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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, "[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.
- 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
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Sun Tzu on The Art of War, by Lionel Giles (trans, ed) May, 1994
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