Yes, Hunter, that's interesting. Would you like to put forward your translation? We shall help you correct. You may come up with the most perfect translation.

I note that you wanted to start a short essay with the quotation on Notebook. Something like this, avoiding a mundane literal translation, may be suitable: "Time, inexorable time. So many things to do, so little time..." The moment the river is mentioned, I think, it gets very ordinary. One can play around with "Inexorably passes time, like a river of no return", but still it sounds like the work of a third rate Victorian pupil from a minor school. I think a more imagistic translation catching the mood would be truer to the original spirit.

Hunter, Here is a list of the notable translations of the Analects, from which this quotation comes, listed in Wikipedia. Legge, James (1861). Confucian Analects, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean. The Chinese Classics I. London: Trübner. Revised second edition (1893), Oxford: Clarendon Press, reprinted by Cosimo in 2006 (ISBN 978-1-60520-643-1 Lyall, Leonard A. (1909). The Sayings of Confucius. London: Longmans, Green and Co. OCLC 1435673. Soothill, William Edward (1910). The Analects of Confucius. Yokohama: Fukuin Printing.; rpt. London: Oxford University Press (1937). Waley, Arthur (1938). The Analects. London: George Allen and Unwin. Reprinted by Alfred A. Knopf in 2000 (ISBN 978-0-375-41204-2 Lau, D. C. (1979). Confucius, The Analects (Lun yü). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.; rpt. with Chinese text, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press Brooks, E. Bruce; Brooks, Taeko (2001). The Original Analects. New York: Columbia University Press. I note that you are now a visiting scholar in the US. It would be very nice if you could call up these books from your university library and post these translations here. We can then continue this fascinating discussion. Of these, Legge, Waley and Lau are particularly noteworthy. So please make sure you do not miss them.