2014/08/03

Tao Te Ching 7

I recently picked a 1980s copy of the Tao Te Ching from my bookshelf and started to read it. The translation was so incomprehensibly klunky that I felt compelled to soften it. But then I thought that reading the book critically was preventing it speaking to me; so I bought another which was lauded as entirely accurate and having footnotes.

But the problem was that whereas one obscured meanings by attempting to be contemporary (and merely seeming dated), the literality of other was equally opaque. Neither translator had any real command of poetic english. So Ive accepted the inevitable, and begun to make my own version as I did with Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

So I began with #7


Sky and earth are eternal
because they are eternally without self-interest.

Thus the disinterested are often propelled to the forefront of affairs.
That they survive this is due to their detachment from appetite-driven emotions.

By these means the common good is best served.

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