In late August, Chinese American author Ken Liu broke from his typical focus on speculative fiction to release a new book that combined non-fiction with translation. “Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time” is less an interpretation and more a direct engagement with the text, as Liu inserts his own reflections on Laozi’s philosophy as well as commentary on his translation choices and even some Daoist parables.

As Liu notes in his introduction, he was inspired to take this approach by the unique mix of instability and robustness that characterizes the “Dao De Jing.” For over two millennia, the text has flourished through a myriad of versions, interpretations, adaptations, translations, and transliterations, captivating thinkers worldwide. Even the order of the chapters remains in dispute. Everyone seems to want to contribute something to Laozi’s philosophy, challenging the very idea of textual authority and authenticity.

Liu’s new book is not the first time that Laozi’s classic has been interpretatively translated by an American speculative fiction writer. In 1997, American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who did not know Chinese, published her own version of the “Dao De Jing.” That book’s 2019 edition — retitled to “Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way” — adopts the Wade-Giles romanization, where Tao is used over Dao and “Tao Te Ching” is opted for over “Dao De Jing,” the now more-standard Pinyin.

A comment in the introduction to Liu’s book — “all translations are, ultimately, a record of the translator’s trials to discern the spirit of the text within its shadowy mirror” — directly echoes Le Guin’s postscript, in which she repeatedly emphasizes how she consulted several translated versions and let them guide her interpretation. Sometimes, she writes, she would discover that “several English meanings might lead me back to the same Chinese word.”

A translation always says more about the translator than the text itself. For Liu, the “Dao De Jing” provided a space for meditation and communication with the all-embracing, ever-cool Laozi during the turmoil of the pandemic. For Le Guin, the “Dao De Jing” was a foundational text, one that led her to embrace nature, equilibrium, and the idea of wuwei, or “non-doing” — an ideal that honors the natural flow of things over the imposition of rigid form and order.

Le Guin describes how she first encountered the “Dao De Jing” as a teenager through Paul Carus’ 1898 edition, discovered on her father’s bookshelves. This early exposure evolved into a lifelong engagement with the text, shaping not only her decadeslong interest in translation, but also furnishing the underlying grammar of her literary work. Daoist philosophy profoundly shaped her world-building as early as 1971’s “The Lathe of Heaven,” which draws its title directly from the Daoist term tianjun.

In Le Guin’s renowned novel “A Wizard of Earthsea,” Daoist ideas shape the narrative in a subtle yet profound manner, mostly through her protagonist, Ged, who describes the essence of magic not as a tool for domination or conquest but as a means of seeking equilibrium. “…My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars,” Ged explains. “There is no other power. No other name.”

This description calls to mind the famous opening lines to the “Dao De Jing,” here rendered in Le Guin’s own translation:

“The way you can go
isn’t the real way.
The name you can say
isn’t the real name.
Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
Name’s the mother
of the ten thousand things.”

Le Guin’s interpretation here is clear: the act of naming often fails to fully encompass the essence of reality. She suggests that approaching the Dao requires a conscious effort to move beyond the constraints of the symbolic order and the compulsive need to assign definitive, authoritative forms to all things.

The “Dao De Jing,” with its emphasis on the abstract, fluid, and transcendental, seems particularly appealing to speculative fiction writers. Le Guin’s classmate at Berkeley High School, the acclaimed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, shared her passion for the Dao. Though their paths never crossed while in high school, Dick found in Daoism a reflection of his belief in the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the physical world.

Dick was likewise fascinated by the “Yi Jing,” or the “Book of Changes,” a text on divination and cosmology that is an important reference for Daoism, Confucianism, and other Chinese folk traditions. Most famously, in Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle,” the “Yi Jing” not only served as a narrative device informing the characters’ decision-making, but also as a guide for Dick’s own creative process. At the height of his immersion in the text, Dick reportedly consulted the hexagrams for even the simplest of daily choices, such as whether to take his children on an outing.

Dick detailed his obsession with the Yi Jing, also Romanized as the “I Ching,” in an interview with Vertex: “If you use the ‘I Ching’ long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.”

To Dick, Daoism wasn’t necessarily found in disciplines or doctrines, but rather exerted a pervasive, subtle, and practical influence. Whether one had “heard the word” or not is irrelevant, and the actual words used to describe the Dao are unimportant.

Both Dick and Le Guin grew up in the liberal, counterculture-infused San Francisco Bay Area during the height of the hippie movement, and they were almost certainly shaped by that era’s fascination with “Eastern mysticism” — a fascination shared by other products of the era, like Apple’s Steve Jobs. This interest, which was typically filtered through an Orientalist lens, treated Daoism as a “purer, kinder, and more spiritual” alternative to the existential crises of the industrialized post-WWII West.

Issues of Orientalism and cultural appropriation prevail whenever Le Guin’s rendition of the “Dao De Jing” is discussed. The fact that she never learned Chinese made readers question whether she was qualified as a translator. More importantly, skeptics wondered at her intentions: was she genuinely paying homage to a culture that had influenced her, or was she doing it for the sake of indulging in exoticism, finding answers to the decadence of postwar America in an idealized “Orient”?

Within translation circles, it raises ethical questions related to the practice of “bridge translation” — when a translator, typically one with knowledge of the source language and culture, is tasked with getting the rough meaning across before a more established, often white writer steps in to “polish” the text.

It would be easy to conclude that interpretative translations like Le Guin’s are mere appropriation. However, it’s also important to ask whether and how concepts like “authenticity” can be applied in the case of the “Dao De Jing.” For his part, Ken Liu explicitly writes that he wanted to avoid producing a literal, academic rendition grounded in extensive scholarship. He also refrains from leveraging his bicultural, bilingual identity to assert a superior claim over the text compared to those who never had the privilege to learn Chinese.

In Liu’s view, we are all on same ground where the “Dao De Jing” is concerned. Everyone has something to gain, and everyone is free to have their own interpretation, as the text was always meant to transcend notions of authenticity and rigid boundaries. Words are insufficient for true communication and connection. As humans, we can only strive to express and understand as best as we are able.

These issues are not limited to translations into other languages. Arguably, given the distance between modern and classical Chinese, translating the “Dao De Jing” from Laozi’s original text into the speech context of contemporary China is a feat not much easier than that of translating it into English. The real question is: what makes Laozi’s text so timeless, and what makes it particularly interesting to modern writers? Could the universality of the “Dao De Jing” help us overcome the artificial boundaries of geopolitics, race, language, and culture?

The Song dynasty (960–1279) Confucianist Lu Jiuyuan, one of the representatives of Xinxue, or the philosophy of the mind school, once wrote: “The Six Books explain me, and I explain the Six Books,” referring to the six Confucian canonical texts. To Lu, the classics are there to support a writer when they are making a point, and the writer’s own interpretation of these texts also adds to how they are going to be understood.

The same goes for the “Dao De Jing.” In times filled with war, strife, pandemics, and grief, perhaps it is natural that this Chinese classic would become a beacon for speculative fiction writers, the people who are most concerned with the future. In Liu’s translation, Laozi acknowledges that the future is chaotic, telling people that “Heaven and Earth are not benevolent. To them, all things in the cosmos are straw dogs.” In an age of AI-generated lies, questioning the legitimacy of words and sticking to heartfelt truth is probably the way to go.

If anything, I think Laozi himself, all cool and non-doing, would have been interested in these versions of the “Dao De Jing,” written some 2,000 years after his own. Perhaps he’d even catch, in Liu’s “shadowy mirror,” a glimpse of our current world.

Editor: Cai Yineng.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG and Shuge, reedited by Sixth Tone)