When prose confronts the ineffable, the discussion or explanation can leave a person thinking that, because it's been discussed or explained, he understands. Poetry, on the other hand, is at once immediate and cryptic, a cry which defies explanation—one thing poetry shares with a good joke. That, and the ability to inspire unease.

All the Chinese sages except Lao-tzu spoke in prose. Lao-tzu's Taoteching is a book of poems about the Tao (the Way), and te (Virtue, the Way in action). The book's 81 verses or chapters employ by one count 28 different kinds of rhyme. Its classical Chinese characters, independent of dialect, admit of variant and or simultaneous interpretations.

Lao-tzu's manual of self-cultivation and self-defense perched between knowing and unknowing has held sway for over 2,500 years. Only the Bible (set down by many hands) and the Bhagavad Gita (one episode in an anonymous oral Sanskrit epic) have been translated more often. The Bible and the Gita reveal and elaborate what happens in the light. The Taoteching espouses detachment, embraces darkness, and addresses the solitary self before the social being. Lao-tzu treats long life as an end unto itself, and through selflessness espouses immortality, an end with no end.

A tall order for any translator.

As a man without Chinese, I'd love to have some idea of, some English analogy for, how Lao-tzu's poetry works. Sticking to those who wrote short, does the old sage sound like John Donne off the pulpit, Blake without the devil, or Emily Dickinson in Asia?

Lao-tzu wrote the Taoteching during the sixth century before the common era. He was already an old man when, according to Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Records of The Grand Historian of China, the young Confucius sought him out. The elder prefaced his remarks to the younger by observing that "the ancients you admire have been in the ground a long time. Their bones have turned to dust. Only their words remain."

Confucius and the later sages (who are ancients to us) left annals, aphorisms, tales, persuasions moral and politic, parables and paradoxes. Even in translation, their writings have a gravity and magnetic tone akin to music, prose being the music of the fallen.

Here, for example, is a passage from Irene Bloom's new edition of Mencius, a Confucian sage who lived about two centuries after Lao-tzu:

Mencius says, "It once was that the worthy would, through their own enlightenment, cause others to be enlightened. Now, there are those who try through their own benightedness to enlighten others."

Mencius is the sage of the possible; Lao-tzu is the poet of the Dark Union. Taoteching verse 56 begins: "Those who know don't talk / those who talk don't know." Answering and unanswerable, Lao-tzu sometimes said things for the sake of the rhyme, a sign not that the sage wrote doggerel, but that his imperative is as much formal and musical as moral and philosophical.

Verse 6 of the Taoteching is one of the few poems that's been transmitted without significant variants through tens of centuries of Chinese editions. James Legge's monumental translation of the Chinese Classics from the late 19th century renders it in rhymed couplets:

The valley spirit dies not, aye the same;
The female mystery thus do we name.
Its gate, from which at first they issued forth,
Is called the root from which grew heaven and earth.
Long and unbroken does its power remain,
Used gently, and without the touch of pain.

Nearly one hundred years later, Robert Henricks translates the same poem in simple prose, arranged in lines:

The valley spirit never dies;
We call it the mysterious female.
The gates of the mysterious female—
These we call the roots of Heaven and Earth.
Subtle yet everlasting! It seems to exist.
In being used, it is not exhausted.

Jonathan Star's 21st-century Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition couples a literary version of each poem with a verbatim translation in the form of a spreadsheet, which displays every plausible meaning for each Chinese character in every poem. Star takes 19 lines to spin out verse 6. It concludes:

Tao is limitless, unborn, eternal—
It can only be reached through the Hidden Creator
She is the very face of the Absolute
The gate to the source of all things eternal

Listen to Her voice
Hear it echo through creation
Without fail, She reveals her presence
Without fail, She brings us to our own perfection.

The revised edition of Red Pine's translation of the Taoteching places each of Lao-tzu's 81 poems on a two-page spread. On the verso, the translator prints his English version alongside and to the right of the Chinese. Below the poetry and continuing on the right-hand page, he presents selections from over two millennia of Chinese commentary, sometimes supplemented by his own observations--noting, for instance, that the "valley spirit" is the moon. His rendering of verse 6 reads:

The valley spirit that doesn't die
we call the dark womb
the dark womb's mouth
we call the source of heaven and earth
as elusive as gossamer silk
and yet it can't be exhausted

And, from the accompanying commentary:

The Shanhaiching says, "The Valley Spirit of the Morning Light is a black and yellow, eight-footed, eight-tailed, eight-headed animal with a human face."

Hsueh Hui says, "The words Lao-tzu chooses are often determined by the demands of rhyme and should not be restricted to their primary meaning. Thus, p'in [female animal] can also be read p'in [womb]."

Sung Ch'ang-hsing says, "The valley spirit, the dark womb, the source of Heaven and Earth all act without acting. That we don't see them doesn't mean they don't exist."

Tu Tao-chien says, "This verse also appears in Lieh-tzu: 1.1, where it is attributed to the Yellow Emperor instead of Lao-tzu. Lao-tzu frequently incorporates passages from ancient texts. We see their traces in 'thus the sage proclaims' or 'hence the ancients say.' Thus Confucius said, 'I don't create. I only relate.' "

Lieh-tzu says, "What creates life is not itself alive."

Any book or scroll that lasts more than a thousand years has attained what passes among the living for immortality. Red Pine recalls a graduate student moment nearly forty years ago, when the professor warned that it was time for a Sinologist to retire when he announced he was working on a new translation of the Taoteching. Unless, of course, the new version really is poetry. At least Red Pine's verse suggests direct speech, if not the immediacy of a standalone poem in English. Lucidity may not be the same thing as poetry, but it is often the next best.

The introduction to this Taoteching is an unequivocal pleasure. Red Pine lived many years in China, and walked the Taoist landscape as well as studying its geography, history, philosophy, and letters. Informed and easy, Red Pine's prose interweaves the transmission of Lao-tzu's text and its place in Chinese culture with a personal narrative. And he manages to measure out as much of Lao-tzu's biography as is known, ending with the sage's disappearance into anonymity in the mountains of the west. The account of Lao-tzu's meeting with Confucius, which was omitted from Burton Watson's translation of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, was a first for me. The backmatter glossary lists and illuminates proper names and Chinese terms; it gives the brief bios and dates of all the commentators and sources of the selected quotations. This dispels much strangeness attached to who, what, where, and when.

About the Tao, less said. But of the commentary, I have to ask: Does Huang Yuan-chi really say, "A person who can adjust their light"? Do these sentences belong to Sung Ch'ang-hsing: "Doors refer to a person's mouth and nose. Windows refer to their ears and eyes"? Chuang-tzu may be elusive and cryptic, but to have him teach that "Who takes Heaven as their ancestor, Virtue as their home, the Tao as their door, and who escapes change is a sage" suggests the sage has been confused. Chiao Hung wonders, "If someone has no life, how can they be killed?" Bad grammar will kill someone, if all that's left of them, or him, is words.

Laurance Wieder is a poet living in Charlottesville, Virginia. His books include The Last Century: Selected Poems (Picador Australia) and Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans). He can be found regularly at PoemSite, a monthly broadside in the landscape (free subscription available from poemsite@gmail.com).

Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.