ABOUT THE ADAPTATION

The texts on the left-hand pages of this book are not translations; they are adaptations, sometimes very free ones. Since I don’t know Chinese, I have been entirely indebted to the work of three generations of scholars and translators. For the Chuang-tzu, Burton Watson’s translation was the most helpful for my purposes, but I also studied the complete translations by Victor H. Mair, Martin Palmer, and Richard Wilhelm, the partial ones by A. C. Graham, Sam Hamill and J. P. Seaton, and David Hinton, and Thomas Merton’s free version. For the Chung Yung, I have used the translations by Ku Hungming, Andrew Plaks, and Ezra Pound.

“Chuang-tzu is not only a remarkable philosopher,” Octavio Paz said, “but also a great poet.” Though the Chuang-tzu and the Chung Yung are written in prose, forty-nine of my chapters are in verse, because it quickly became apparent that verse would allow me to write a more lyrical and epigrammatic English. I have been particularly free with these chapters, and have sometimes expanded, contracted, paraphrased, improvised, changed images, changed meanings, so that I could create a music in English that seemed genuine to my inner ear. With thirteen of the prose chapters I have been closer to the original text, though even with them my sentences occasionally wandered off in their own directions. (Two prose chapters—27 and 31—are free variations on the original themes by Chuang-tzu.) In the Notes on the Adaptation, I have appended a number of more literally translated passages for comparison.

As with my version of the Tao Te Ching, the chapters that describe the M aster alternate between “she” and “he.” In Chinese, the personal pronoun is gender-neutral; in English we have to choose. Since we are all, potentially, the M aster—since the M aster is, essentially, us—it seemed absurd and disrespectful to present the reader with a male archetype.

My original intention was to create a book of eighty-one chapters, like the Tao Te Ching. But after much searching and sifting, I couldn’t find eighty-one passages of the highest quality. So instead of 81 (9² or 3⁴) I settled on 64 (8² or 4³) chapters. In this way, the number wasn’t altogether arbitrary; and while 81 has a particular elegance to it, so does 64. Besides its arcane mathematical properties, it is the number of hexagrams in the I Ching, the number of squares on a chessboard, the number of sexual positions in the Kama Sutra, and the only two-digit number ever to star in a Beatles song.