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45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
By a translator of genius with much to teach us all., May 11, 2001
The full title of the present book is: 'THE WAY AND ITS POWER - A Study of the TAO TE CHING and Its Place in Chinese Thought by ARTHUR WALEY. The book, which was first published in 1934 and has often been reprinted, besides containing a study of the historical and intellectual background, also contains a complete translation of the Tao Te Ching.Waley, who was one of the great Sinologists of the twentieth century, is perhaps better known to most as a translator of Chinese poetry. His 'Translations from the Chinese,' the book which contains, among other treasures, the marvelous poems of T'ao Ch'ien, Po Chu-I, and Wang Wei, has been reissued many times. And although we have seen other excellent translations of Chinese poetry from writers such as A. C. Graham, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder, none of them have had the impact of Waley. Chinese poetry, for most, is and always will mean Arthur Waley. His influence has been overwhelming. I would attribute his enormous success to two things. In the first place, there is the very special quality of his English, a quality impossible to describe. In the second place, Waley was a master at evoking an atmosphere, a feeling tone, that strikes one as authentically Chinese. So good was he at this that one sometimes gets the feeling, as one does when reading the poems of Emily Dickinson (whose mind had a very Chinese cast), that they must have been Chinese souls who had somehow strayed and ended up reincarnating in Western bodies. The particular beauty of Waley's style, a style which despite its age still strikes one as modern, will also be found at work in the present book. The book falls into two parts. The first gives us a 100-page Introduction which covers such topics as The Hedonists, Quietism, The Language Crisis, The Realists, The Mystic Basis of Realism, The Tao Te Ching, The Sheng, The Literary Methods of the Book, and the Author. Then follow six Appendices which treat of such matters as Authorship in Early China, Foreign Influence, Taoist Yoga, Text and Commentaries, etc. Then comes the translation itself, after which Waley rounds out the book with some Additional Notes and an Index. Waley's translations of each Chapter of the Tao Te Ching are followed either by a Paraphrase, a brief Commentary, or, in most cases, simply a few footnotes. The notes are brief, practical, and invariably helpful, and are designed to assist both the general reader and those with access to the Chinese text to arrive at a better understanding of the text. Waley's approach, in other words, has a distinctly old-world and British feel, and is designed to appeal, not to the pedant or technical specialist, but to gentlemen and gentlemen scholars, and ladies also, who are seriously interested in understanding the thought of Lao Tzu. Chapter XLIII gives us a good example of Waley's style and basic procedure. Here it is, slightly modified since it should be set out as verse: "What is of all things most yielding / Can overwhelm that which is of all things most hard. / Being substanceless it can enter even where there is no space; / That is how I know the value of action that is actionless. / But that there can be teaching without words, / Value in action that is actionless, / Few indeed can understand." Readers are referred to the book itself for Waley's two brief informative notes on these lines. Waley, who mastered both Chinese and Japanese, but who wisely refused to visit the East for obvious reasons, was undoubtedly something of a genius, and he has much to teach us all. His edition can be recommended with confidence to anyone who is looking for a study of Ancient Chinese thought along with an uncluttered, authoritative, and readable version of the Tao Te Ching.
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