> Now how do we translate this into ten or more English words?

I think it's fair to say that written Chinese simply allows to encode more information than English. So it's "physically impossible": translation from Chinese is a lossy operation.

We can only provide a reasonable approximation.

Even at the character level, some information just can't get through. "道" for example contains both "辶" (to walk) and "首" (head, chief, first (occasion, thing, etc)). In addition to the usual meanings, we could derive some further meanings, coherent in this context, with a "philosophical" approach to life (e.g. "the state of mind of someone who moves forward, one step at a time, without rushing").

Native English speakers, and especially native English speakers who do not have fluency in another language, also often have a "familiarity breeds contempt" situation going on with their own language and are not aware of the fact that English is also a rich language, filled with cultural allusions, subtleties in the connotations versus the denotations, rich histories than span continents behind many words, distinct poetical traditions, and many other quirks.

It isn't just Chinese -> English that loses information. The other direction does too. They are two languages that spent thousands of years estranged from each other, so, unlike the European languages which are all different but coevolved, they are both different from each other in a lot of ways. The richness of languages that have grown apart from each other inhibits translations in both directions not just because the concepts in the original language are not precisely present in the other, but also because you can't help but invoke the rich concepts of the target language that don't match.

I'm sure a Chinese person reading just this very post could write about the implications carried in the word "continent" and how that is wrapped around a lot of cultural assumptions around how things are separated (if you don't know what I mean, google around for discussions around "how many continents are there"), the etymology of "quirk" and its many nuances, the connotations embedded in the word "estranged" and why I chose that one over, say, the more neutral "separated", the implications behind "coevolved", and make English sound as amazing as English speakers make Chinese sound... and that would be because both are correct.

> It isn't just Chinese -> English that loses information. The other direction does too

Yes, definitely. People who think studying "dead" languages is a loss of time are foolish.

There's even a somewhat "gain" of information which can chaotically appear in translation. For example if we decompose "道" as "walking" and "head" and translate it in French we get "une tête qui marche", which means both "a walking head" or more interestingly, "a working head."

But it's not because English is richer than commonly believed than Chinese isn't still more spacious, which I do believe for multiple reasons, one of them being that it's a pictographic language:

  A picture is worth a thousand words.

Some of the "etymology" is more readily available, so to speak. But we could also consider "hidden etymology" -- ancient character forms -- which, as for Western languages, would enrich the interpretations.

> not aware of the fact that English is also a rich language

Quite. For any given language, it’s always those who either least understand it (the ‘Japanese grammar is easy’ people) or speak it natively (the ‘English lacks the poetry of other languages’ types) who underestimate its complexity. Not to mention the additional effect of exoticism.

Anyone who says ‘[language] encodes more information than [language]’ is in most cases talking rubbish — especially when comparing two languages that seem to encode quite enough to be preferred by much of the word.

I suppose that wenyan is not a normal spoken language [1], but a form of a literary encoding, more like poetry meeting stenography, and a way to crystallize the meaning without excessive syntax.

English translation requires many more words because a "normal", vernacular Chinese rendition would also require many more words.

My suggestion is to assume quotes:

"Dao which is 'dao' is not true dao", that is, the mere word "dao" (and, by extension, any more descriptive and explanatory words) is insufficient to convey the meaning of true dao.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_an...

It was a bona fide spoken language at the time the Daodejing was written. Likely sounding very little like modern Chinese.

It was likely an inflected language at the time it was spoken, and they just left the tedious grammar bits out when writing.

Well, probably not, no -- I'm pretty sure the Daodejing was written in a literary language quite distinct from any spoken language at that time. This used to be something readily found all over the world.

the way has many ways

yet are not the way

(I'm sure someone can put on their yoda hat and do even better!)

My long-aborted attempt at a poetic translation of the first few lines:

  The road which can be walked is well trodden

  The name which can be said is said often

  The universe began with no witness

  But we can know the origin of everything in it

How does that work? Where's the negation?

They left out the second half of the sentence: 非 [not] 常 [eternal] 道 [way]

Classical Chinese is highly contextual, and characters take on different meanings depending on the position in the sentence and the narrative context, hence the second instance of 道 meaning "speak, expound" instead of "way, method".

My favorite instance of this is from the Zhuangzi: 物 [thing] 物 [thing] 而 [and/under those conditions] 不 [not] 物 [thing] 于 [among] 物 [things]

Which translates to "treat the things of the world as things, but don't be a thing among them" which means that you should use strategic thinking to avoid becoming a victim of circumstances.

This is not even getting to that; but that is actually pretty simple, to be fair.

The negation is: 非常道

非 -- fei, this has been a negator for a very long time in Chinese

常 -- chang, this means something like common, usual, normal, or nominal (I suspect that translating this as "eternal" is a creative move on the part of some westerner)

道 -- dao, the way again

Nowadays, 非常 as a compound is used to mean "extraordinary" ("not normal", "exceptional"); but it is not hard to see how it might be taken to negate 道 here.

Interestingly the 常 was originally 恒, meaning “constant,” in the oldest manuscripts. It got changed to 常 because it was taboo to write any character appearing in the given name of an Enperor, and Emperor Wen of Han had the given name 恒.

Thank you for sharing this

I was gifted with one translation of the Tao Te Ching. While a translation in hindsight I found it to be one that resonated the most.

I am pretty sure this is an online version of it but will have to check.

“ The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery.”

https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu01.html

> 道 -- dao, it means literally a road or path; metaphorically, it used to mean a spiritual way of life

Some relate Tao to Logos from the Greek, and as in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. The meaning of Logos is quite complex[0], and the typical translation into most languages as "word" is grossly inadequate.

And so, if Christ is the Incarnate Logos, and Tao is Logos, then Christ is the Incarnate Tao. And John 14:6 reads "I am the _way_, and the truth, and the life.". (Hieromonk Damascene has written a book on exactly this subject[1].)

These have also been related to Rta, Asha, and Ma'at.

[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=lo%2Fgos&la=gre...

[1] https://a.co/d/0btyDy8i

That is not really translation, though, once you start doing that.

One big difference, if I understand correctly, considering that I think I understand Tao better than Logos, is that Tao is definitely purposeless and kind of pluralistic, which seems rooted in Chinese culture, whereas Logos seems to me to lean more toward purposive and not pluralistic. Like, Chinese culture has a big thing for filial piety--one's ancestors, as your creators, with the lack of a 'central power', seem to catch up some of the sovereignty that logos would attribute closer to the divine. In Chinese culture, it's not some weird divine abstract thing you owe existence to, it's just your ancestors.

Taoism seems to talk of 'heaven and earth', but 'heaven' seems like the collective of little sovereignties like the emperor, your parents, and simple the pattern of nature itself, the pluralistic part. 'Heaven' doesn't seem like a monolithic entity.

In regard to being purposeless, purpose seems acknowledged as emergent, and subservient, like 'the way that can be named is not the eternal way'--there's naming, purpose, and then subservience. It's harder to think of more concrete examples, and it's a bit easy to confuse an acknowledgment of pattern with purpose, but taoism seems rather critical of purposive action on the whole.

The really impossible thing to translate into English here is that 道 was also the verb “to say.” So 道可道 is a pun that could mean “the way that can be trod” or “the way that can be said.”

The Dao is beyond words. The reality is ineffable.

So... Roadable road?