D. Wallace Review

As the author of Profound Accordance, which had not yet been reviewed, I personally found the D. Wallace review of 2016-12-06 uplifting and a great relief from wondering if I’d ventured too far out of the box to which my official credentials might otherwise have confined me.  Omitting the reviewer’s broad and detailed perspective on the precepts and historical sweep of Dharma as a precursor to Taoism, the points that boosted my morale the most were these:

• Of all the translations of the Tao Te Ching you will come across, this one is surely the best. You can finally understand the context and meaning of Lao Tzu’s wisdom.
• Sieving’s insightful explanations, asides and “interpolations” bring the work back to life after a century of dusty and opaque translations. You can hear and feel the presence of the old master again in every chapter and on every page.
• Profound Accordance is highly recommended for all cultural time travelers who seek the wisdom of the ancient masters.

My unofficial credentials for the first two years or so that I spent translating Lao Tzu’s ageless classic were the more than twenty years of immersion in his philosophy that led up to that effort and the nagging questions arising about the accuracy of this or that translation and of how to reconcile the various passages and translations with one another.  Knowing that my expertise would have developed during my first pass over the source materials, I saw fit to revisit them from the beginning in a second pass, for which my credentials now included the first pass.  That 3-year effort was mostly concluded more than 16 years before the 3rd and probably final edition of Profound Accordance was finally published alongside the 3rd edition of its companion volume and raison d’être, The Way of Ages.  Here’s the chronology:

• 1995: Wrote the first draft of The Way of Ages in Thousand Oaks, a quiet suburb of Los Angeles, in the summer of 1995 between jobs.
• 1995-1997: Realized that I would need to produce my own translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching for the reasons described therein.
• 1997-2000: Shifted all of my spare time onto the translation project using the tools described as follows and depicted in a subsequent post.
  • a Taiwanese-made digitizer device that inputs Chinese characters and idioms using a stylus and displays a number of alternative English translations.
    • Made a personal visit to the Los Angeles offices of the manufacturer to familiarize with its use for my intended purpose.
    • This device added a great deal of range to my reference space beyond that afforded by static paper dictionaries from which many of the older senses of a given definition have most likely been edited out over time.
  • a more traditional paper Chinese to English dictionary cited in Profound Accordance.
  • a number of pre-existing translations to cross-reference, also cited in Profound Accordance.
• During this time for obvious reasons, I also approached two native Chinese speakers on separate occasions and showed them a few of the more difficult passages.  In both cases, they said that the ancient writing style used by Lao Tzu is no longer used in China.  Since the characters themselves clearly hadn’t changed, they were referring instead to the metaphorical and often intentionally obtuse manner of expression found in the pages of the Tao Te Ching.
• Thus while the elemental aspects of translating Lao Tzu are more or less mechanical, achieving a clear and true translation is more a problem of interpretation than of rote translation.  This depends in turn on an appreciation of Lao’s teachings as a whole – a common conceptual framework with which each individual passage remains consistent when properly translated.  The proper translation is then achieved through an iterative process until such a broader consistency emerges.
• While idioms can play a part in such a process, their literal translations must also be considered.  If the literal translation – considered literally, as possible satire and metaphorically – fits the teachings as a whole better than the traditional idiomatic interpretation then the idiomatic interpretation must be discarded as most probably a later development of the Chinese language.
• 2000-2016: As eBook technology emerged – at a painfully glacial pace I might add – and knowing that The Way of Ages in particular was far better suited to hypertext than to paper presentation because of its numerous cross-references – I transformed it from the latter to the former.
  • It seemed unfortunate during this period that it was taking so terribly long for eBook technology to support what I considered my quite modest use of Microsoft Word features, but the longer it took, the more time I had to develop and polish The Way of Ages.
  • Despite my Acrobat bug reports and persistent followups, the promise of DRM-protected PDF support came and went.  I must say that Adobe really lost track of its surfboard as the eBook wave approached, crested and crashed over its head.  It was a missed opportunity of epic proportions.  I ranted and raved on my eBook technology blog but to no avail.  Most of the material on that blog thus faded into obsolescence, so I took it down.
  • At some point circa 2013-2016, it appeared as though the ePub standard had begun to fully support my eBooks but when tested on the latest devices, they failed to render properly.
  • Finally with the advent of the Kindle Fire and the latest Kindle mobile apps, a more complete support became fully evident, at which point I moved steadily to full and final publication of my two eBooks, the content of which by 2016 were both in their 3rd editions.

Because I did not want to make material edits to my Tao Te Ching translation in Profound Accordance outside of the deep and broad perspective afforded by that years-long immersion in the source materials circa 1997-2000, it remained almost entirely unchanged during that 16 year period as I developed and polished The Way of Ages.

Now that it’s finished and now that you the reader have a better perspective on what went into its creation, how do you feel about the translation?  How might it be helping you on your journey?

My own main takeaway as of this writing is that it revealed to me a method to the madness of life that I could verify through observation of real-world events and through protracted reflection on their long-term aftereffects against the canvas of Lao’s treatise.  There really are immutable laws of actions and their retributions, I had discovered.  I really could proceed with confidence in nature’s dispassionate devotion to these laws to incrementally build a successful life – confident not only in my path forward but in the future success of that path for as long as it maintains its basis in those laws.  The courage to build, in 4 words or less.

How about you?