Master Sun’s Art of War trans. by Philip J. Ivanhoe (review)

With any translation of a philosophical text, there is a balance between the aims of specialist and nonspecialist translations. One recognizes the specialist’s translation by both its extensive introductory material—which provides not only historical context for the original work but also engagement with authorship controversies, quantificational analysis of linguistic patterns, and rigorous excavation of philosophical and literary themes in the work—and its numerous endnotes and appendices to accommodate a variety of scholarly engagements with the text. Ivanhoe’s translation of the Sunzi Bingfa is not one of these translations, though this is not to say it does not make a valuable contribution to the field.

The value of Ivanhoe’s translation is made clear to the reader in the conclusion of the introduction, where he notes that

Master Sun’s Art of War has no simple set of lessons to teach or any definitive interpretation. It presents a collection of stimulating topics, themes, and ideas, opens up paths for reflection and further inquiry, and invites readers to take these up into their own imaginations, thoughts, actions, and lives to rediscover and create new insights about the shifting, elusive, threatening, and yet seductively exhilarating phenomena surrounding conflict and how to respond to it successfully.

(p. xxx)

Ivanhoe aims to capture the perennially insightful and stimulating nature of this text in his translation, and to do so, he takes a lesson from the text itself. The original text is not bogged down with technical terminology or an abundance of historical examples, nor does it presume a high degree of familiarity with warfare on the part of the reader. These sorts of details are unnecessary for this philosophical study of conflict, and omitting them allows the lessons of the Sunzi Bingfa to become easily adaptable to the confrontations and conflicts of our everyday lives. This accessibility makes the Sunzi Bingfa not only relevant to but also deeply influential for any reflection on conflict, which is necessary not simply because war and violent conflict are still a regular occurrence in the world today, but more importantly because the war metaphor pervades so much of Western thought and language. We have wars on poverty and drugs; we battle cancer and depression; we are constantly fending off the assault on education, or religious freedom, or women’s rights. In translating this text into English with the utmost clarity and conciseness of language allowable without obfuscating Master Sun’s lessons, Ivanhoe aims to bring this text to life for the modern reader, and, to aid this project, he provides what context is necessary for the Sunzi Bingfa.

Ivanhoe’s introduction to the Sunzi Bingfa, much like his translation, is concise and to the point. In his first section, he notes the controversy regarding the text as a whole and its authorship. Traditionally, the text is thought to be a single work composed by one author, Sun Wu, sometime in the late sixth and early fifth centuries b.c.e. However, recent scholarship indicates that the text is more likely a composite put together sometime in the fourth and third centuries b.c.e. by several authors at different times. Though this controversy is real, Ivanhoe argues against making too much of it. First, it is unclear to what extent the text is composite, but on a more theoretical level, it is also difficult to see why such a compositional history should constitute a significant controversy. There could have been a handful of authors over the course of several years, or there might have been a slew of contributors amending and editing the work over centuries. This observation, along with the fact that the number of authors and the amount of time in composition do not preclude the creation of a coherent, insightful, and persuasive work, leads Ivanhoe to conclude that though an acknowledgement of the controversy is necessary, dedicating more words to the subject would be inappropriate, especially...