The First Woman Scholar to Translate ‘The Art of War’ Vastly Improves It

The new version — in which diplomacy trumps destruction — arrives when we need it most

Photo: georgeclerk/Getty Images

Admired by Tony Soprano and Gordon Gekko alike, The Art of War is one of the only 2,500-year-old texts that’s still widely read today — by cadets at West Point, consultants at McKinsey, and political leaders the world over. In July 2012, before he began his presidential campaign, Donald Trump tweeted a quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “The Supreme Art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

Michael Nylan, a professor of early Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a few academic books of history and criticism, has completed a fresh translation of The Art of War — fresh both for the fact that she is the first woman scholar to do so and also because she has worked to move the reader’s focus away from the book’s brute military elements, which comprise only two of the 13 chapters, and toward its psychological and peacemaking ones. Nylan follows the success of Emily Wilson, the British classicist, who, in 2017, became the first woman scholar to translate The Odyssey — rethinking Odysseus as a particularly complicated and straight-talking protagonist.

Though Trump tweeted a quote of apparent diplomacy (made further questionable by his recent strike on Iranian leadership), Nylan argues in her introduction that Trump, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and James Mattis have all been recent, notable misinterpreters of The Art of War, viewing it as a treatise on how to crush one’s enemies rather than as a manual on converting enemies to your point of view. Nylan’s translation — on which she collaborated with a number of her doctoral students — maintains much of the original’s nuance while also showing how the conversion of minds is a superior task to brash destruction. GEN caught up with Nylan (whose voice sounds remarkably like Elizabeth Warren’s) in a phone conversation ahead of the book’s release.

Michael Nylan. Photo: Michael Nylan

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

GEN: How is your interpretation of “The Art of War” fundamentally different from previous ones?

Michael Nylan: The people who’ve been interested in The Art of War are, of course, not only men, but [most] tend to be interested in the war part of it when, actually, The Art of War is pretty much an anti-war treatise. It’s only if you haven’t been able to outmaneuver your enemies by various means and you’re attacked that The Art of War will tell you how to conduct a war as ruthlessly as possible — but that’s about two chapters’ worth out of 13, and most of the rest is far more interesting.

What explains why those on the political right and far-right — Trump, Bannon, Gorka, etc. — revere “The Art of War”?

A lot of the military establishment has been wowed by it. They compare Sun Tzu to [early 19th-century Prussian military general Carl von] Clausewitz, whose philosophy was total destruction, whereas The Art of War is about bringing a conquered population as quickly as possible into the fold so that they identify with you. That leads to a very different politics of the common good.

How so?

Throughout the book, there’s unusual concern for those at the lowest rungs of society. There’s unusual concern that you don’t kill innocent civilians. There’s unusual concern that you consult people as widely as possible and that when you have to calculate going to war, you do so in the hopes that you will be killing as small a number as possible.

What’s a significant, specific divergence between your translation and previous ones?

For one, many of the previous translations treat it more or less like Machiavelli — all about deception and duplicity when, actually, deception and duplicity are pretty much [confined to] a single chapter that is usually translated as “spies.” For instance, the same word that means “spies” means “a gap that has been introduced,” so a lot of that chapter should not specifically be about spies but rather about how to introduce a division within the enemy’s population while keeping no division within the home forces.

Where might “The Art of War” be unexpectedly applied?

It was applied historically to matters of the bedroom, and not in the sense of conquest but in the sense of thrust and parry — amusing ways like that.

Wait, explain that more!

I’m blushing! Look, I went to convent school, but let’s just say it’s in a kind of half-amused, half-serious way that The Art of War has been frequently invoked.

Does it matter that Sun Tzu’s identity is essentially unknown?

All these texts circulated in manuscript, which means that many people could have copied them and freely amended passages as they chose. What we have from the earliest period is abundant evidence of lines being slightly modified in different editions. The grammar is probably [from] a couple of centuries later, maybe 300 B.C. rather than 506, which is when Sun Tzu was supposed to be advising King Ho-Lu of Wu.

In manuscript culture, rather than in print culture, it is a rare event to actually know who the author was. They always say about Homer, “Well if it wasn’t written by Homer, it was written by someone who lived at the same time and who had the same name.” I feel about Sun Tzu the same way: Who cares?

Was your translation a collaborative process?

I had three students fairly well along in their PhD program, all of whom had a specific interest in Sun Tzu, so we formed a little working group. Since one of them had done two tours in Iraq, he brought quite a bit of expertise that the rest of us lacked. I believe that none of us, no matter how smart, is sufficient unto a good text. People will have insights that would simply escape me.

I won’t say we had all-night sessions, but we had a couple [moments] of, okay, now we actually have to make a decision here. But by that point, we — I should really say my students, who have much better memories than I do — had basically memorized the text. I was looking at an electronic database of it, and we would check: Is this word used anywhere else? What other contexts does it appear in, not only in the Sun Tzu, but in all of early Chinese literature? And on that basis, we made our final decisions.

Looking to the future and emerging technologies, how might we better make the kinds of strategic calculations Sun Tzu advises?

I think what The Art of War tells is very smart, which is that you can calculate up the wazoo, but human beings are fundamentally unpredictable. The only way that you can really predict what people will do is if you’re in a trusting relationship. How you scale that up is one of the primary issues in The Art of War. We were thinking the whole time of how often the text points to the psychological. How much is really predictable? That so much is unpredictable is the chief reason not to go to war.