Jeff,
When you say:
> IMHO, there is no adequate way of translating Taoism
> into English. For example, the Paul Carus translation of 1913 renders
> the first sentence of chapter 5 as, "But for heaven & earth's humaneness,
> the ten thousand things [everything] are straw dogs [sacrificial
> objects]." Most modern translations render it as,"Heaven & Earth aren't
> humane. To them the ten thousand things are straw dogs." Can't you feel
> the shift from static to dynamic quality
> in these passages?
I agree. I have a very "modern" translation (1993) by Man-Ho Kwok, Martin Palmer, and
Jay Ramsay
called "The Illustrated Tao Te Ching" with the Chinese characters juxaposed to the new
translation.
Chapter 5 is translated thus:
Heaven and Earth
are not like humans.
The Tao does not act like a human.
They don't expect to be thanked
for making life,
so they view it without expectation.
Heaven and earth are like a pair of bellows:
they are empty, and yet they can never be exhausted.
Work them, and they produce more and more
-there's too much talking, it's really better to stay quiet.
There are too many laws, when all you have to do
is to hold on to the centre.
Now I'm sure that if I read Chinese and was familiar with older more traditional
tranlations it
would take some serious head scratch'n see how one gets from:
"But for heaven & earth's humaneness,
the ten thousand things [everything] are straw dogs [sacrificial
objects]"
to:
"Heaven and Earth
are not like humans.
The Tao does not act like a human."
in a mere 80 years.
Guess, -there's just to much talk'n go'n on. Not enough expierenc'n.
3WD
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