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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
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.
