BOOK REVIEWS The Daodejing of Laozi. Translation and Commentary by Philip J. Ivanhoe. (New York and London: Seven Bridges Press, 2002. 125 pp. + xxxii.) Dao De Jing: The Book of the Way. Translation and Commentary by Moss Roberts. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2004. 226 pp. + ix.) Here are two new versions of the most frequently translated work in the world, save for the Bible. What do these translations have to offer that is new? Both translators are scholars of ancient Chinese who are fully acquainted with recent trends and discoveries in the field. Of the two translators and commentators, Roberts is the more ambitious. His introduction and notes are longer than Ivanhoe’s, and his translation is freer and more daring. Ivanhoe’s commentary is informative and philosophically acute. His translation is the more literal of the two. These two versions, then, have very different things to offer the modern reader. In Ivanhoe’s translation, the structure of Laozi’s argu- ment is sometimes clearer, while Roberts attempts to recreate Laozi’s suggestiveness and the distinctively poetic nature of the ancient Chinese text, including rhyme. It has been more than fifty years since Bernhard Karlgren presented evidence—building upon earlier Chinese research—that approxi- mately three quarters of the Daodejing is composed in rhymed verse. As Karlgren noted,“it may seem astonishing that many sentences start in prose, then continue with a couple of rhythmical and rimed lines, and then, again, wind up with a line or two in prose” (“The Poetical Parts in Lao-Tsï,” Göteborgs Högskolas Arsskrift 38 [3], 1932). Indeed, much of the Daodejing reads like ancient Chinese poetry, which—unlike, say, the poetry of the ancient Greeks and Romans—was composed in rhyme. One of the qualities that sets Moss Roberts’s translation apart from other modern translations is that it frequently deploys rhyme. Ivanhoe, in contrast, tries above all to convey Laozi’s meaning. He is not preoccupied with evoking the texture and rhythm of the Chinese. Roberts, on the other hand, strives to simulate Laozi’s rhythms by writing a poetic line with a definite number of stresses (often four of them) and that can often be scanned as iambic. Whether these rhythmic and metrical qualities are the result of Roberts’s conscious intention I cannot say,since the translator does not © 2006 Journal of Chinese Philosophy