3. From English To English

We appear on the verge of a technological singularity in which silicon becomes smarter than carbon and the rate of progress accelerates beyond human comprehension. This book might even be the last translation of the Tao written by a human for humans. At least I employed no AI in writing it and AI seems today still incapable of fully grokking it. Though I hope our robot overlords also get good use from it as they come to face the same challenges in their communities we have in ours. And that we face in merging with them …

To be clear, although it employs agile terminology and the order of the text is different, this translation maps line for line onto the Chinese as per Hatcher, the roman numerals in each of the chapters here provide a key to compare it with the traditional 81-chapter structure.

As to how this new structure came about, it evolved just as if solving any ordinary jigsaw. Only much slower because the constraints are so much looser and the dimensionality so much higher.

I began by grouping key stanzas by the commonalities I’d learnt working with the GNL version. I then refactored each grouping into a poem with a form consonant with chapters that seem to stand alone. Then I analyzed and re-ordered the result into consistent narrative through-lines, refactoring these over and over until I could see no way to improve them.

The 6x11 symmetry that results has deeply surprised me. I imagined there must be gaps and discontinuities that line by line refactoring wouldn’t overcome. Whether 6x11 reflects the original form of this work, there’s no way to know, but ironing out the wrinkles I operated on the assumption that it does so. I don’t believe this compromised the correspondence with the Chinese, nor that my unorthodox choices of metaphor have done so.

The 6-part scheme conforms with the subtitle of this book - connect, adapt, simplify. With each of these three we have a yang section and a yin section, one more focused on practice and the other more on experience. This yin/yang is reversed in the third part to make the book more accessible in leaving the most philosophically challenging content to its end. And the chapter titles are mine - the Chinese has no chapter titles, nor even chapter markers, and only rudimentary punctuation.

Throughout this work I found myself repeating these editing patterns over and over:

Distinguish Duplicates

Two Chinese lines are identical or nearly identical. Therefore, look at the flow of the stanza to find the most significant distinction the duplication could reasonably suggest. As each pictograph admits many meanings, specialize or generalize these duplicate terms so the relation between them contributes value to the whole.

Join Fragments

A short chapter doesn’t complete an idea. Therefore, look for fragments to join with it to complete it. Also try to find non-sequitur or redundant stanzas that can be broken out of a longer chapter without detracting from its meaning, which might meaningfully recombine with this one.

Refuse Doggerel

Sometimes all the dictionary meanings provide insufficient significance to make more than a Hallmark-style platitude. Therefore, examine the Chinese and English etymology of the pictograph in context to elicit more specific meanings.

Undo Glosses

On review or in a new context it seems older translation choices have taken excessive liberties or lack a clear correspondence with the Chinese. Therefore, Retranslate from scratch, paying close attention to usage revealed by the new context.

Respect Dictionaries - Unless You Can’t

There’s a particular word that gums up the works in numerous places. As the earliest dictionaries came long after the earliest editions of Lao Tzu, the idea that dictionary definitions exhaust translation possibilities shouldn’t be taken to extremes. Therefore, Examine the effect of trying a novel translation of a word in all its contexts throughout the the text. If the majority of them break apart, start over.

Swap Stanzas

The bamboo editions of the book mark no chapters or stanzas per se, just occasional punctuation, so it was not unlikely historical transcribers got their knots wrong and created accidental transpositions. Not just for adjacent lines, but whole stanzas. And the numerologists did the same intentionally. So sometimes it’s clear that the beginning of a poem has been transposed with its middle or its conclusion. Therefore, if and only if you can’t find a way to make a chapter read right as it is, try swapping the order of a pair of adjacent stanzas.

Agile In, Agile Out

Translating sheng ren as agility places this translation in a very specific context. Many traditional translation choices read as flowery orientalism that obscures pragmatic application to an everyday context. Therefore, don’t be afraid to employ words and phrases derived from the modern agile development lexicon if and only if they work as faithful translations of the Chinese.

On The Way

Most English editions of Lao Tzu either leave the word Tao untranslated or render it as The Way. This choice has become so orthodox that any other may seem a kind of heresy. Unfortunately, The Way makes English translations clumsy throughout; it makes the first line of what is traditionally the first chapter - 56 here - hyperliterally, “The Way that can be Way-ed isn’t really the Way”. No translator can be satisfied with that.

I worried this word like a kid tonguing a wobbly tooth until one cool autumn in 2004 beneath a golden rain tree in the donkey paddock of my teahouse in the rainforest in Limpinwood, Australia, the tooth fell out.

A golden rain tree loses all its flowers in just a few days. As I curried Josephine, the donkey, our bees bothered the blossoms and the petals floated down around us like snowflakes. It seemed as close as I would ever get to sitting in an antique Chinese woodcut.

In a flash I saw the fallen petals Josephine trampled into mud weren’t dying but transforming into soil to feed next spring’s buds. Moments in a cycle connecting this tree with all the trees in the valley. Over deep time the loam fed roots and lichen, carving veins of mist and wind into the hills around us.

Dig your fingers in the soil and interlace them with worms and fungi. Wake to the hum of a city as its people build it around themselves. See stars older and more numerous than you can count whorling across the night. Watch Lao Tzu wriggling its way through a hundred generations of hands and eyes as a poem writing itself.

What is Tao? Not life as the life you live, nor the distinction between petals and dirt, but a physical flowing on all scales from the whispy tips of Josephine’s ears to streams of stars burning through the darkness to silhouette the flowers.

Peter Merel
Tasmania, 2025