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A Comparison of Two Translations of the Tao Te Ching

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A Comparison of Two Translations of the Tao Te Ching The translator in the translation: A comparison of two translations of the Tao Te Ching Michael Broughton Introduction This essay is a brief comparison of two translations of a Chinese text commonly known by the name Tao Te Ching. This short text dates back to approximately the fourth century B.C.E. and has become associated with the Chinese philosophical doctrine known as Taoism. There are numerous translations of the Tao Te Ching, which after the Bible is said to be the most translated literary work in the world (Chan 2017). In this essay, I have chosen to compare the translations of James Legge and Arthur Waley due to the large influence that both translators had on Western understandings of ancient Chinese texts. Due to word constraints, I will only focus on three differences between the two translations. Background James Legge (1815-1897) was a Scottish missionary who served for some time in Hong Kong before taking up the first Chair of Chinese language and learning at Oxford University. His translations of ancient Chinese texts were originally made to assist missionaries working in China by helping them to understand the Chinese classics (Ride 1961 p.1). Legge published his translation of the Tao Te Ching in 1891 as part of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series (Girardot 2002 p.420). Arthur Waley (1889-1966) was a prolific translator of both Japanese and Chinese texts. Waley was associated with the Bloomsbury Group of Cambridge University and later worked at the British Museum before becoming a professional translator (DeGruchy 2003 pp.34-63). Waley’s translation of the Tao Te Ching (He named this work The Way and its Power) was first published in 1934. Translating the Tao Chapter 1; The Tâo that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tâo. Legge The Way that can be told of is not the Unvarying Way. Waley 道 (Tao), the first word of the title Tao Te Ching is a difficult word to translate. Although this term is often used to refer to a ‘doctrine,’ ‘way’ and ‘course’ in classical Chinese, in the context of the Tao Te Ching, the term Tao has a deeper philosophical meaning that OED describes as ‘the absolute principle underlying the universe.’ For the devout Legge, Tao was something of an enigma that seemed to contradict his own personal religious beliefs. Naturally inclined to accept the existence of God as the conscious creator, Legge was baffled at the description of the ability for Tao to create the universe spontaneously from nothing (Legge 1891 pp.19-21). Likening this to the Darwin’s understanding of evolution (Legge 1883 p.107), Legge could not reconcile his own God with Tao. In his struggle to come to grips with the term, Legge finds that the uncertainties and perplexities of Tao are best left untranslated as ‘Tao.’ For Waley, the Tao of the Tao Te Ching, meant ‘the way the universe works,’ which he described as similar to God, in an ‘abstract and philosophical sense of that term’ (Waley 1934 p.30). However, unlike Legge, Waley’s concept of the God-like nature of the Tao was seen through an anthropological lens, allowing him to come to understand the term from the perspective of cultural relativity. In his introduction to the text, Waley noted that the meaning-extensions of the word ‘Way’ in European languages follow many of the same meaning-contours of the term Tao, giving the biblical example ‘I am the Way,’ as evidence of a use in which ‘Way’ reflects the God-like nature as found in Tao (Waley 1934 p.30) . This use of the term ‘Way’ acts to demystify the more ambiguous concept of Tao. However, although Waley uses ‘Way’ for Tao at the start of his translation, less than a quarter of the way through the text he changes his translation of the term Tao to ‘Tao,’ noting that to do so, ‘avoids many inconveniences’ (Waley 1934 p.174) Such an abrupt shift in translation highlights the difficulties in finding an English equivalent for Tao and suggests that Waley may have found this term more ambiguous than he realised. Translation style Chapter 37; The Tâo in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do. Legge The Tao never does; Yet through it all things are done. Waley A rather conspicuous difference between Legge’s and Waley’s translations of the Tao Te Ching is their style of language. Writing in the later half of the nineteenth century, Legge’s wordy Victorian style can sometimes feel somewhat clumsy when compared to Waley's translation. Legge’s wordiness is often due to the fact that he uses two or three words where Waley only uses one, i.e. ‘there is nothing which it does not do’ vs. ‘all things are done.’ Legge’s choice of wording here strictly matches the Chinese original (無不爲) which contains a double negative, and his more literal method of translation may have been influenced by the fact that while he was at Oxford his translations may have been used as textbooks for classical Chinese. Waley’s desire to produce a more simple rendition may also have been part of what de Gruchy (2003) describes as his reaction against the elitist modernism of Ezra Pound and William Yeats, who were ‘consciously creating an unpopular literature for a chosen few’ (p.12). Waley was particularly conscious of translating for the ‘general’ reader, and while his introduction is rather long, his translation contains few textual notes when compared to that of Legge’s. Although Waley maintained that his translation of the Tao Te Ching was based on philology rather than literature (Waley 1934 p.14), the readability of his translation has ensured its continuing popularity and it is frequently republished even in the twenty-first century. Translating the original meaning Chapter 80; In a little state with a small population, I would so order it, that though there were individuals with the abilities of ten or a hundred men, there should be no employment of them. Legge Given a small country with few inhabitants, he could bring it about that though there should be among the people contrivances requiring ten times, a hundred times less labour, they would not use them. Waley As with many ancient Chinese texts, the Tao Te Ching took on a plethora of meanings as it was passed down from one dynasty to the next. Making sense of these meanings, Legge aimed to recapture the pure spirit of Taoism as found in the original meaning of the text, a spirit which he felt had degenerated in the esoteric practices of 19th century Taoists that he observed during his time in Hong Kong and China (Legge 1891 p.29). Legge described his method of translating the original meaning as a process in which he slowly brought his mind ‘en rapport’ with that of the ‘author’ (Pfister 1995 p.418) For Legge, this ability to see mind-to-mind with the author was centered upon his belief that the author of the Tao Te Ching was a 6th century B.C.E philosopher by the name of Laozi. This was the orthodox understanding of both Chinese and Western scholars until the beginning of the twentieth century, and stemmed from what Girardot (2002) calls a ‘hermeneutics of trust,’ in which the text is understood as an authoritative doctrine with reverence given to its sage author (p.431). Such an understanding led Legge to translate certain sections of the texts as though Laozi is speaking himself, such as the one above, in which the first person pronoun is not given in the original, but is added by Legge due to his belief that this was Laozi’s personal opinion. Finding the original meaning of the text was also important for Waley, who distinguished between what he called ‘scriptural translations’ - translations that explain what a text means to those reading it today, and ‘historical translations’ - translations that explain what the text meant to start with (Waley 1934 p.13). However, in contrast to Legge, Waley’s approach to the text was more in line with with an early twentieth century ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (See Girardot 2002 p.431) in which the text is viewed irreverently, outside the bounds of faith and orthodoxy. Waley did not believe that the author of the Tao Te Ching could be known, nor did he find this problematic. Rather, Waley found his ‘original meaning’ through assessing the meaning of the text by exploring the relationship of its key ideas in other ancient Chinese texts. In the example given above, Waley’s understanding of the term (器) ‘contrivances’ is built upon comparisons found in many other ancient texts (Waley 1934 p.241) Conclusion Unlike the Tao, translations do not emerge from a vacuous emptiness, rather they are the products of their translators. This essay has explored just a few of the many ways in which Legge and Waley were influenced by their times, personal beliefs and social environment, and how these factors in turn influenced their translations of the Tao Te Ching. Such a process has shown that the translation acts not so much as a mirror of the source text, but rather as a mirror of the translator. Bibliography Chan, A 2017, "Laozi", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/laozi/>. DeGruchy, JW 2003, Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism, Orientalisim, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English, University if Hawai’i Press, Honolulu.
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