Daodejing
By Laozi
Translated by Brook Ziporyn
Liveright 2023

Reading a revered work of Eastern philosophy is much like listening to a lecture on quantum physics: the audience will be suspiciously rapt, the author will be a fairly obvious weirdo, the subject matter will likely be profound, and you won’t understand a word of it. Reading a work of Eastern philosophy in translation is therefore like listening to an excited audience member try to recount everything to you later, over wine and calzones. In such instances, there usually just isn’t enough wine in the world.

The best workaround with that excited audience member is to concentrate on quotidian but at least comprehensible details: what was the weather outside? How big was the audience? How’s the new iPad for note-taking? That sort of thing.

Which brings us to the critical apparatus of Brook Ziporyn’s new translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, out in a lovely volume from Liveright. Ziporyn, a professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, styles the work’s title “Daodejing” and the author’s name as “Laozi,” and he states right away that his book is but the smallest pebble dropped in the pond of Daodejing translations (or some such Eastern philosophy image – maybe something involving cranes?); apparently, this work has been translated more times by more individuals than virtually any other piece of writing in history.

That speaks to a certain perennially inviting nature, and we can grant the truth of that without necessarily granting much more. A bowl of snacks at the front door is inviting too, but it hardly contains the key to understanding life, the universe, and everything. Or does it?

That last bratty bit, the simple rhetorical judo-move of seeming to subvert a patently clear observation by appending a question or reversing some wording, is a staple of so much of revered ancient Eastern philosophy that the entire genre is virtually unimaginable without it. 

Particularly the Daodejing, which is absolutely chock-a-block with things like “The constancy of the course liles in doing nothing/yet leaving nothing undone./If lords and kings could hold fast to it,/all things would transform of their own accord,” or “Those who know do not speak./Those who speak do not know.” Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know? Honestly, what is a normal person to do with such posing nonsense? You read it knowing with 100% certainty that its author knew many people who spoke yet knew what they were talking about; you read it knowing yourself many people who speak and yet know. It’s just gnomic prattle, fit for any occasion in which a moron wants to sound profound (or a “seeker” who wants to justify continuing to avoid the novels of Anthony Trollope). 

In the baking and preparing of such material, Ziporyn is endlessly enthusiastic. His notes on every quivering word or double-edged phrase are indispensable, and the sheer energy with which he explains this deceptively complex text is a marvel of pedagogy:

“I have tried to reproduce something of the rhetorical variety that exists in the Chinese text in the English – while at the same time preserving the rather remarkable consistency that so distinctively subtends this variety of literary styles,” Ziporyn writes. “The consistency is found in tone, stance, structure, and theme – a predilection for surprise juxtaposition, reversal, ironic repurposing, contrarianism, and indirection rooted in a sort of ‘A/B structure’ that contrasts pairs of opposite terms (being/nonbeing, high/low, etc.) that reflect an evaluative assumption rooted in the conventional values prevalent (rightly or wrongly, from the modern point of view) in early Chinese societies.” 

Ziporyn mentions that this work has been translated countless times, by countless people. He’s no doubt resigned – maybe even philosophically – to the near-inevitability that his own translation will soon be overwhelmed by new renditions. But in the face of such an eventuality, he can surely buck himself up by remembering: “That which is forgotten is remembered” — or something like that.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.