jivadas is not currently reading any books.
I’m 75 years old, male, from Canada. I’ve been a DailyLit member since January 07, 2009. My reading interests include Philosophy, Sanskrit, and Translation.
Posts
Masters of Verse - Poem 1354
Yoga-vasishtha@googlegroups.com
Masters of Verse - Poem 1354
The Yoga Vaishtha googleGroup is offering prizes for a Sanskrt translation of this beautiful poem.
Question of the Week - Question of the Week #8: Which books make good movies?
My choice would be "The Horse's Mouth" with Alec Guiness despoiling his voice to create a hoarse Gulley Jimson, a rogue-artist of great beauty. I love the film especially because I saw it before I read the book. The book has whole subplots that are not in the movie: a true bonus!
The other would be 'Tom Jones' from the same 60's period. This movie performs the task of condensing a very complicated 400-page plot without losing a trace of meaning. It is a masterpiece!
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jd
Masters of Verse - What the hell is "The Burial of the Dead" about?
Eliot wrote a lot of spontaneous beautiful blather. Ezra Pound cut it down to its present form, to create a corpse of singular beauty, still ringing in our ears after many decades.
Poetry should be read aloud, and let the words bring-forth whatever meaning they can suck from the universal unconscious, for your pleasure!
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jd
Tao Te Ching - Ignorance masked as englightenment
amatbrewer's concern about translation is not well-taken. The Tao Te Ching or Dau De Jing has been translated into more languages than the Bible, and has many English translators. Some Scholars have held-up their hands in despair, and called it "untranslatable".
Translation [I speak as a translator--see my profile] is always an approximation of the original. Where the translator is dealing with Classical Chinese, the ideograms are only approximations of the thought.
What you read is the meaning that the Chinese words had for the very scholarly Dr Legge. The original edition of this work had a superabundance of scholarly notes, and the Chinese text.
Another [and more beautiful] translation is Arthur Waley's _The Way and Its Power_. And you can google many others. This is an interesting way to see the waywardness of the Way.
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jd