上士聞道，勤而行之；中士聞道，若存若亡；下士聞道，大笑之。不笑不足以為道。故建言有之：明道若昧；進道若退；夷道若纇；上德若谷；太白若辱；廣德若不足；建德若偷；質真若渝；大方無隅；大器晚成；大音希聲；大象無形；道隱無名。夫唯道，善貸且成。
When the highest man hears about the Way, he makes it his endeavor and pursues it.
The mediocre man hears about it, he now seems a true follower! … he now seems to flee.
And the lowest man? He laughs at the Way with glee.But suppressing laughter suppresses Speech
so these dictums were established to grasp It:
clear Speech sounds muddled;
Going forward is like going backward;
habitual Conduct is as if akin.The greatest potency is limp;
the purest white looks stained;
the omnipotent seems deficient;
inculcating morals comes off as vulgar;
and real substance is accidental.The largest square has no corners;
the deepest mastery ripens late;
the loudest note is unheard; and
the supreme form is shapeless.The Way conceals the unnamed.
But only the Way nourishes and completes.
There is a vast syntactical chasm that separates Classical Chinese from English. But since this chasm might mirror the Dao in its emptiness, it might auspiciously embody the Dao’s fertility as well. Perhaps one can render the linguistic difference fruitful in this way: if the Dao abhors speech, then engendering another language with the creative force of the compendium of sanctioned sayings—the Daode jing—might unveil the superfluous qualities of discourse in general. In translation, in oscillating between two languages, the semantic shrouds briefly slips off and the unsignified is glimpsed at in the speechless median.
Of course, there is an asymmetry here, as the Chinese and English are not on the same footing. The former lays claim to being the original language in which the appropriate expositions were inscribed; consequently, there is a set direction in translating, from Chinese to English. Yet this mono-directionality might emulate that between Heaven and Earth—heaven always engenders the earth, whose union culminates in an ephemeral dew.1 Through translation I hoped to realize the model set by dew, a subtle balance that couples the engendering force, Classical Chinese, to the receptive medium, English.
No doubt, I fell short in this endeavor. However, to at least provide myself reasonable grounds on which I could expect success, I strove to write in a natural English, for only this would permit the appropriate distance between the two languages. I don’t think “natural” English entails writing in a colloquial register. The written word rests at a distance from common parlance. To be sure, I have no knowledge of the ancient Chinese vernacular, so I’m in no position to precisely measure the distance between it and the language as presented in the Daode jing. And yet, the extreme concision of the language reads to me as a self-conscious artificiality, especially when compared to the Analects, Zhuangzi, and the Mawangdui version of the Daode jing, all of which appear more syntactically straightforward. Such self-consciousness in fact introduces the text, “the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant way”2. The Daode jing, then, seems quasi-poetic: it incorporates poetic elements, such as a self-conscious form, while remaining prose. I therefore attempted to mimic that sort of polished English that I find in our vernacular poetry without slipping into verse.
But, again, I tried above all to compose my interpretation in a natural idiom. In this respect, my rendering differs from the translations provided by Feng/English and Mitchell. One of their word choices is not decipherable in what I would term English. What is the Tao that they both use for 道 in the first section of the chapter? By merely transliterating the character, both translations step out of a given language and write in a hybrid Chinese-English, committing wholly to neither one. Perhaps they might argue that the character holds such a privileged position in the text that it deserves to be left “untouched,” and the reader should be allowed to gradually conceive its meaning for herself by seeing the word in its various contexts. I was tempted to follow their lead, swayed by similar reasoning.
Yet I couldn’t suppress the feeling that I was no longer reading a proper translation. “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with the god” is not a true translation of John 1:1, even if it evokes in the reader the versatility and weight of the Greek λογος, to which no English word is equivalent. And the argument that the character is of such importance in the text insinuates that the translation is hyper-aware of itself—not simply in its form, as the Daode jing might be, but aware of itself as a translation of the Daode jing. This results in not just a Chinese-English, rather a Daode jinglish. I think this would further erode its virtue as a translation, no longer an independent entity in a separate language. Surely all translations are to an extent conscious of their mimesis, since the translator must be, but I think this consciousness ought to be more indirect, subtly suffusing the work instead of pockmarking it. Hence, for the sake of fidelity to my idiosyncratic principles, I thought that I must in every case translate 道. I did make one concession: I indirectly paid homage to its importance by capitalizing its instances, as Feng/English does for 德 (and as the KJV and NRSV does for λογος). This has the added benefit of making conspicuous to the reader the character through its multivalent readings, a feature absent in both of the supplied translations.
In the opening section of the chapter, which I believe is limited to the discussion of the three classes of men, I opted for “Way.” Here, it seemed to me that the author utilized the reading of 道 as path or road for poetic playfulness. A literal path coalesces multiple perspectives on a single track. One traveling on a road through the mountain, for example, “sees” the mountain as simultaneously distant, nearby, and as a part of it. Likewise, the Way appears to the various heights or orientations of human beings differently depending on their perspective—high, middle, or low. (Attention to orientation might be suggested graphically as well. 上 ,中,下 seem to rotate on the anchored axis 士 .) Should one disagree that this playfulness is here, the reading of 道 as way, path or road, appears to me nonetheless justified by the language of traveling on the 道 (行之 ) and fleeing (亡). Neither Feng/English nor Mitchell carry over the sense of an actual road on which one travels—in fact, by failing to translate the word, they carry over nothing. I decided on “way” over path or road because it connotes, in English, moral advancement, like Dante’s la diritta via.
