Personally, as someone who has read (and often rereads) the Tao in the original Chinese (with a lot of assistance and references!). I actually really like Hogan

Personally, as someone who has read (and often rereads) the Tao in the original Chinese (with a lot of assistance and references!). I actually really like Hogan's translation. I don't think it holds as the only translation you need, but I feel a lot of translators become fixated on trying to capture the mystic poetic-ness of the Tao, but it is impossible to render this in English without loosing one of its most important stylistic elements: it's extreme terseness. Hogan's translation misses a lot of "meaning", but you're missing the point if you want the specificity of the word choice translated for you.