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shën : soul

身

'shën' is one of the most inconsistently translated words in the DDJ, as seen below. My choice of 'soul' for it seems unique and maybe perverse, but then my concept of 'soul' is perhaps not the most commonly accepted one. 'shën' translated as 'self', 'body', and 'person' all suggest individuality. 'individuality' is conceptually but not poetically close to 'shën'; 'soul' to me best captures both sense and sound. I am also amused that 'shën' and 'shén 神 [spirit]' are homonyms.

MWD has 'tùi 退 [retire, retreat]' for 'hòu' in line 7, a word associated with 'shën' in 09:09. MWD-B has the variation 'wài qí shën | ér shën xïan' interjected between lines 8 and 9, which surely must be a transcription error. RH notes it to be a "copy error", but diligently translates it in line.

L1 uses 'person' for line 7, then 'it' subsequently (L2 has 'person' for line 9 as well), an overt example of both taking the word too lightly (as with others' frequent omission of the word) and ignoring the poetic repetition of the source, which only PC and DH maintain.

JL has 'his own person', 'it', 'his person', and 'that person'; again one is left with the ambiguities surrounding willful disregard for repetition. Is there a difference between 'his own' and just 'his'? Is 'his own' really necessary?

Despite LY's copious commentary, justification for his bewildering switch from 'himself' to 'his body' is neglected. The same can be said for RH's inconsistent use of 'self-concern'.

WO's 'himself'/'Self', C1's 'he'/'his self', and CM's 'herself'/'her self' simultaneously suggest and obscure the question of a metaphysical interpretation of 'shën'. Is it the common, everyday 'self' we encorporate casually in 'himself', or is it the metaphysical 'Self' (of special concern to be capitalised even) that some claim emanates from the transcendent and eventually merges back into it?

DC also translates 'wú sï¹' (line 11) as 'selfless'.

Again is evident the vacillating disregard translators have for 'shën', here it is most often treated as an implied pronoun to be dropped. This is impossible in other examples, so giving the word less weight here must be missing an important point.

This is one of the more difficult chapters and shows how slippery 'shen' is. It seems to fall somewhere between 'self' and 'body', but splitting the difference and using two or three translations in one chapter is ridiculous. I did not belabour the variations translators have with these lines as I did with Chapter 7, but the small letters following the translators' initials suggest some of the leaps and shifts they make. 'embodied persons' (AHb) seems especially grating of all these examples; especially bewildering are the distinctions made between 'body' and 'physical body' (WW), 'person' and 'personal conditions' (JL), and 'self' and 'human condition' (FE). And none of these would make sense in the context of 09:09.

The following translations are equivalent in both chapters:

The following translations show significant differences:

One of the more telling cases of translation drift: two identical lines treated variously and inconsistently in two places. 'mò¹ shën' seems an idiomatic phrase for 'throughout life', exactly what is meant in English, 'all your life', 'your whole life', 'to the end of your life' is a description of life, not a prescription for death. The DDJ already has terms for 'death' and 'losing one's life', so there is no need to force them here. Then there is the further complication of 'shen' as 'self' in a metaphysical sense, which I do not find convincing or elegant. But translators inflate this into some doctrine on the self merging with the Dao and so forth. But whatever tack one takes, there is no justification for discrepant translations, and some are just baffling. CM says 'you do not die', then 'you can die without pain'; though 'pain' and 'death' are not mentioned, this a glaring contradiction. FE goes from 'though the body dies' to 'freedom from the fear of death', which is a gross inflation of terms.

GD has 'wu 務' for 'qin' (52:10) and 'lai 來' for 'jiu' (52:13). MWD-B is missing text for 'zhong shen' and has 'ji 棘' for 'jiu'. MWD-A is missing text for 'bu jiu/ji/lai' (52:13).

The translation drift becomes is even more clear with lines these parallel lines in Chapter 52. They each come at the end of a section, three lines apart, the structure indisputibly intentional. That the second and third sections form one unit separate from the first is clear thematically and textually. Thematically, the first section uses the mother/child metaphor for cosmology, the second-third section flips to the individual. Textually, one sees that 52:07 is a repeat from Chapter 16 and that lines 8 and 9 are repeated in Chapter 56. My guess would be that 52:07 was imported to join the two sections structurally through the parallels of 'mo shen' and 'zhong shen', but 'mo' was retained out of textual fidelity. But it is not speculation to see that these are equivalent constructions [(until the end of)] [shen] [no] [(misfortune)], essentially, "do right, live well". Yet even here we see L1, Aw, and CM offer discrepant translations of the same term three lines apart. More significantly, 'person', 'body', and 'self' seem to be totally forgotten at this point.

MWD-A has 'wu-alt dao shen yang-alt 毋道身央'. MWD-B is missing text for 'wu' and has 'yang-alt 央' for 'yang'. RH does not comment on these variants. AH uses 'wu-alt' but not 'yang-alt'.

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