The Link That Can Be Followed ...

Ed Felten, of all people, points us to Das Tao Te King von Lao Tse, a compendium of dozens upon dozens of renditions and translations of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, in many languages, including Chinese, German, English, Russian, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, French, and Icelandic, among others. The Chinese includes both the classical and the Mawang Dui texts. The English translations include those of Feng & English, Robert G. Henricks, and D. C. Lau, among others – even one by Aleister Crowley! Not included, alas, is Ursula Le Guin's wonderful rendition, but you can't have everything.

The site's niftiest feature is its capability to compare texts side-by-side, with pages for comparing two at a time and four at a time, which comes close to providing the experience Le Guin had of reading the 1898 translation by Paul Carus, owned by her father, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber:

[Carus] printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.

To have the text thus made accessible was not only to have a Rosetta Stone for the book itself, but also to have a touchstone for comparing other English translations one with another. If I could focus on which word the translators were interpreting, I could begin to understand why they made the choice they did. I could compare various interpretations and see why they varied so tremendously; could see how much explanation, sometimes how much bias, was included in the translation; could discover for myself that several English meanings might lead me back to the same Chinese word. And, finally, for all my ignorance of the language, I could gain an intuition of the style, the gait and cadence, of the original, necessary to my ear and conscience if I was to try to reproduce it in English. [Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1997, Shambhala Publications, Boston; p. 107]

It's easy to compare the classical text, rendered in pinyin, to a translation, and find in the original rhythm and symmetry that is lost in translation. Here's the opening in pinyin:

dao ke dao, fei chang dao; ming ke ming, fei chang ming....

Here's the Feng & English version of the opening:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name....

I think this is beautiful, even though I don't know any Chinese language to any degree beyond being able to say "aiyah" at the poker table.