In high school, around the time I began studying Chinese, I would pass time by going to bookstores, heading to the Eastern Religion section, and perusing different translations of the Laozi, the classic of pacific philosophy known in English by its other title, generally romanized either as Daode Jing or Tao Te Ching. I was something of a pacifist, and one of the first chapters I would flip to in comparing translations would be thirty-one, which explains, in Thomas Meyer’s translation, that

beautiful swords even so remain ugly tools
loathed by almost all creation

therefore those who have the dao
won’t abide them

the wise at home lean to the left
those at war lean to the right

The Laozi (like most ancient Chinese texts, this classic of the way and virtue is titled after its purported author) is a particularly political tract—the philosophy of Daoism found a more personal application in the Zhuangzi—and this chapter is one of its most outright governmental: for a ruler to be virtuous and follow the Way, he must abandon his reliance on the military.

In Meyer’s translation, this chapter reveals a convenient coincidence of the terms left and right; and yet, while such a convergence enables a political reading fit for contemporary America, it also forces a detachment from the original connotations in classical Chinese. When we read that the wise lean left and war-mongers lean right, or that “to the left lies happiness / misfortune on the right,” we can be confirmed in our anti-war views and our conviction that a victory of the Left in America will yield greater prosperity. But this is somewhat different from the implications of the Chinese, for while the Laozi indeed uses left ? and right ?, saying ??????????? for the first couplet and ??????????? for the latter, the implications of these directions is of course not the same as we would have it today in this country. A more prosaic translation would render the first couplet “The Prince [a moral, rather than royal, appellation] at home prizes the left, while at war prizes the right.” As for why, a translation of the following couplet hints at the underlying logic behind the symbolism: “Therefore in auspicious events we honor the left, and for mourning we honor the right.” The author of the Laozi is believed to have been a master of the rites, even consulted, as Meyer notes in the afterword, by Confucius, and so his left and right were ritualistic rather than political. And yet, if the left denotes receptiveness and the right aggression, even our labels of left and right seem to adhere to this ancient wisdom. The genius of Meyer’s translation is that in addition to translating the words, he also translates the context.

I hope I never use a discrepancy between the original and the translation as a basis for lambasting the work of a translator. While errors occur even in the most “faithful” translations, when we deal with a text like the Laozi we are dealing with a text for which possibilities for all kinds of translations abound. Philological, philosophical, political, or poetic, the Dao is open enough to accommodate all this and more (and besides, “the person who knows what he’s talking about / never argues while the person who doesn’t know // what he’s talking about always argues” ) in translations. Most important is to understand the purpose, and then the method, of the translation; for Meyer, his daode jing is a poetic translation with political implications. While the poetry brings us closer to the Chinese original, the politics create a tension: even as the left / right distinction brings ancient China and contemporary America together to illuminate both, at times the cultural and historical gap is greater, and we must confront difference. Consider:

so it seems that what we highly value begins as something ordinary
and that what we see as exceptional starts out as something basic

this is the reason those in authority describe themselves as
alone friendless at loose ends

Leaders describing themselves as alone and friendless? We cannot relate. And yet, this is one of the functions of translation: amidst the gained closeness of language and happened-upon commonality, translation is always a mediation of difference; that difference can be held off, but when it disappears completely, we are no longer in the realm of translation.

Translation per se is not, however, the only way to navigate the differences and similarities between cultures and across time. Poetic engagement with foreign and ancient texts has produced a tradition of work (think Ulysses as an examination of The Odyssey or Eliot as an investigation of Dante) that has confronted the question of foreignness from the terrain of the native. And so does David Axelrod’s Another Way engage with the Laozi. In 79 poems (two doubled-up verses allow the book to arrive at 81), Axelrod reconfigures classical Chinese philosophy without hiding his contemporary American standpoint. References to Monty Python—“Surely Monsieur can have / just one more little mint / before the great explosion?”—or contemporary corporations—“Power brokers may smoke their fat cigars / but goodness goes beyond smoke and mirrors”—open up to a retelling of Daoist comprehension. But most strikingly is how the politics of the Laozi are domesticated, not only in the sense of made American (as in chapter thirty-one, where “Left-wing liberals, Right-wingers, / the NRA know killing sucks”), but made domestic. While the Laozi speaks to kings and princes, Another Way speaks to mothers and fathers:

Parenting should be letting
one’s kids alone. Yes, a smack
on an ass when there’s cars
whizzing by may save a child.
But letting the kid alone lets her
grow.

or,

Tell a kid, “I don’t want
to hear about it” and you
won’t or only lies. Mind
games are games:
“Where have you
been,” requires an out.

Sometimes, though, such translations raise doubts about the political possibility Daoism espouses. While we might agree that “Full jails / don’t work,” when we read,

Little Johnny
comes home with low
grades in math? Buy
him an ice cream. Don’t
punish him, cheer him up,

what do we say? We can agree with the philosophy of “When does suffering / plus suffering equal help? / Permit good, don’t impose it,” but rewarding bad study-habits sounds like a misapplication of Daoism’s skepticism towards book-learning.

Still, the language with which Axelrod has transformed Laozi examines the foreign with a diction intimate, close, and above all, light. At best, he achieves illuminating wit, writing one- (or two-) liners such as “The womb is a door to the universe. / Enjoy turning the knob”. Some—“I was a hypochondriac / until I got sick of it”—are too full of shtick for ancient Chinese philosophy, but these do not stand in the way of Axelrod’s most undeniable verses:

Aging is like leaving
the pull of gravity:
time speeds faster
as the earth
falls away.

This intimacy seems to be the hallmark, both for Meyer and for Axelrod, of what brings the ancient and distant world of the Laozi into our world today. While Laozi himself was a court scholar writing in a language for the literate elite of his day, these poets have made him accessible by confronting, rather than avoiding, his difference. In his afterword, Meyer compares Laozi to Basil Bunting, expounding after dinner: “the daode jing is table talk. An old man, not holding forth really, but just telling someone what he knows … The tone was conversational, not canonical.” While such a vision may not be accurate according to the history’s limited possibilities, in poetry—and in translation—we can create a different world, where someone from far away comes to speak to us of his world in our own language.