SuttaCentral
I’m writing an introduction for the Dhammapada, and given the veritable oceans of ink that have been spilled on this text over the years, I am thinking that it might be nice to gather some interesting things that people have said over the years.
I already have some quotes from the usual suspects—Bhikkhu Bodhi, Buddharakkhita, etc.—and I’d like to see if I can spread my net to more diverse sources. Any ideas? I’m specially interested in perspectives from women!
Speaking which, I just learned about this amazing woman who translated the Dhammapada!
Bai Juyi(白居易, 772~846), one of the most famous poets in the Tang Dynasty, once asked Chan Master Daolin(道林, 741~824) what the essential teaching of Buddhadharma is. The Chan Master’s answer was “Not to do any evil; to embrace the good (諸惡莫作; 眾善奉行)”, which is a line from the (Chinese version of) Dhammapada. When Bai Juyi replied that "Even a three-year-old child understands that!”, the Chan master answered: “Although a three-year-old child can say it, an eighty-year-old man cannot do it.”
For more on this famous anecdote, see here.
Also, it is quite intriguing that Gendün Chöphel translated the Dhammapada from Pali into Tibetan. There is an English translation of the work, and one can read the preface on the publisher’s website.
There is the Tibetan Udanavarga, which is the Northern Tradition’s version of this text. The Tibetan canon contains a commentary on this text by a certain Prajñavarman. There is an old translation of this Udanavarga by Rockhill and apparently it contains some extracts from the commentary.
Okay folks, I found it, the hottest of hot takes, by Albert Edmunds, whose 1902 translation Hymns of the Faith was one of the earliest into English, and whose introduction remains perhaps the most dramatic:
If ever an immortal classic was produced upon the continent of Asia, it was this. … No trite ephemeral songs are here, but red-hot lava from the abysses of the human soul … These old refrains from a life beyond time and sense, as it was wrought out by generations of earnest thinkers, have been fire in many a muse. They burned in the brains of the Chinese pilgrims, who braved the blasts of the Mongolian desert, climbed the cliffs of the Himalayas, swung by rope-bridges across the Indus where it rages through its gloomiest gorge, and faced the bandit and beast, to peregrinate the Holy Land of their religion and tread in the footsteps of their Master.
Bhikkhu Dhammajoti in his Chinese Version of Dharmapada has a wonderful introduction on the comparative studies of various extant Dharmapada versions and historical analysis of its origins
Gogerly published a partial translation in 1840, up to verse 255. Just FYI.
Dear Bhante, there’s one of the most popular Spanish translations made by argentinian Carmen Dragonetti, the first one made directly from Pali. 
Thanks, that’s really interesting!