Dao De Jing in Clear English: Including a Step-by-Step Translation

Perfect for those with a few years of Chinese language under their belt who want to dive into Classical Chinese.The bane of every Chinese language learner's existence is unknown characters. When we don't recognize a word, we have to pull out a touch screen dictionary and manually look up the pronunciation and meaning.This book takes away that trouble. I can finally read a book through without bouncing between a phone dictionary. The pinyin and word by word meaning is right there!This book is very new (2018) which means it's able to build and improve on old translations. It's also special in that it's a collaboration between a native English speaker and a native Chinese speaker, which gives the translation accuracy much more integrity.The downsides:1) I wish it there was a traditional Chinese version.2) The cover isn't very handsome. I think a lot of folks buy The Dao De Jing so that they can ostentatiously display it on their bookshelves. This book, however, has a very humbling cover that resembles a high school textbook. Personally, I think this adds to the charm. "Without laughter, there's no Dao" as the book says.I look forward to reading the other books Pepper and Dr Wang have collaborated on.

If, like me, you are concerned with the accuracy of a translation, and you also want to see for yourself how it came about so you can make up your own mind about the original's intended meaning – its linguistic constraints, its use of literary devices, potential metaphors, double meanings, rhymes, deliberate ambiguities and ambivalences that may have shaped its choice of words – this is so far the best edition of "The Laozi" I have seen.It suitably humbly makes no claims to being an academic edition, it gives credit where credit is due, standing, as it does, on the shoulders of other great works and interpretations (such as that done by Moss Roberts and many others), but it provides the careful, linguistically and poetically minded reader with most of the tools needed to find their own interpretation of the wisdom of the ancients.It is based not just on previous translations as many versions are, and it also takes into account the relatively recent discoveries of early copies, such as the Goudian Slips via the excellent work done by Henricks and others to integrate the differences between those and the received versions into the way we read and understand the text.In addition to a clear, concise translation into English, it has a line by line rendering of the Chinese characters in simplified Chinese, the Pinyin transcription, a character by character direct translation, and a short section underneath for clarification.Unlike most other editions, it does not "preach" the meaning of the book or the Tao, it does not interpret for you, but it seems, indeed, to be exactly the edition I was looking for as the perfect starting point to delve deeper into the work.Other editions claim to be as literal and precise as possible (Derek Lin's, that I regrettably bought first, springs to mind), and yet they neglect to follow up their intention with notes that neutrally allows the reader to make up their own mind, thus negating the entire point of a literal translation in the first place.

Hello,I've been studying Daoism for some time now and of course this text the DaoDeJing in a special edition translated by a daoist. Now that I have notions in Chinese language and its romanisation (pinyin) I willingly go towards these types of books. I found in this translation bits of interpretations that aren't always correct or just. This being said, the value of the word to word ; pinyin to ideograms ; and finally interpretation ; all in one - the whole text in Chinese included - is a good insight of a tool (maybe not for beginners purpose - to learn about this fantastic "way" turned into a book) to have a better grasp of the inner meaning of this work.Hope this little comment helps. I'd wish for more books like this (with pinyin and all) to come up to really study.P.S: I also bettered a lot my Chinese understanding (grammar & structure).

Of the many translations of the Dao De Jing that I have read, this one gave me the clearest understanding of the original text. Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang provide a clear translation in simple, direct English, followed by the text of the Dao De Jing in simplified Chinese with a pinyin rendition of each character so that non-Chinese readers can get an appreciation of the intricate rhymes, alliterations, plays on words and extreme concision of the original text. This is an outstanding piece of work which I would recommend to anyone who wants to get as close to the original as possible without setting out to acquire a knowledge of Classical Chinese.

This is a really great book for those who look to translate the Dao word by word.