The stillness within Stephen Mitchell

Reporting from Ojai -- "If I'm a scholar, I'm an amateur," says Stephen Mitchell, the soft-spoken translator of Rainer Maria Rilke and the book of Job as well as "Gilgamesh," the "Bhagavad Gita" and his all-time favorite, the "Tao Te Ching" -- "that marvel of lucidity and grace, the classic manual on the art of living."The Tao is Mitchell's deep well, his Ganges. His 1988 translation has sold more than half a million copies. The New York Times ran a story on the front page of the business section after Harper & Row bought the book at auction with the headline: "Translation of Ancient Tao Text Brings $130,000." Asked what he would do with the advance, Mitchell humbly told an interviewer he was hoping to find a workplace with heat.