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Originally Posted by Stitchawl
Absotivly! I'm sure that you, as I do, have many different translations of each text at hand. I just picked one that had the least 'inscrutable' translation to post here!  |
Yeah I've had to look at quite a few translations, but I also read classical Chinese and have done translations of certain parts myself. Translation of such old works is incredibly frustrating, and commentaries, despite their disadvantages, have the advantage of postulating on possible references in the text to other works. This is especially the case with pre-Qin stuff since a huge amount of possible source material was lost before the Han, and undoubtedly a lot more has disappeared since then. Chinese literature tends to reflect on older Chinese work, and is only occasionally fully self-contained. In Japan, the same can be found in poetry and drama.
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From your use of the name 'Laozi,' do I assume correctly that you are in Japan rather than China?
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Nope, I'm in former Taihokushi.
Actually, Laozi is the accepted 漢語拼音
Hanyu Pinyin Romanized spelling of 老子, and Lao-Tzu is from another Romanization method called Wade-Giles. The latter is still occasionally used, mostly in academia, but China standardized
Hanyu Pinyin, and it's being used more and more (much to the chagrin of many Taiwanese who are seeing it adopted for street names in Taipei). I use it because I don't feel like confusing people with apostrophes (WG
chi = HP
ji, WG
ch'i = HP
qi, etc.).
Sorry again for my confusion before!
