SUN TZU ON THE ART OF WAR THE OLDEST

SUN TZU ON THE ART OF WAR THE OLDEST

MILITARY TREATISE IN THE WORLD

Translated from the Chinese with Introduction and Critical Notes

BY

LIONEL GILES, M.A.

Assistant in the Department of Oriental Printed Books and MSS.

in the British Museum

First Published in 1910

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To my brother

Captain Valentine Giles, R.G.

in the hope that

a work 2400 years old

may yet contain lessons worth consideration

by the soldier of today

this translation

is affectionately dedicated.

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Preface

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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, "It 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.

The Giles' edition of the ART OF WAR, as stated above, was a

scholarly work. Dr. Giles was a leading sinologue at the time

and an assistant in the Department of Oriental Printed Books and

Manuscripts in the British Museum. Apparently he wanted to

produce a definitive edition, superior to anything else that

existed and perhaps something that would become a standard

translation. It was the best translation available for 50 years.

But apparently there was not much interest in Sun Tzu in English-

speaking countries since the it took the start of the Second

World War to renew interest in his work. Several people

published unsatisfactory English translations of Sun Tzu. In

1944, Dr. Giles' translation was edited and published in the

United States in a series of military science books. But it

wasn't until 1963 that a good English translation (by Samuel B.

Griffith and still in print) was published that was an equal to

Giles' translation. While this translation is more lucid than

Dr. Giles' translation, it lacks his copious notes that make his

so interesting.

Dr. Giles produced a work primarily intended for scholars of

the Chinese civilization and language. It contains the Chinese

text of Sun Tzu, the English translation, and voluminous notes

along with numerous footnotes. Unfortunately, some of his notes

and footnotes contain Chinese characters; some are completely

Chinese. Thus, a conversion to a Latin alphabet etext was

difficult. I did the conversion in complete ignorance of Chinese

(except for what I learned while doing the conversion). Thus, I

faced the difficult task of paraphrasing it while retaining as

much of the important text as I could. Every paraphrase

represents a loss; thus I did what I could to retain as much of

the text as possible. Because the 1910 text contains a Chinese

concordance, I was able to transliterate proper names, books, and

the like at the risk of making the text more obscure. However,

the text, on the whole, is quite satisfactory for the casual

reader, a transformation made possible by conversion to an etext.

However, I come away from this task with the feeling of loss

because I know that someone with a background in Chinese can do a

better job than I did; any such attempt would be welcomed.

Bob Sutton

al876@cleveland.freenet.edu

bobs@gnu.ai.mit.edu