I decided to sit down and actually translate a few chapters before really deciding on whether I was going to stick to the style I started with or if I was going to go back and refine it further. Ultimately, for the time being at least, I have decided I like the methodology I am using and plan to stick to it. I need to go back and clean up some of the first chapter as this project was started as a purely linguistic pursuit, but there really isn’t a sane way to translate this without interpreting parts as the source material has too many tricky spots where committing to any phrasing commits to an interpretation.
There are dozens of good translations of the Daodejing (道德经), and I don’t expect mine to really be a contender in academia or similar. This is a project I started for myself to become more familiar with literary Chinese and as an exercise in self improvement. I originally tried to avoid getting too into what the philosophical pieces meant to me, but ultimately, this is near impossible with the Daodejing (道德经) unless I plan to just translate literal characters with a dozen definitions and hundreds of permutations of each sentence or section. Even committing to a sentence break is a bit of a fool’s errand.
I first selected two editions of the Daodejing (道德经) which I have seen included in various translations and published editions. I am not familiar with the edition names and the public domain ones don’t really have the name included. I tried to avoid changing anything in either of these (like for instance the added punctuation in one edition), but I did compare several editions and correct some obvious issues with whichever edition I was working for (obvious typos or things which most published editions had corrected as well). I avoided any changes to make the editions more in line for better and for worse.
Each chapter will be comprised of a small section of the text in the original (starting with the edition I have heard is the older and more venerable edition), then the Pinyin, followed by a literal translation. I avoid ending punctuation in these sections due to the fact that certain structures in Chinese would be put together, but don’t make sense to not split up in English. A lot of these sections will seem like run-on sentences, but this is just to avoid splitting clauses that may be linked in the original, but really couldn’t be linked easily in English without adding phrasing or grammatical devices which may affect the original.
I place the comparison section from the second edition of the original below and repeat the process to make an easier AB comparison. Afterwards, I add my commentary on specific parts of the translation and what the sections mean to me which may help explain the translation choices. As mentioned before, this started as a personal project, and originally it started only focused on the literary Chinese, but it has grown a bit already. My commentary has shifted from stiffer linguistic choices to interpretations of what the material means to me and explanations of my interpretation of it.
As I progress through this series, I plan to eventually go through and make another section which will just be an AB of the original text, the Pinyin, and an interpreted translation which will not be as literal and takes into account my interpretation, but without commentary. As I clean up the originals, I will also include these at some point with more sane break points in the text. I am welcome to suggestions for certain things, but ultimately, this project is for me, so I plan to just kind of do what I want with it.
I split this off as a separate domain from my main blog because it makes a lot more sense to have this specific project self contained. As I proceed through and ultimately one day complete this interpretation, I plan to move on to something like the I Ching (Yijing, Zhouyi, 易经, 周易, etc.) or maybe some Buddhist literature. I plan to do similar as I have done with this series, but hopefully with a bit more clarity from the get go as to what the goal and plan is.