Daodejing
An Interpretation by David Breeden, Steven Schroeder, and Wally Swist
This is a multi-step collaborative translation that began with the Chinese put into English, then the three scholar-poets worked on the language of their first step in translation to make better available to modern readers the experience of a poem through an integration of form and meaning. Without such an integration, the aesthetic experience of reading a poem is at best only partial, at worst not a meaningful experience at all.
This new Daodejing is both the old one with all its majesty and a new one offered in 21st-century American English as wielded by true experts: poets who will not and cannot divorce meaning from form.
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About the Poets
David Breeden is a poet and Unitarian Universalist minister in Minnesota. Recent poetry collections include Raging for the Exit: A Commonplace Book (with Steven Schroeder), Wipf & Stock, 2012, and They Played for Timelessness (with Chips of When), Virtual Artists Collective, 2012.
Steven Schroeder is a poet and visual artist based in Chicago. Recent poetry collections include A Water Planet, flying island books, 2014 and Raging for the Exit: A Commonplace Book (with David Breeden), Wipf & Stock, 2012. More at .
Wally Swist’s books of poetry include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, Southern Illinois University Press, 2012 and Velocity, Virtual Artists Collective, 2013. Garrison Keillor recently read a poem of his on the daily radio program The Writer’s Almanac. More at .