The Lathe of Heaven - Title

Title

The title is taken from the writings of Chuang Tzu — specifically a passage from Book XXIII, paragraph 7, quoted as an epigraph to Chapter 3 of the novel:

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. (知止乎其所不能知，至矣。若有不即是者，天鈞敗之。)

Other epigraphs from Chuang Tzu appear throughout the novel. Le Guin chose the title because she loved the quotation. However, it seems that the quote is a mistranslation of Chuang Tzu's Chinese text. In an interview with Bill Moyers recorded for the 2000 DVD release of the 1980 adaptation, Le Guin clarified the issue:

...it's a terrible mistranslation apparently, I didn't know that at the time. There were no lathes in China at the time that that was said. Joseph Needham wrote me and said "It's a lovely translation, but it's wrong".

She has published her own translations of the Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way and Its Virtue by Lao Tzu, the traditional founder of Taoism (Daoism). In the notes at the end of this book, she further explains this choice: "The language of some was so obscure as to make me feel the book must be beyond Western comprehension. (James Legge's version was one of these, though I did find the title for a book of mine, The Lathe of Heaven, in it. Years later, Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese science and technology, wrote to tell me in the kindest, most unreproachful fashion that Legge was a bit off on that one; when the book was written the lathe hadn't been invented.)"

Translated editions have titled the novel differently. The German and first Portuguese edition titles, Die Geißel des Himmels and O Flagelo dos Céus, mean literally "the scourge of heaven". The French, Swedish and second Portuguese edition titles, L'autre Côté du Rêve, På Andra Sidan Drömmen and Do Outro Lado do Sonho, translate as "the other side of the dream".