My basic motivation, methods, and assumptions are described in the About page. Here are some of the nitty-gritties of how I do things.
My rules
My goal is:
- to assemble as objective a description as I can of each character based on the Western Zhou Bronze Inscription glyph version of that character, including every image held therein while also
- incorporating more modern—often more abstract—meanings attributed to each character;
- use the exact same translation for any given character every single time it appears and
- never translate two different characters in the exact same way.
- I start a new line in my translation for each character (so you can tell it’s one character), and
- I start a new paragraph here for each line of the original Dào.
Of course this approach means my version is much, much longer than the original! And it sacrifices Lâozî’s impressive rhyme and rhythm. It’s best to read each chapter aloud in Mandarin Pinyin for the full effect whenever you can. I will include that at the end of each chapter in the Chapters tab as soon as I get that operational.
The only thing I’ve unabashedly improvised are capitalization, punctuation, and line indentation. I use those techniques to highlight the built-in structure that seems to me to emerge from the characters and sentences themselves. Because my translation of each word is so long, everything’s more spread out and I think it makes that innate organization hard to see or hear without the help of some layout devices. Of course different translators have seen the text’s structure in very different ways, and what you see here is my interpretation. Again, I refer you to this beautiful website to compare others’ ideas with mine.
Exceptions
- Because these words seem to have a long history of being combined into one term, I have compounded them. As a result, they share a line:
- Sky-Earth
- Sky-down-below, and
- Sky-all-matter-external-to-you
- The word zhī (之) connotes possession. In English, we most often do this by attaching ‘s to the end of a word, for example: “the red bed is the cat’s favorite place.” It seems simple enough, but of course, from Chinese the sentence might read more like: “the red bed… cat zhī favorite place.” I most often translate zhī as has this, so our example here would translate: “the red bed… the cat has this favorite place.” But sometimes I do use the simpler ‘s, and in those cases, that character shares a line with whatever character precedes it.
The Dào of Lâozî 