What’s New with Getting Right with Tao

It’s been a few months since Channel V Books and I got together to publish Getting Right with Tao, a print edition of my modern adaptation of the Tao Te Ching, and it’s been exciting to see how the book continues to strike a chord with readers—like a post earlier this month at the American Taoist blog, which looked at three chapters in my version to consider the neutrality of Tao. I’m particularly excited by a new project that’s taking shape at The Rambling Taoist: a line-by-line analysis of the Tao Te Ching that juxtaposes my version with more established translations by James Legge, Derek Lin, and Gia-fu Feng and Jane English—this last likely being one of the most well-known apart from the Stephen Mitchell.

I read through a lot of different translations of the Tao Te Ching as I was writing my adaptation, but that was a long time ago… and, in any event, it’s very illuminating for me to see what somebody else who’s spent much more time than I have thinking about Taoism thinks of my effort, and how the message I was trying to impart holds up against Lao Tzu’s original wisdom. This line-by-line approach is clearly going to take a while; it’s nearly two weeks in, and we’re still on the second chapter. But I’m looking forward to what I might learn from the Rambling Taoist as his exegesis unfolds.

22 August 2010 | uncategorized |