While I’m here on this section, I’d like to note some other diverging choices in my translation. I went with Mitchell in rendering 士 as man instead of student as did Feng/English. Although “scholar” is one of the meanings given in the gloss, the primary sense is a general masculine person; thus, I thought that selecting a subset of this would artificially limit the statement’s applicability. Indeed, I can envisage any given person laughing at the Way, as many of the lessons propounded in the chapters run contrary, if not opposite, to what seems prima facie right to both the scholar and the general public. One might object: if the author didn’t want to limit its applicability, then human being (人) could have been used instead. True. But for one, the text would lose what I see as a graphical interplay of the characters around 士; for two, if the chapter is intended for an audience of statesmen, which is one reading of this character, then 士 is general enough to encompass anyone who could and should read it.
There are a couple other distinct choices in my translation in this section. The lines pertaining to the highest and lowest man both end with it (之)—insinuating, perhaps, a closeness with the Dao. I wanted to preserve this parallelism, which may suggest an identity between the highest and lowest. The text often pronounces such a similarity between opposites, as it does later in this very chapter. This interpretation is strengthened if the next lines are as “if [the lowest man] didn’t laugh, it wouldn’t be the Tao” (Mitchell). The low is revealed to be more essential to the Way than the high, thus inverting expectations by ascribing a semblance of superiority, one sense of 上, to the worst of the three men. Feng/English and Mitchell entirely ignore this parallelism and, consequently, any of its possible implications.
So far as meaning is concerned, I don’t think I’ve strayed too far from what the other two translations have hit upon. My disagreements, and their disagreements with one another, are largely limited to stylistic differences. To be sure, I think these differences are not trivial, and may play a larger role in second-order interpretations which require granular attention to minute choices. But if one were to form paraphrases based on each of the three translations, I reckon that they would be for the most part indistinguishable.
Our alignment of meaning unravels at the line about laughter, however. Mitchell’s, right above, is equivalent enough in meaning to Feng/English’s. Mine, on the other hand, reads “But suppressing laughter suppresses Speach.” I obtained this by attempting to render more fluent a more direct translation which could read, “To not laugh is not to completely treat [it] as Explanation (道).” In other words, a budding sage may think that, since only the lowest man laughs at the Way, all they need as a token of their understanding is an absence of laughter. I’ll concede that the other translations boast a simpler reading of the text: whereas theirs requires no additional elements, I had to supply an objective pronoun and some wrangling of meaning.
Yet I was motivated to translate this line in the way I did because it seems to me at least to offer a better sense of the next one, which I translated as “so these dictums were established to grasp it.” The first character here is 故; thus the reader would expect the previous line(s) would explain this one, which my rendering of the laughter line accomplishes. To paraphrase: it’s not enough to not laugh to fully understand, so we’ve established these additional sayings to help you grasp [a fuller understanding]. The other translators merely say “Hence it is said” or “Thus it is said,” spitting out the “hence” and “thus” and leaving the reader to concoct their own connection. Of course, such complexity would align with the Daode jing’s M.O., so perhaps it’s in their favor. The other translators appear to have entirely deleted 有之, to possess it. More likely, I am just ignorant as to how they were able to grammatically complement 有之 with the other components of the sentence to reach their essentially identical translations.
To underscore the next difference, I’d like to recapitulate my above criteria of naturalness and poeticness. On the whole, the supplied translations are elegantly idiomatic, almost certainly more so than mine. And if I consider only their grammatical templates, empty of content, they would both be indistinguishable from a prose-poem, so they satisfy my criterion in imitating the space between prose and poetry that the Daode jing occupies. I’ll venture to claim, however, that they don’t entirely live up to my outlined aesthetic standards. Feng/English’s translation reads, to me at least, as mildly stilted and labored, and Mitchell’s a touch too colloquial.
But where they fail most in elegance, at least by my lights, is in their surfeit of “seems”: In almost every instance of 若, they repeatedly write seems. I found this cumbersome to read and say, so I replaced the 若s in the text with synonyms that, I hoped, would best fit the context of the terms compared. To give an example, I rendered “the purest white looks stained” for 大白若辱, which somewhat more literally is “the greatest white seems disgraceful.” Mitchell sins along similar lines when he repeats “true” and “greatest” over and over. I hoped to likewise rectify this by modulating these descriptors to the terms they’re modifying. Feng/English occasionally does this with me, as in “perfect square” for “greatest square.” Of course, sacrifices are made in choosing this route, as the reader can no longer note where “great” is and isn’t employed, perhaps obfuscating some nuance in the text.
So much for style. There are further deviations in meaning, but most of these arise from what appear to me to be suitable alternative interpretations, so I won’t quibble too much with them. (Mitchell is an exception in a couple of cases: I have absolutely no idea how he devised “the greatest love seems indifferent” where the glosses, Feng/English and I seem to be speaking of squares, and I’m not sure either where he finds the “childish” in “the greatest wisdom seems childish.”)
I’d like to briefly focus on one last variation, however, since it might attribute a new power to the Way. The penultimate line I have as “the Way conceals the unnamed” instead of “the Tao is nowhere to be found” (Mitchell) or “The Tao is hidden and without name” (Feng/English).
Given the importance of naming or lack thereof throughout the text, I think Mitchell was wrong to delete a reference to 名. And although Feng/English’s interpretation is unimpeachable, I am biased in my own favor and believe that my translation runs more smoothly with the preceding statements. For my rendering would contradict the earlier statement, that “these dictums were established to grasp [the Way],” by reiterating once more that the true nature of things is all concealed and are inexplicable. And such an undermining of speech should be expected at this point (cf., again, 1.1). But why would the “unnamed” refer to the preceding statements? Since they are all identified with their opposite—bright and dim, for example—they are unable to be distinguished, and hence unable to be named. My rendering would grant this power to the Way and link it more closely the things muddled.
Essays 