THE HISTORY OF THE TRANSLATION OF THE ANCIENT CHINESE TREATISE «TAO TE CHING»

Liu Ling, Wang Gang

One of the fundamental sources of Chinese philosophy is the ancient Chinese treatise “Tao Te Ching”, which had a great influence on the culture of China and the whole world. The relevance of the work is explained by the presence of numerous translations into Russian, English, French and other languages. The purpose of the work is to study the history of the translation of the ancient Chinese treatise “Tao Te Ching”. The practical significance of the article is directly related to the history of ancient Chinese literature, teaching history and philosophy in Russian and Chinese universities. The main methods of work are descriptive and comparative. The main objectives of the study are the following: 1) talk about earlier and modern translations of the book “Tao Te Ching”; 2) consider translation options for the main term “Tao”, on which the content of the entire text and its direction depend: the philosophical, from the point of view of socialism, the modern concept of “comprehensive matter”. The main results of the work are: 1) consideration of earlier and modern translations; 2) interpretation of the basic term “Tao”; 3) highlighting the distinctive properties that distinguish each translation. It should be noted that the different spelling of the name of the author and his work is due to its presentation in the translation, therefore, the text of the work specifically presents various interpretations that distinguish one translation from another. The author considers Yang Hing-Shun's translation to be close to the text, which is due to his studies at the Department of Philosophy in Russia and his perfect knowledge of the Chinese language. The author comes to the conclusion that translations of the ancient Chinese treatise “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu differ in the history of writing and the interpretation of the book by the translator.

Keywords:translation, history, daily Chinese treatise, “Tao Te Ching”, Lao Tzu