A Link
To a Meditation on the Dao
VĂ©ronique (Quartidi), 4 Messidor, CCXXXIV
As part of the promotion for my Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) translation, the Yale University Press blog has published a short reflection of mine on the text and on the experience of rendering it into English.
Thank you so much! I know you did not translate Logos because we really don't have a word in English, but you wrote Tao is the closest meaning.
don't listen to your critics Dr. Hart. Sometimes people think they know the Greek really well. But everytime I ask them to translate NT- no else does it but you. yours is the best translation of NT we have.
So I feel your work is bringing us closer to knowing Logos. I mean how can we understand Logos in English as Americans.
We all owe you a debt of gratitude for your work.
Speaking (broadly) of marketing copy, my exposure to the Tao Te Ching, like many, has been though tai chi practice. Â Needless to say, the text is not a manual of movement or martial practice but rather, as you say, about metaphysical and political paradox, concerned with the mysterious source of being (the Tao)that exceeds all conceptual grasp. Â Tai chi emerged centuries later as a martial and bodily discipline that came to be interpreted through Daoist categories. That said, the relationship is real, if indirect, and as a matter of fact few serious tai chi "players" have not parsed the text. Â Tai chi, at its best, with its emphasis on yielding, non-coercion, and responsiveness, becomes a bodily pedagogy of receptivity to the mystery of the Tao. Â (Though, at its worst, it becomes a series of calisthenics performed aside inspirational wall hangings and scented candles.)
I mention this relationship with no elaboration only to note a marketing point.  Compare the tiny group of serious readers interested in philology, historical context, and textual ambiguity (the sort of people who buy four translations and bicker about  them) to the enormous group of tai chi practitioners who encounter the text through practice communities and desire a version that feels immediately, if analogically, relevant.Â
Then again, your publisher may prefer to follow the Taoist approach to marketing, viewing sales as something that cannot be mastered through force and will, just as human flourishing cannot be achieved through sheer exertion.