A student of the Tao Te Ching since childhood, Ursula K. Le Guin offers her translation of Lao Tzu's seminal work nearly five decades into her career, weaving her personal narrative and experiences through footnotes and language.
Because Le Guin's translation process is not invisible, she provides an exceptional example of the meaning-making of journey building. As she consumes Lao Tzu's words and translates them into her language, she is also inviting them into her own journey as cookies in her experience. The result is a playful and profound collection of comments that serve as artifacts of her own lived life, memories from her viewfinder.
"The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority... I wanted a Book of the Way accessible to a present-day, unwise, unpowerful, and perhaps unmale reader, not seeking esoteric secrets, but listening for a voice that speaks to the soul. I would like that reader to see why people have loved the book for twenty-five hundred years."
Le Guin first discovered the book in her father's library. She was a student of the Tao Te Ching her whole life — she recited its words at her father's funeral, she had someone speak its words at her funeral. And, toward the end of her long, illustrious career, she believed she could translate it in a meaningful way. We all have pieces, work like this in our lives, that are seminal, that we continue to visit and re-visit.
Notable chapters and reflections. The book isn't supposed to make sense. The apprehension, which is inherently uncomfortable for humans, is one point this book makes. Wei wu wei: do not do. doing not-doing. Act without action, action by inaction.