[Buddha-l] Milarepa--his story & translations

[Jo]

X-posted FYI
Joanna K.

I guess that practically all of us have read about Milarepa one time or
another. Translation is an interesting and often fraught action. This
message discusses some aspects of translation of the Milarepa story and also
questions the tendency to treat such accounts as this one as historical
fact. However, if one isn't an historian,  such stories can be enjoyed as
folklore or legend-from which we can also learn. Aside from the Buddha as
first, Milarepa was the second Buddhist hero I read about, some years ago. I
still find his story and his character far more complex and intriguing than
many a story of the siddhis.  Thangka scroll paintings of Mila also strike
me as far more appealing and easily related to his story  than many others. 

Another discussant posted a new translation noted but not listed below:
_The Life of Milarepa_ (Penguin Classics) [Paperback], Tsangnyon Heruka
(Author), Andrew Quintman (Translator), Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Introduction).

Cheers, Joanna

_______________

From: Indo-Eurasian_research at yahoogroups.com  
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2012 7:02 PM

[From an IER list member):
I haven't seen Idoeta's Spanish translation, but maybe it's worth mentioning
that Idoeta, who seems from his Wikipedia page to be primarily a Sinologist,
has as far as I know had little or no contact with the Tibetanist community.
He seems to be best known for his strongly pro-Chinese position on the
Chinese occupation of Tibet. Of course, he still may have done a competent
translation of the Milarepa biography.

Neither of the two English versions (the old Kazi Dawa Samdup, ed.
Evans-Wentz, and Lobsang Lhalungpa) is a scholarly translation (there hasn't
yet been a scholarly translation of this text into English), but when I
checked passages from them with the Tibetan many years ago both seemed
generally accurate. There is also the old French translation by Jacques
Bacot, who was a serious Tibetan scholar, but I haven't checked this in
detail.

There has been signficant work on the author of the biography (Tsangnyon
Heruka) and on the Milarepa biographies in general. It's worth noting that
the English Wikipedia page in its current form presents the events narrated
in Tsangnyon's biography as literal history; few Tibetanists would agree
these days. The discussion in my Civilized Shamans (Smithsonian 1993) gives
a starting point. An important recent contribution is Peter Alan Roberts'
The Biographies of Rechungpa (Routledge 2007) - Chapter 3 discusses the
evolution of Milarepa's biography in detail.

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