrutable decisions made by capitalist lawmakers
As another comment points out, Le Guin herself does not call this a translation, so we shouldn't misrepresent it (although it might be my favorite English version).
However, it's not in the public domain. Her work deserves all the attention it can get, but I'd rather not see it pirated wholesale.
> However, it's not in the public domain. Her work deserves all the attention it can get, but I'd rather not see it pirated wholesale.
I don't disagree. Does github have a way to report copyright violations?
I just bought the real book from Powell's. Several buying options: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/lao-tzu-the-tao-te-ching
> Does github have a way to report copyright violations?
What would reporting this GitHub repo do? Is the late Ursula K. Le Guin going to get a check in the afterlife? Her historical stance on copyright was based on consent. What happens when the author passes away?
What on earth is it about intellectual property that breaks someone's mind so much that genuinely, when presented with a translation of a 2000 year old text that itself is based on another authors translation and who's translator is now dead, they go onto a website to proclaim "it's not in the public domain!".
I have 0 confidence that I could understand the Tao even if I read the best most classical translations available.
Take the bible, which is translated from languages that are closer to mine, and which refers to a culture which is closer to mine, with family and scholars whose interpretation I can understand directly. Still I don't have much confidence that I understand the bulk of it, it takes years of reading and lived experiences to understand both the modern and past contexts in which it was written.
By the same token, I'm certain actual chinese people read the Tao and are like "Lmao what does this mean", and for the most part these books are meant to be mysterious, iirc there's actual sections of the Tao that translate to "You can't understand the Tao".
I don't mean to be overly religious here, it's just that the Tao happens to be religious, but consider Beowulf, which is written in an old form of the English language, surely you would be able to understand it? Not a chance, try it. But ok, surely the translators are able to understand it and provide you a translation without losing much meaning. No, not only can they not provide a translation that you can understand without losing context and signal, but they can't understand a lot of what they are reading anyways. Consider that for just the first word of the whole epic, they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means, nobody can even settle on what the first word means! Imagine the rest of the text.
So to think that one has a chance to understand the Tao, or even that it is worth it at all to understand something from a culture so different. Not for me.
Unless you are Asian, by all means go for it, but if you are not, I would invite you to question whether you first have any chance at understanding at all, or whether you will interpret "being like a Straw Dog" from whatever translation you chose through your own lens, like a Rorschach.