THE BOOK OF THE WAY AND VIRTUE

The principal undertaking of my life has been the translation of the classic Chinese book, Dao De Jing.
When you translate, you have to understand every single word, and with such a book especially, that was a challenge. I had no idea how much of an adventure it would become when I began the translation in 1968, but I worked on it in four extended periods through the years until the final publication in 1998.
“The only virtue of a good translation” says Vladimir Nabokov, “is faithfulness and completeness. Whether it reads smoothly or not, depends on the model, not the mimic.”
Faithfulness and completeness is what I strived for.
First I translated into Danish and published a limited edition in 1969 bound in Chinese fashion.

The proceeds from the sales were enough to get me to India and Nepal. The money was mostly gone when I arrived, but I managed to stay over three years. My studies of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism increased my understanding of Eastern religious thought and practice.
After I settled down in America I did a new translation, this time in English, and some of the problems that I had not cleared up in the first translation were now solved. Still, it seemed to be an undertaking without end, and it was not until the late nineties, that I was ready to publish.
I decided to do this myself, in part because I did not find a publisher, in part because I wanted to make all the decisions myself: the cover, the layout, and the illustrations.


Just as a virtual reality can be created digitally with 0 and 1 so the old Chinese philosophers saw reality characterized by yang and yin. The original meaning of yang and yin is sunny and shady. I made this linocut for the book:

and these linocuts of the ancient characters for Dao and De are also used in the book:

If you, my precious reader, are interested, the book can be purchased by sending $10 plus $3 covering tax, shipping, and handling ($4 to foreign countries) to Seven Hawk Publishing, 326 Wilkes Circle, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, USA.