著名的许渊冲教授 曾这样翻译:
From path to path no man in sight.

All roads are deserted, not a soul in sight.

So the equivalent English word to “灭” is...?

回复：4楼
your phrase can't be translated word by word.
they just translated it by meaning.

oh, so it's the lexical gap thing~~！   gaps,of course! There are always the gaps... But come on, try harder,please~~~

It's probably "to extinct", or "to vanish", if you have to translate the character 灭 by itself. It also means to destroy or to extinguish.
literal translation of the verse would be "(ten thousand) (paths) (people's) (trace) (extinct)"

>>So the equivalent English word to “灭” is...?
disappear, non-existent

now we are talking sense.
Thanks.

you know why it's so hard to determine the English counterpart of the character 灭? That's because 灭 is only used as a WORD in ancient Chinese, while in modern Chinese 灭 is considered a semanteme, not an individual word. It does have it's basic meaning, but has to be combined with other characters to form words that find their equivalents in English. 

“灭”好像可以做 word 用耶：
苏维埃政权不仅杀了沙皇，而且灭了他全家。
你就灭了那个念头吧！

回复：11楼
嗯，我也想过类似的，比如灯灭了。quench。
但是这些灭翻译成英文，对应的词和这句诗里的貌似都不太一样。
灭全家是destroy或者kill。灭了那个念头...貌似也是kill，kill the thought.
所有这些词都是取了灭的基本意思，但是我一时想不好这个基本意思怎么用英文表达又清楚又有感觉=。=，翻译成kill的话感觉好没诗意啊。。。 另外单翻译一个字，译成什么词性也很麻烦。

翻译就是一种残缺品，个人认为，因为翻译也就只能翻译一下大致意思，而很难把语句中的节奏，押韵甚至意象所标示出的意境完全的展示给人看。。。。。