Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
Much worse to me would be sloppy new age thinking.
I will not become overly shy or tactful in pointing out what I think
And it seems to me you keep defending that translations can be extremely different and still all make sense. So basically you like what translators have put into the text, not the original text itself. In that sense you actually don't show much respect for the original text do you?
...
even if we could translate it almost perfectly...
I disagree. For many questions that precise translation will not at all be a precise answer.The more precise translation we use the more precise answers we get!
I must have dialed the wrong planet.
Perhaps it is best to notice just your quote and realize that there is no justification for such conduct, especially when you rely solely upon your own individual perspective and call it scholarship. Frank
I for one refuse to let my beautiful free-flowing river of an oracle getting narrowed down to a straight one-way canal. If anyone offers a 'perfect' translation, I will embrace it enthused, but then put it on my shelf next to the other ones, and use all of them.
Y'ain't alone.
Your comments remind me of a jazz trumpet player's remarks on improvisation, saying that even accomplished jazz musicians are only purely improvising about 5-10% of the time. The rest of the time they are recalling proven patterns which fit into the chord progression. That's how I experience it too. The wider your musical vocabulary, the more patterns you have to draw upon. 'Course then there's the danger of playing to show how much you know. But knowing isn't necessarily a hindrance, if you stay near your roots. And it's those roots which distinguishes music from packets of digital information.
I think that might be the best analogy I've heard here. I don't really "get" most jazz, especially the soulless showoff stuff, but I think I've heard the theory often enough. Aren't Ragas in Indian music similar in concept, where you're dancing improv all around some kind of formal core?
I look in an interpretation now and then, just for getting some more ideas when I cannot make sense of a line. But that happens extremely seldom, and only when all my 'real' translations cannot give clarity. When I cannot understand a line, I go from character to character for a 'feeling' for all meanings of each character. It is a hex.50 work: putting them all together, and cooking them in my mind until an image arises. Very often it is not one possible meaning which gives the clue but a mix of meanings. In English that also happens now and then, a word which has two different meanings, and both make sense. But this rich image, which Chinese characters have, hardly exists here.
How about this for a solution: Forget about translations, and learn to read the Yi in Chinese. Lindsay
Let me present the word "seeing". In English, seeing can refer to seeing a tree, seeing an idea, going to see someone, seeing a vision or dream. Understanding that context drives the meaning, is there anything from the translation of seeing, which might be relevant to this thread?
One problem that is widely mentioned about working with the Yi is that there isn't enough text to establish an internal context. Sentences tend to be very brief and unrelated to each other. It's very difficult to guess what flavor of "seeing" is meant, since several fit well enough in the scanty context of short, stand-alone phrases.
Lindsay
Recently, when discussing the problem of context in translating the Yi (or even simply understanding what it is saying), it has become more common to talk about the context of the translator. That is, where is the translator coming from? What ideas and opinions does the translator have that affects his translation? What is the historical and cultural context of the translation? Lindsay
But unfortunately there's been a whole lot of black-and-white fallacy going on here too. Anything Yijing but not Zhouyi is Confucian and so it all must be dismissed as Confucian. Anything by Missionaries is Christian. While a significant chunk of these accusations might have some merit it isn't a reason to discard a whole corpus without examining it for legitimate context. Then too, when looking too hard and closely at cultural context, the larger context of human nature is often ignored, and to the extent that the Yi is identifying or using archetypes and such, the broader and more useful meaning of the text is not seen.
Great point. It does beg the question though: Where is the point of balance or rather where is the proper vantage point to be found? The middle way, so to speak. I mean, personally,
I think the middle way passes through this gate: "It will never be perfect"
and this one: "It has to make sense"
and this one: "Never give up, for thousands of years"
Most of this IMHO discussion has focussed on the rational / intellectual aspects of the Yijing, and to some extent the "senior" members have vaunted their knowledge without really being concerned whether newbies are gaining anything. It really does give the impression of being a closed club.
I am a trained counsellor, at one stage I was a Franciscan novice, and have read extensively for the last 40 years. I find the lack of humility and respect surprising, and wonder what it might indicate about those purporting to follow the Dao ????
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).