20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

80 Oliver Corffreflection on strategy, the underlying logic of warfare, the required qualitiesof successful military leaders, and the nature of humans in society andconflict in general. The “Art of War” has been widely quoted ever sinceCao Cao wrote his comments about it, and, as mentioned above, in the 12 thcentury it was translated into Tangut, later in the 18 th century into Manju 3 .At that time, we also have the first translations into Western languages.Major translations into modern languages (including Russian, English, andJapanese) are undertaken at the the beginning of the 20 th century. Duringthe second half of the 20 th century the text has seen a renaissance which wasprompted partially by Mao Zedong's quoting from Sunzi in his writingson guerilla warfare, partially was prompted by renewed western interestof military leaders (perhaps triggered by the Pacific theatre of WW IIand the ensuing proxy wars of in the Far East during Cold War). Mostrecently, the “Art of War” has been promoted in China and discoveredby the international business and management community, a phenomenonaptly dubbed “Business Sunzi” by Thomas Kempa 4 .Textual PropertiesIn many aspects, the text is fundamentally different from another opusmagnum on war and warfare composed approx. 2000 years later, “VomKriege” (“On War”) by Carl von Clausewitz. Unlike the latter, the “Art ofWar” is short, if not to say terse, generally restricts itself to a high level ofabstraction, and makes only a few, mostly vague, references to concretesituations, historical context or historical persons. Above anything else,we can observe that the “Art of War” is written in a highly formalizedmanner with little information redundance (with the exception of a smallportion of text and repetitions of formal structures), even going so far asto assume that a substantial portion of the total information of this text liesprecisely in its terse structure. The terseness should also be understood inthe context of properties of historical writing materials. Bamboo stripes do3Several versions exist which are different enough from each other as to implydifferent translations rather than different copies. The study of these translations is aworthy exercise for those who want to untangle some of the more arcane sections of “TheArt of War”. See Victor H. Mair, “Soldierly Methods: Vade Mecum for an IconoclasticTranslation of Sun Zi bingfa”, Sino-Platonic Papers, 178 (February, 2008),which featuresone such Manju text in romanized form accompanied by interlinear translation.4Thomas Kempa wrote an excellent study on this subject which also describesthe position of the oeuvre in political and business culture: “Kriegskunst im Business.Transkulturelle Resonanzen am Beispiel chinesischer und westlicher Managementliteraturzu Sunzi bingfa”. China Studien 3. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2010.