Tao Te Ching LO1098
jack@his.com
Sun, 07 May 95 23:04:44
I have been completely overwhelmed by a couple of the threads here of
late, especially the storytelling thread, to which I intend to contribute
just as soon as I can "collect" my thoughts. In the meantime, I was
struck by the exchanges surrounding the quote from Lao Tse on "doing
nothing". I am always a little puzzled by conversations which revolve
around translations from a foreign language, especially when - as in this
case - the material under discussion is so fundamental to a "different"
culture. (What in the world do we think we're talking about?)
On this particular topic, I would like to call attention to page six of
the Millennium Whole Earth Catalogue, where several translations of Lao
Tse are compared. It's useful, I think, to look at how the Chinese
original "means" very differently to translators, and it puts disputation
around any particular translation into quite a different light.
--
Jack Hirschfeld Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to
jack@his.com speak, are you smart?