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Title: Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation (Mandarin_chinese Edition)
ISBN: 0345444191
Author:
Roger Ames
David Hall
Lao Zi
Publicate Date: 2003-12-30
Publish: 2003-12-30
List Price: $13.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.91
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Translation, interpretation or obfuscation?
With a Philosophical Introduction of 44 pages, a Glossary of Key Terms of 17 pages, an Introduction to the Translation of a merciful 4 pages, and the translation itself bloated to 128 dense pages by often 1-2 page long commentaries on each chapter, one might expect to learn a great deal by reading this book. But with such prose gems as this from the Philosophical Introduction:
"A third assumption in the Daoist "cosmology" is that life broadly construed is entertained through and only through these same phenomena that constitute our experience. The field of experience is always construed from one perspective or another. There is no view from nowhere, no external perspective, no decontextualized vantage point. We are are all in the soup. The intrinsic, constitutive relations that obtain among things make them reflexive and mutually implicating, residing together within the flux and flow."
There is no new information there for the serious student of Chinese philosphy. Imagine over 200 pages of this sort, and worse, in fact some real howlers of tortured English language which made me laugh out loud, and I found myself reading many sentences over several times to deconvolute the meaning.
To be fair, the translation itself is readable and I found the authors' interpretation to be interesting and sometimes illuminating, but never poetic. If you buy this book, buy it for the translation. Personally, I find the translation of the Ma Wang texts by Victor Mair to be more satisfactory with a far more interesting commentary.
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2: Simply the best
This is simply the best translation of and commentary on the Dao de Jing that has come along in a long time. Maybe the best ever. It is not for the person who is looking for a mushy, feel-good read, but I found it far more "enlightening" than the more "poetic" versions. These are complicated concepts from a time and a culture quite unlike our own, and they deserve the rigorous attention given them by the authors. I was surprised that those writing negative reviews, most of whom claim to be on a spiritual path, preferred to discount the book rather than to have the humility to admit that the fault lay with their inability to understand what had been written. If you want Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Tolle, then read them, but don't denigrate a book written for a more sophisticated and educated audience.
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3: This translation is a revelation
I have read, and enjoyed, numerous translations of the Daodejing (some numerous times), but reading this translation has been a revelation. This is not a translation for the neophyte, or for those unwilling or unable to tackle some hearty philosophical discussion. But if you are a serious student of the Daodejing (not necessarily an academic), then reading this translation is a must. My general sense is that Ames and Hall have succeeded in their translation because they have managed to combine mature wisdom and serious philosophical insight. Translating the Daodejing into English is an extraordinarily difficult task that requires bridging a vast chasm between ancient China and the modern West, and this translation seems to have pulled this off about as well as it can be done (at least so far). Some specific features of the translation that make it stand out: (a) a worthy historical introduction, (b) an outstanding philosophical introduction, which by itself makes the book more than worth the price, (c) a worthy glossary of key terms, which appropriately avoids the "fallacy of the perfect dictionary", (d) a lively and accurate translation of the Daodejing itself, (e) with each passage/chapter accompanied by the translators' commentary, (f) a thematic index. I am enjoying this book immensely ... I can't recommend it highly enough.
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4: Ivory Tower
I'm sure their intentions were good, but this is filled with the most inaccesable and arcane language structures, it's almost impossible to read and understand. Whereas it is not an interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, but rather an application of Taoism, Alex Anatole's THE TRUTH OF TAO, is much more accessable
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5: Gives you the context you need to understand the original text
Every translation tells you "what" the translator thinks the book should be saying, but only this one actually tells you "why" those words are presented the way they are. This book stands out as an example of what Ames calls the "self-consciously interpretive" style of commentary. (Hall died before the book was finished. So Ames had the last say in this book.)
This style is developed out of the belief that "any pretense to a literal translation is not only naive, but is itself a cultural prejudice of the first order." (Preface, p. xi) To neutralize prejudices, the translation of every chapter is immediately followed by a commentary, which serves as a "meta-translation" to reflect on translation and editing issues from the social background at the time of the writing of Tao Te Ching, to the tension among ideas from different traditions and across chapters. My experience tells me that one either hates or loves this kind of fragmentary, hoop-jumping, stop-and-go lecturing style. However, to me it is very close to that of the vast majority of annotations in classical Chinese scriptures. I find it quite convenient for referencing verses and ideas. So I am perfectly comfortable with (and even welcome) this format of presentation. Also, the authors' professional training in philosophy gives them the edge in presenting the kinds of problems that the ancient Taoists were trying to deal with and analyzing the flow of ideas. What some people may see as "pedantic" commentaries and footnotes actually challenged me to re-evaluate the aims and strategies of those Taoist projects. For that I thank the authors for their great services. But it does not necessarily mean that this style suits everyone (or every purpose).
However, whether you like this book or not, you have to give credits to the authors for being serious down to the most minute details, such as whether the presence of a connective "gu" (footnote 42, pp. 103, 207-208), "shiyi" (p. 10), or "yici" (p. 108) would entail the concatenation of successive chapters. Also, their text is mainly based on the archaeological findings at Mawangdui (168 BCE, discovered 1973) and Guodian (c. 300 BCE, discovered 1993) and the authoritative commentary of Wang Bi (27-91 CE). Throughout the book, fine points are cross-referenced to multiple expert opinions. In my opinion, any cost to this all-encompassing approach should be compensated by the authenticity and the quality of information given our current state of knowledge. Of course, one may insist that a translation should be nothing more than a translation. However, I beg to differ in this particular situation.
Casual readers may not realize that Tao Te Ching actually has no standard version. Not that it has no standard translation in English, but rather that there is not even a single "original" text in Chinese that everyone can confidently identify as _the_ writing of Lao Tsu. Every edition has something unique. Since the grammar of ancient Chinese is often-- and perhaps way, way too often-- too flexible for stable interpretation, any addition, omission, alteration, and even partition of key words can and do radically change the meaning of the same sentence (or what people think should be the same sentence) across editions. Needless to say, this posts a lot of difficulties for the readers. Every editor of Tao Te Ching had tried to "correct" his predecessors' "mistakes", only to generate yet other new confusion and controversy. Worse, without a historically accurate and philosophically coherent context, any "poetic" translation of Tao Te Ching that most people prefer can easily degenerate into wishful thinking on mysticism. The authors cannot (and did not claim to) stop the divergence in interpretations of the text, but they did try in good faith to be open and honest about it. They even adopt a dual translation system such that a hard-to-translate concept is given a literal approximation followed by a sound translation in parenthesis. Thus, even for a supposedly "simple" word like Tao, the book would translate it as "way-making (dao)". (Dao is the latinized translation of Tao. The latter was based on a different phonetic system.) For beginners, this practice may sound silly. But as you study more and more versions, you may come to appreciate what the authors had done.
In conclusion, I think this book should appeal to people who are in interested in knowing what Lao Tsu "really" said (or what the early Taoists were supposed to be saying). Even though this book does not have the final answers, it is still a reasonable place to start. However, as most reviewers would probably agree, I would not look for poetic awe or spiritual enlightenment in this piece of scholarly work because those are simply not the primary objectives of this book.
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