Utopian communities: The case of the Daodejing and its Estonian translations
In the development of the cultural identity of a smaller nation, a noteworthy roll is played by
contact with a linguistic and cultural Other; which in some places is possible only through
translation, and requires that choices, agreements and certain internal changes be made by the
translator. Tensions, which inevitably appear during the course of identifying with the text being
translated, are more or less related to the given sociohistorical situation and create the
prerequisite for the generation of new meanings which may lead to the formation of new values
and attitudes, which in turn may either support or contradict the norms valid in the target culture.
When viewed in such a light, the Estonian translation tradition of the 20th century proved to be a
field of numerous opposing tendencies, in places cultural and political. In Lawrence Venuti’s
terms it could be called the anticipation of a utopian communities instead of simply serving
domestic expectations (Venuti, 2000)
In preparing Estonia’s first complete bibliography of translated Chinese literature, I wished to
test the above-described hypothesis using one Chinese text as an example. The current paper
focuses on the Daodejing and its various Estonian translations. My objective is to analyse the
three Estonian language versions of the Daodejing, each of which was published during a
different historical stage and under the conditions of a different political situation – pre-war
Republic of Estonia (Wesley, 1937), Soviet occupied Estonia (Mäll, 1979) and the restored
Republic of Estonia (Kaplinski, 2001) – and, by placing the translation as well as the translator in
their cultural discourses, to observe to what degree the target text may have been affected by the
social and political tendencies of the period. I plan to focus, above all, on those chapters of the
Daodejing relating to political order and the authority of the state, and to examine how the three
translators have intermediated into the Estonian language such concepts as dao, shengren, wuwei
etc. and the accompanying concept clusters. Alongside other topics, the linguistic characteristics
of the Daodejing, the translatability of the text and the opportunity to talk about the numerous
possible directions of its interpretation will also be discussed.