A short list of Classical Chinese reading materials

[croptoptux]

[reposted from tumblr]

Disclaimer: I put this together from my notes rather quickly, and cannot swear by the quality of the links below.

Confucianism

Kongfuzi (Confucius) 孔夫子
《論語 - The Analects》
https://ctext.org/analects

Mengzi (Mencius) 孟子
https://ctext.org/mengzi

Daoism

Laozi 老子
《道德經 - Dao De Jing》
https://ctext.org/dao-de-jing

Zhuangzi 莊子
https://ctext.org/zhuangzi

Liezi 列子
https://archive.org/details/book-of-master-lie-lieh-tzu-thomas-cleary/mode/2up

Buddhism (esp. Chan Buddhism)

Tao Yuanming 陶淵明
《桃花源記 - The Peach Blossom Spring》
https://eastasiastudent.net/china/classical/tao-yuanming-taohua-yuan/

Su Shi 蘇軾
《赤壁賦 - Ode on the Red Cliff》
https://ajmccready.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/translation-su-shi-meditation-on-red-cliff/

Bai Juyi 白居易
《長恨歌- Song of Everlasting Regret》
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Song_of_Everlasting_Regret

Du Fu 杜甫
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Fu
https://allpoetry.com/Du-Fu

Li Bai 李白
https://archive.org/stream/worksoflipochine00libauoft/worksoflipochine00libauoft_djvu.txt

Wang Wei 王維 (and Pei Di 裴迪)
《輞川集 - Wheel River Collection》
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/23162/Bruneel_2018.pdf?sequence=1

Additional misc. collection of the above 4 poets
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Chinese/AllwaterWangWei.php

Hanshan 寒山
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Chinese/HanShan.php

Platform sutra
https://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Translations/PlatformSutra_DharmaJewel.pdf

Lotus sutra
http://www.pawhitney.com/LotusSutrax.pdf

Heart sutra
https://huntingtonarchive.org/resources/downloads/sutras/02Prajnaparamita/heartsutra.pdf

Comments

[larryhammer]

I hesitate to point to this as it's an older draft with cringe-causing misreadings in at least 2/3 of the poems, but I did translate all of 輞川集. I'm more confident in my 長恨歌, though the Wikisource version is indeed quite good.

[croptoptux]

I'd been meaning to look more into those so thank you very much for the links and ご苦労様でした!
Translating this stuff isn't easy.

The above list is everything I covered in a university class, and Laoshi was realllly into Daoist literature. I posted it in response to some especially bad takes I saw someone else complaining about in a c-novel fandom. Xianxia makes more sense when one has actually read some Daoist foundational texts, even partially!

I never actually read all of 長恨歌 in class. Laoshi had us work through all of 琵琶行 instead, but a lot of scholarly sources I looked at list that much lower on the list of Bai Juyi's best hits. I will be reading yours soon :D

[larryhammer]

I haven't gotten to 琵琶行 yet -- one day, assuming I finish 唐诗三百首. I've been told it's more often taught in school than 長恨歌 because it's easier to read, rather than a better poem. :shrug:

FWIW, the index for all my translations is here, including an exceedingly rough rendering of a third of 道德经. A foundation of Daoist stuff does indeed help xianxia make more sense, at least its surface tropes.

[croptoptux]

Bookmarking that too :D

道德經 was such a headache. 道可道非常道 lives rent free in my brain. Good on you for translating that. The English translation on ctext.org is... not great</>. Certainly better than nothing at all.
It's centuries out of copyright; I appreciate that James Legge was making a serious attempt as compared to some later Victorian hack jobs. I prefer not to reference translations predating 1960 when I can help it.

A Chinese diaspora friend once told me that the best way to bridge philosophical Daoism to occultist Daoism and the resulting genre tropes is probably a Traditional Chinese Medicine text. Finding a good primer is on the never ending to-do-list. If, by some chance, you have any insight in that direction, I'm all ears.

[larryhammer]

Legge's translation is useless. I try not to even glance at it, while using ctext's dictionary lookups on the text. (Or any other translation, for that matter, though for others it's to retain my own voice rather than to avoid being led astray.)

Though to be fair, Legge is not as atrocious as the Witter Bynner attached to ctext's 唐诗三百首, which is has at least one outright mistranslation every poem that I checked. Which I eventually stopped doing because life's too short.

A Traditional Chinese Medicine text is as good as guess as any. I've no specific insights, though.

