Through some administrative oversight I was allowed to offer an undergraduate seminar entirely focused on Ursula Le Guin this semester. I thought it would be clever to mix in her version of the Daodejing, so I finally read it straight through instead of dipping into it. My students rightly suggested we look at the book as Le Guin’s self-conscious effort to popularize Laozi: obviously you should go elsewhere for Sinological rigor. Le Guin’s annotations and the presence of her own voice in the text clearly signal her desire to make Laozi applicable for a late-20th-c. US audience that wants gender equality, peace, and less wreckage of the environment…and for a mid-to-late-20th-c. genre writer committed to ideals of art as conveying deep “truth” in ambiguous or elusive form.

Le Guin is vocal about her distaste for the “manual for princes” interpretation of this text—that is, the scholarly consensus that the Laozi belongs to philosophical debates about social order and political rule in the Warring States period. But this may be symptomatic, considering how much her own writing is itself not-so-secretly a manual for non-princes. She takes liberties that are philologically unacceptable, and her general editorial / translational tone clearly owes a lot to the nineteenth-century amateur tradition. Her acknowledgments led me to learn a little about the fascinating oddball Paul Carus, whose zinc-magnate family set up a syncretic religious publisher, Open Court. Carus produced, inter alia, a character-by-character gloss of “Lao-Tze’s Tao-Teh-King” (1898), which Le Guin says was her first Daodejing, found on her father’s shelves.