Beatrice

Once upon a time, the worldwide web was a creation of and for scientists, eventually escaping the labs and universities and stumbling out into the daylight, looking for something useful to do. Whether that goal has yet been achieved continues to be the subject of debate, but one thing that evolved early on was this site, which in one form or another, dates back to those glorious days in the mid-1990s when people still read books. If only while they were waiting for their dial-up connection and Netscape Navigator to load. Introducing readers to writers is the goal here, in a blog by Ron Hogan and a vast archive of interviews with literary luminaries across the last fifteen years, names such as Douglas Adams, James Ellroy and Lisa See amongst many less immediately recognizable authors who have been introduced to readers here. Still running and active, this is a heavily textual site as befits the subject matter, and also befitting the Wordpress blog that powers it, for once not re-imagined as a content-management system and adhering to the traditional left-hand blog, right-hand sidebar format. Easy to read and navigate. I'm not saying this is the best possible venue for readers looking for new works and new authors, but it has to be up there amongst the best blogs. It's a bookmark for the book-minded and a source of some interesting early interviews that add to its authority and usefulness. However, having said all that, I came here for Ron Hogan's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Not exactly shiny and new, it's from 2004 but it's the latest of the best attempts to translate this into English and it's far and away the most daring. I'll spare you the tale and the theories about the origins and authorship of the Tao Te Ching itself, because as one of the pillars of Chinese philosophy there are many sites devoted to it already. Suffice it to say that it's more than 2000 years old, written to be relevant to the times, regardless of the passage of time, and it carries just as powerful a message today as it did whenever it was written. As such, it's vital that any translation is sensitive to zeitgeist, and that's a challenge to any translator. Ron Hogan is such a sensitive, and he's somehow managed to get away with a radical rewrite in modern idioms, without the almost inevitable outcome of the establishment guarding the original and hating him for messing around with it. For once, someone has made a classic work more readable and been accepted. Here's a sample of one of the earlier translations of the book: REASON'S REALIZATION. 1. The Reason that can be reasoned is not the eternal Reason. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The Unnamable is of heaven and earth the beginning. The Namable becomes of the ten thousand things the mother. Therefore it is said: 2. "He who desireless is found The spiritual of the world will sound. But he who by desire is bound Sees the mere shell of things around." 3. These two things are the same in source but different in name. Their sameness is called a mystery. Indeed, it is the mystery of mysteries. Of all spirituality it is the door. And here's Ron Hogan: If you can talk about it, It ain't Tao. If it has a name, It's just another thing. Tao doesn't have a name. Names are for ordinary things. Stop wanting stuff; It keeps you from seeing what's real. When you want stuff, All you see are things. Those two sentences Mean the same thing. Figure them out, And you've got it made. http://www.beatrice.com/wordpress/tao-te-ching http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Right-Tao-Contemporary-Ching/dp/*******982