Chinese and Western cultures and attitudes differ widely in many ways.
Master sun plus#
Plus there is a problem of contextual understanding. The translator succeeds or fails in how he manages these two tensile factors. There is a delicate balance that must be struck between fidelity to the original, and the need to convey ideas into another medium in a way that sounds lucid. As reviewer Quintus Curtius wrote in 2015, And translating from Chinese is fraught with complexities that do not appear when translating, say, a Romance language (a single Chinese character can represent more than one word, idea, or sound). As I’ve written before, translation is both an interpretive art and a linguistic activity. Like many Chinese classics, Western appreciation and understanding of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War have suffered from the problems inherent in translation as well as cultural differences (not least of which that it was written more than two millennia ago…). It was likely started by a student or a clerk writing down the master’s words, and others adding to and embellishing them. There may not actually be a single author: the book is likely a composite, created over decades or even centuries by many authors contributing and updating the core. The word tzu (or tzi or zi) means master, as in Lao Tzu. And, very much like The Prince, it’s one of the most often-quoted and referred-to of unread books, sometimes reduced to a handful of bumper-sticker epithets and misquotes by the literati and ignorati alike.
It’s a short book: a mere 13 chapters written in generally brief aphorisms. And, like Machiavelli’s The Prince, it has often been misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted for those purposes. It has been used as a model of strategy and leadership for the military, for business, romance, sports, and for politics. So wise that his famous treatise, The Art of War (aka The Art of Warfare), has been read, written about, critiqued, and discussed for roughly 2,400 years.
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