Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition)

The Dao, like any esoteric writing, is inherently difficult to translate. So reading multiple translations helps reveal more of the essence of the original text. This edition provides a history of the Dao and takes some recently discovered translations into account. This is fascinating and a helpful context for understanding the work as an historical work that evolved over centuries through many contributors. To their credit, the authors treat the Dao as a serious philosophical work on par with Western philosophy, a welcome relief from the perspective that something so short and essential could compare with the weighty tomes of Western thought.This academic approach is helpful in an intellectual sense but it's a bit like some literary criticism of poetry; too much explaining can obscure the essence. The authors genuinely admire the Dao but the academic nature of the book makes me wonder if it really touches them. Perhaps it does but they excluded that dimension to keep to a more academic approach. In any case, this leads to translations that feel a little flat, that don't fully capture the essence.It can be said that good poetry feels like a transmission. When we read it, something happens in us that bypasses our analytical processes. The essence of the poem "arrives" in us as a feeling in our deeper sense of beingness. We may not even have an intellectual understanding of the poem, but that doesn't matter if the poem has that transmissive quality. This is when we read poetry in our own language. Translated poetry has to find new words to transmit the essence of the original, always a daunting task.The same can be said of the Dao, only more strongly because the Dao is concerned with the deepest truths about the nature of reality. So the measure of a particular translation of the Dao, an admittedly highly subjective measure, is how well it transmits its essence. By this measure, Ames and Hall's translation is at least adequate, though often not inspiring. Still, for those of us who want to draw on multiple translations of the Dao, this book should be one of them, more for its historical and textural contributions than its translations.

Having read a number of translations of the Dao De Jing, and bearing in mind that each has its own slant, each translator making their own choices -- I am inclined to say that this one by Ames & Hall is the best. The main reason I say so is because of its emphasis on dao as a "way-making" process, centralizing the relational nature of the world, the environment, the people and other beings in it, rather than depicting "the Dao" as some sort of mystical entity (that in many translations tends to stand in for "God" in the Western mind, and that creates the universe). Ames and Hall, instead, foreground the open-ended nature of dao and of life itself, where all beings are participants in, as their sub-title has it, making this life significant. I also like their in-depth discussion on the various wu- forms (wuwei, wuxin, wushi, wuyu, etc.). For example, they define wuwei not as the usual "non-doing," which suggests that Taoists should be passive or non-participatory, and instead translate it as "non-coercive action," i.e. it actually is a kind of action, but the kind that is "uncompromised by stored knowledge or ingrained habits. . . . [instead] the result of deferential responses to the item or event in accordance with which, or in relation to which, one is acting" (p. 39). There is also an emphasis here on connectivity and inter-relationship. As they write in their extensive (and inspiring) introduction, "creativity is both self-creativity and co-creativity. Either everything shares in creativity, or there is no creativity. Indeed, it is this transactional, co-creative character of all creative processes that precludes the project of self-cultivation and self-creation from being egoistic" (p. 17). I see that others in this review section have sometimes found the book "too academic," but I didn't think so at all. It does help to have some knowledge of basic philosophical concepts. I would also suggests than any book that is truly worthwhile asks us to be active readers, and we should not expect that a text as "deep" as the Dao De Jing, which itself utilizes a number of very specific terms and ideas, translated from an ancient language, is going to be easy. That said, once you tune into what Ames and Hall are doing here, it is perhaps simpler than it seems.

Heavy going but well worth it. I have been reliably informed by a western Taiji master (who studies in China) that this is one of the best translations of the text. I also found the detailed introduction, which sets the cultural context, most enlightening.

Great book, very thought provoking

Wonderful publication, service and quality.

Great price and good service.

Per chi cerca una spiegazione chiara e ben scritta di questa opera fondamentale, questa è l'edizione migliore. L'introduzione spiega i termini-chiave usati in modo ricorrenti nel testo. Poi c'è il testo cinese, con rimandi a note filologiche e varianti, e la traduzione, capitolo per capitolo. Subito dopo la spiegazione di ogni aforisma. Utile e ben fatta.