About Sun Tzu The earliest known work on military strategy and war,
The Art of War consists of 13 short chapters attributed to a man
named Sun Tzu, also known as Sun Tzi or Sun Wu. Little is known
about the man, but he is widely believed to have been an
accomplished general when he wrote the text. It emphasizes surprise
and deception, with lines like "When capable, feign incapacity;
when active, inactivity." The Art of War became known in Europe in
the 18th century, and something of a manual for U.S. military
strategists in the 20th century, when it was popularized by Henry
Kissinger, among others. When Lionel Giles began his translation of
Sun Tzu's ART OF WAR, the work was virtually unknown in Europe. Its
introduction to Europe began in 1782 when a French Jesuit Father
living in China, Joseph Amiot, acquired a copy of it, and
translated it into French. It was not a good translation because,
according to Dr. Giles, " I]t contains a great deal that Sun Tzu
did not write, and very little indeed of what he did." The first
translation into English was published in 1905 in Tokyo by Capt. E.
F. Calthrop, R.F.A. However, this translation is, in the words of
Dr. Giles, "excessively bad." He goes further in this criticism:
"It is not merely a question of downright blunders, from which none
can hope to be wholly exempt. Omissions were frequent; hard
passages were willfully distorted or slurred over. Such offenses
are less pardonable. They would not be tolerated in any edition of
a Latin or Greek classic, and a similar standard of honesty ought
to be insisted upon in translations from Chinese." In 1908 a new
edition of Capt. Calthrop's translation was published in London. It
was an improvement on the first - omissions filled up and numerous
mistakes corrected - but new errors were created in the process.
Dr. Giles, in justifying his translation, wrote: "It was not
undertaken out of any inflated estimate of my own powers; but I
could not help feeling that Sun Tzu deserved a better fate than had
befallen him, and I knew that, at any rate, I could hardly fail to
improve on the work of my predecessors." Clearly, Dr. Giles' work
established much of the groundwork for the work of later
translators who published their own editions. Of the later editions
of the ART OF WAR I have examined; two feature Giles' edited
translation and notes, the other two present the same basic
information from the ancient Chinese commentators found in the
Giles edition. Of these four, Giles' 1910 edition is the most
scholarly and presents the reader an incredible amount of
information concerning Sun Tzu's text, much more than any other
translation.
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