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

Cody Delistraty
GEN
Published in
5 min readJan 7, 2020

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Photo: georgeclerk/Getty Images

AAdmired 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.

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Cody Delistraty
GEN
Writer for

A writer from the Pacific Northwest. Culture editor at WSJ.