[croptoptux]

The absolute worst Daodejing commentary I found in the library is the Ursula K. Le Guinn one. I can't believe someone wasted paper on this. Her primary reference was the Paul Carus translation. If what Wikipedia says is true, that guy got heckled out of the profession!

[larryhammer]

I'm not looking at* her rendering (which she was at least honest about it not being a translation -- she did actual translations of other works and did indeed know the difference) but in the past I've found her commentary on it of some use, at least for conceptualizing.


* Especially not while still theoretically engaged in my own. Le Guin was a master wordsmith and I do not want to sound like her,** because I am not her.
** Unless I'm writing fiction, in which case I would love to have even a hundredth of her craft.

[larryhammer]

Oh, and 道可道 is indeed not 常道.

But I'm curious, which meaning of 道-as-verb do you understand, "take (a path)" or "describe"?

[croptoptux]

I took it as a noun actually. "The Way may be the Way, but it is not the Eternal Way."

Where the Way represents not only a translation of just any old path, but also the natural order of things, and also the socio-political concept of "good government". We had a very, very long class discussion about the Warring States period that I do not recall much of this many years later.

Laoshi also spent a good chunk of class time hashing out the difference between 非 常道 and 非常 道, and why the latter was a false cognate from modern Mandarin.
What confused me more at the time was that the dictionary entry for 可 is べし, and I had no idea how to make that work because I couldn't fathom 非 as a "verb". In modern Japanese, at least, it's exclusively a bound morpheme. What I was missing was that 非 is shorthand for 有らず. I still disagree with the rendering of 可 as べし, but for example's sake, I'll include it:

道は道なるべかれど常なる道非ず

Neither the Chinese nor Japanese department professors ever answered my questions about 漢文訓読, no matter how many times I inquired. I only understand now how many layers of unnecessary ladder translation that is, due to having finally sat down with a tutorial meant for Japanese high school teachers, and hashed it all out myself.

[larryhammer]

the dictionary entry for 可 is べし

:head tilts over like a confused puppy:

:head tilts over the other way:

That's ... certainly a decision.

So you understand the second line as something like "A name may be a name, but it is not the eternal name"? Hmmm. Dunno -- taking 可 as the auxiliary verb of a relative clause seems easier to read: "the name that can be named ..."

[croptoptux]

I haven't figured out how to embed images yet but if you look up 可 in a kokugo dictionary, like weblio, it's べし, I swear.

On the other hand, there's this kakioroshi, which translates it as 道で従うべきものは、変化しない道ではない。
Since when has みち ever been read したがふ?! (This is about when I needed Laoshi to put his foot down about how ridiculous kanbun kundoku is... Alas.)

It make much more sense to interpret 可ke3 from the angle of 許可の可 or 可能の可. The infinitesimal amount of Modern Mandarin I know leads me to believe that 可 can be a stand alone verb in its own right, so the relative clause isn't necessary.

Coming at Classical Chinese from a Japanese base instead of Chinese is certainly a unique experience.

Looking at the rest of the chapter, it's pretty parallel in structure if one assumes there are a bunch of dropped copulas. My Chinese is a little rusty these days. Let's see if I can still translate.

A Name may be a Name, but it is not its eternal name. Those without name are the beginnings of Heaven and Earth; those with names are the mother of all things. For this reason, those who are eternally without desire, [experience] wonder by seeing it. Those constantly with desire, [experience only] its edges by seeing it. Both of these yield similarly, yet have differ in name. Similarly [they] call it "mystery". Mystery is even more mysterious, and it is the door of a myriad wonders.

[larryhammer]

We know a bunch of cupolas were dropped, because we have two texts from a tomb in Mawangdui from the first half of the 2nd century BCE, and they both include them. Or some of them, anyway. They also record numerous alternate hanzi, sometimes synonyms, sometimes writing the pronunciation with a different character, both of which have been Very Helpful in picking through meanings -- I've been reading the standard received text with those on the side. (Translating just the Mawangdui texts is a no-go, because too many characters have gotten obscured over the millenia.)

My understanding, based on Kroll and a couple beginner grammars, is that in Old Chinese 可 can be an adjective ("possible"), a contrastive conjunction ("however"), and as an auxiliary verb indicating either passive voice or "may/can", but not a main verb. Could be very wrong about this. (In Modern Mandarin, 可 can indeed be a main verb.)