Art of War (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (11 page)

Giles understood he was blazing a trail. At the time of the French Revolution, China had been the world’s largest empire. In 1910 England held the title and was feeling the responsibility. This was the moment of high British Empire—a decade after the Boxer Rebellion, fifty years after the Indian Mutiny, and eight since the bitterly fought Boer War—when imperial reach was consolidating in Asia and Africa. Nevertheless, as an English speaker Giles was flying solo. Ever since the Enlightenment, the French and the Jesuits had made strides in translating Chinese arts and letters for the West. The Germans, the Russians, and particularly the Japanese had begun to study and translate the great Chinese classics. In this realm, however, the English were just gearing up for what would become a golden century of Asian language scholarship.

In 1905 Captain E. F. Calthrop, R.F.A., had published an English translation of
The Art of War
in Tokyo, under the Japanese name for Sun Tzu: Sonshi. Assisted by two Japanese military men, he had worked from a Japanese version of the text. Giles dismissed Calthrop’s work as substandard and not scholarly, and other scholars have rejected it too. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Calthrop’s work did not face quite the scholarly depredation that it would by the 1930s, but it was clearly unacceptable.

Giles’s effort in 1910 was the first translation into English of Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
by a serious sinologist. With a text some 2,400 years old, Giles confronted a language and a sensibility at considerable remove from his own, and he worked years before the great “Orientalists”—Arthur Waley, Ivan Morris, Donald Keene, Burton Watson, James Legge, John Fairbank, Owen Lattimore, and scores of poet-translators—would fairly invent Asian studies for English speakers. Yet Giles achieved his mission. His version can and does stand alone. It is still studied by military men and is beloved by general readers who have no connection to combat.

For more than fifty years, the Giles translation was the definitive edition—it had no competitors. But at the opening of the twentieth century his feat was neither easy nor assured. A quick scan of the original Chinese text frames the issues: The writing is neat and brief—like a haiku poem. And in several instances, it makes no earthly sense in English or Chinese. We need not investigate too deeply to discover why. When we encounter works like
The Art of War
we are on the long cusp of an oral tradition. As Arthur Waley writes, “The earliest use of connected writing . . . was as an aid to memory . . . [I]ts purpose was to help people not to forget what they knew already, whereas, in more advanced communities, the chief use of writing is to tell people things they have not heard before” (introduction to
The Book of Songs
, p. 11).

A completely accurate translation is categorically impossible, always a hopeful approximation. But translators working in European tongues rarely confront the Pandora’s box Giles did. He succeeds, but not without infelicities and compromises. Guiding his readers into this fabulous, ancient world, he introduces English words to descant the laconic Chinese text—sparingly, but he does. Later translators will argue against this practice, but they will have access to a version of the text that is “purer” by a thousand years. And other translators will reflect the reigning literary and cultural trends of their times. That is the “way” of translation—Dryden and Pope, even Fitzgerald set the standard for their periods, but now they sound, if not quaint, more like themselves than a true rendering of other men’s words. Language is a living thing, and as change is essential to life, it is characteristic of our words. We read Dryden’s translations of Homer, Ovid, or Virgil for the devilish brilliance of Dryden’s own lyricism, and even his vocabulary seems odd now, a thing apart. In
The Art of War
Giles found some measure of himself—citizen, thinker, pioneer, and, most especially, educator. That’s probably why this work still stands.

Lionel Giles had to carve a passageway between West and East, Classical and contemporary, yet still keep to the text Sun Tzu composed. In the notes, Giles nails cultural and historical observations, plus the interpretations of the commentators, to the relevant phrases he translates. It is often delightful reading, but cumbersome. He wonders aloud about his choices and argues with the interpretations of other scholars, while offering wise observations about the world and its bellicose propensities. The notes break the rhythms of the original, herding the text as a sheepdog might into fields of military history, corrals of interpretive queries.

The notes are of uneven length, naturally, and do not accompany every item. We have maintained the style of the original notes but have edited them for relevance; for example, they include descriptions of Giles’s methods and rationales for the translation, but such academic discussion is of interest only to linguistic scholars, and we have eliminated it here. When, for this edition, we have selected only part of a note, we have not used ellipses to show that, in the original, text precedes or follows the selection, but we have used ellipses to show omitted words within the selection.

Mere words can bridge only part of the epochal cultural chasm that exists between Sun Tzu’s time and subsequent eras, even for the Chinese. Giles also faced textual interpolations and corruptions that had accreted like barnacles to the original over the millennia. For centuries, the best scholars in China had chewed over certain ideograms, argued over entire lines (or their absence), and fought over the veracity of variants of the original, just as Western scholars debate the authorship of Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
and the provenance of Shakespeare’s plays. Over the centuries, a great scholarly literature developed to explicate the thorny passages, to wonder over the ideograms, and to ferret out bogus additions.

Giles provides us with the most pungent and trenchant of them here in selections from the commentaries. What a gift! The authors include Wang Hsi, Ts’ao Ts’ao, Tu Yu and his grandson Tu Mu, Li Ch’üan, Mêng Shih—some of the most illustrious names in Chinese military and historical literature. They elucidate the numbered points Sun Tzu makes with examples from China’s 3,000-year history, in a method that is a classic Chinese teaching device and characteristic of Chinese expository style. Apart from the delicious entrée they give us to Chinese culture, the commentaries present a print approximation for the modern reader of how an instructive treatise might have been transmitted at the time of Sun Tzu. As part of his original introduction Giles included descriptions of the major Chinese commentators he cites in the notes; they appear in this edition in the Appendix.

In this edition, we have introduced relevant excerpts from the work of Western writers and thinkers, ancient and modern—generals, poets, political leaders, and other observers.

Sun Tzu on
The Art of War

Sun Tzu signals the importance he assigns to planning by opening
The Art of War
with its discussion—and then reiterating many of the points from this chapter through subsequent chapters. While we cannot know with certainty whether the Greeks and the Romans studied Sun Tzu’s work, they must have known it at least indirectly. Across the centuries caravansaries plied the Silk Road, exchanging cultural tidbits far less valuable between China and empires to the West. DG

1. Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State.

2. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

3. The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field.

4. These are: (1) The Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) The Commander; (5) Method and discipline.

 

It appears from what follows that Sun Tzu means by Moral Law a principle of harmony, not unlike the Tao [method or way] of Lao Tzu in its moral aspect. One might be tempted to render it by “morale,” were it not considered as an attribute of the
ruler
in paragraph 13.