The Art of War

THE ART OF WAR
with Notes, Commentaries from the
Chinese Masters, and an Appendix by
Lionel Giles and Dallas Galvin
ON THE TRANSLATION, NOTES, AND COMMENTARIES
by Dallas Galvin
LIONEL GILES WANTED TO ALLOW his readers to understand the text of The Art of War as Sun
Tzu intended it. To achieve his ambition would require three tasks: creating a text able to stand alone
as a work in English; indicating where the original text was uncertain; and providing English readers
with some measure of the commentary—the history lessons, the strategic debates, the thoughtful
qualifications—that the typical Chinese student would receive. Thus along with his translation of The
Art of War, Giles provided copious critical notes. We have reproduced them, with emendations, along
with the text as Giles originally conceived it. In addition, Giles presented commentary from some of
the most important thinkers on military and historical matters throughout Chinese history.
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