That book became a literary sensation - selling over a million copies and establishing you not just as the definitive translator of Lao-tzu, but also as an important literary voice in your own right. London: My experience was no doubt similar to that of many others in 1988 or ‘89 when you published your great rendition of the Tao Te Ching. So I never have an audience in mind except for my own inner audience. Generally, my experience is that when I'm successful to my own inner ear it works for a lot of people. Stephen Mitchell: I think that is a book of surpassing greatness even in a mediocre translation. I thought I was reading Rilke - and of course I was - but I was reading a version of his work refracted through your particular lens, made accessible by your own special gifts as a translator. I remember buying a copy of Letters to a Young Poet in a used bookstore in London back in the 1980s and having my mind blown wide open. I found my way to you through your translations of Rilke, a poet I had read in school but never really "discovered" until I came across your translations.
When translators do their jobs well, they become invisible, transparent. I think I was reading your books before I even knew it - which I imagine you hear quite a lot. Scott London: Like many people, I’ve been reading your work for some time now. In this conversation, held in front of a live audience at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara, California, I talk with him about The Second Book of the Tao, his perspectives on writing, his longtime Zen practice, and the rich tradition of wisdom literature that informs his work. It would seem that the description applies not just to the ancient Chinese sages but to Mitchell himself, a man with an eye for the genuine, a deep love and respect for words, and an awareness that, paradoxically, connecting with the essence of things always requires going beyond words. "There was only a passion for the genuine, a fascination with words, and a constant awareness that the ancient Masters are alive and well in the mind that doesn't know a thing." "There was nothing to live up to," he says. Mitchell describes their philosophy as a kind of non-philosophy. In The Second Book of the Tao, just published by the Penguin Press, he anthologizes some of the great teachings of Chuang-tzu - Lao-tzu's brilliant and playful disciple - and Tzu-Ssu, the grandson of Confucius. He has also co-authored two bestselling books with his wife Byron Katie. Renowned translator and scholar Stephen Mitchell has brought to life a wide range of literary classics for readers of English, including the Tao Te Ching, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad Gita and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
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