07/06/2024
In the late 1990s, at the Faculty of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities, were offered to translate a line from "Dao De Jing". The aim was to grasp the wisdom of this profound book.
The "Dao De Jing" comprised sets of lines with three hieroglyphs. Each hieroglyph represented a word, and when combined, they formed a sentence with multiple possible interpretations. For example, there is a line: "son," "eat," "mother". The literal translation is "the son eats the mother". But what could this mean? "The future grows out of the past"? "The son is nourished by the mother's experience"? "The new grows only out of the old"? "The mother feeds the son with her breast"? "We all devour our parents to grow"? All these variants are quite acceptable.
It's intriguing that after the reform (simplifying hieroglyphs into pinyin), the same line in "Dao De Jing" looks entirely different. Each word is now represented by two hieroglyphs, and the literal translation has nothing in common with the translation of the ancient Chinese line: "Once you know the mother, you understand her children.
Once you know her children, you return and hold fast to the mother". However, this is also just one version of the translation.
This story is a vivid example of how language shapes our thought patterns, and also demonstrates the complexity and wonder of the work of a written translator from Chinese. While modern language is much simpler than ancient Chinese, we owe this clarity to the reforms of the 1930s and 1940s.
