Re: The Art of War
Dave Thompson
"CWO4 Dave Mann" <miste...@loveable.com> wrote in message
news:pan.2005.09.03....@loveable.com...
> The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
>
From my father's generation I especially like Betty Grable and all the nose
art on bombers and such. While in "The Nam, Man" I had an excellent painting
of Little Annie Fannie on the mast of my mighty ship, The LCU-1567.
Wait...
You are talking about the Art of Making War.
Never mind....
--
Dave
(The Other)
Latrine Orderly Canadian War Library
to pass...settled for a stenciled name. darned Vietnamese could draw or
paint just about anything but they couldn't figure out why I wanted an
overweight duck on my truck....instead of the dinner table
"Dave Thompson" <da...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:f7KdnXxdE9A...@comcast.com...
Yaketyak
Thanks for that one..found loads of stuff I havent read since I was a kid.
On Sat, 03 Sep 2005 12:25:49 -0500, CWO4 Dave Mann
<miste...@loveable.com> wrote:
->The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
->
->
->This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
->almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
->re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
->with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
->
->
->Title: The Art of War
->
->Author: Sun Tzu
->
->Translator: Lionel Giles
->
->Release Date: May 1994 [eBook #132]
->[Most recently updated January 2, 2005]
->
->Language: English
->
->Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
->
->***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ART OF WAR ***
->
->
->
-> 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
->
->-----------------------------------------------------------------
->
->
-> 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.
->
->-----------------------------------------------------------------
->
->Preface to the Project Gutenburg Etext
->--------------------------------------
->
-> 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 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
-> al...@cleveland.freenet.edu
-> bo...@gnu.ai.mit.edu
->
->-----------------------------------------------------------------
->INTRODUCTION
->
->
->Sun Wu and his Book
->-------------------
->
->
-> Ssu-ma Ch`ien gives the following biography of Sun Tzu: [1]
Remember 9/11
..the murdered innocents..
and those who now support
their murderers and our enemies.
Yaketyak