While trying to find better rips of certain books I stumbled upon someone who had a ton of RNIB rips, and not just of Le Guin. Luckily there was only one anthology and one collection I had to purchase myself. I had a bunch already and then I searched for the ones I didn’t have. Then I mined for the various anthologies that featured her work.

While that was going on in the background I downloaded all I could find and sorted through the various rips other people put out on the internet from Audible, RNIB, CDs, tape and even an LP. All told, it took about a month and a half to record all NLS books available. Every now and again I go through an obsessive streak and one day I switched focus to Le Guin.

The collection was on the horizon, but when I was going to do it was nebulous. I bet Stephen Mitchell himself would like you to have both.22 books & 420+ short stories, essays, poems and reviews.Ī few months ago I regulated myself to focusing on various anthologies and Analog/Asimov’s magazines. If you like Mitchell's approach, get one of the more literal translations too. However it is good, compelling reading, and honestly makes no pretense of being a literal translation. This is just to say that his book cannot be definitive, because it is less literal and not really a translation. None of this is to find fault with Stephen Mitchell. So, Mitchell is providing a modern interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, while Mair as well as Addiss & Lombardo are closer to a literal translation (which is not possible however, because the Chinese language and the English language are so completely different from one another.) Obviously, there were no factories, trucks, tractors, or warheads in the ancient times in which the Tao was written. When the Way does not prevail under heaven, Swift horses are relegated to fertilizing fields. Warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.' 'When a country is in harmony with the Tao, To show how modern it is, let's take an example and compare his version of the beginning of chapter 46 with two other versions: Perhaps to the point of being 'politically correct.' However, he does have a way with words and this is a very readable version of the Tao.

Mitchell's version of the Tao Te Ching is very, even extremely, modern. But he is a Zen student of a couple of decades and has good insight into the Zen of the Tao (Zen Buddhism is Buddhism heavily dosed with Taoism). Stephen Mitchell has not translated this classic, but rather has paraphrased it - as he admits in the Foreward. Tao Te Ching is ancient, now a couple of millenia in print.

Tao te ching stephen mitchell review