The Battle at Fangliao, Qing campaign engraving, 18th century. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Penguin Classics
The Art of War
Strategy as the avoidance of battle.
$17.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Sun Tzu; trans. John Minford
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Published
- January 2009
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
The Battle Won Beforehand
The Art of War, attributed to the general Sun Tzu and composed in China around the fifth century before Christ, is a short book with one governing conviction, that supreme skill lies in subduing an enemy without fighting. Its counsel runs on deception, intelligence, terrain and timing, and its influence long ago escaped the battlefield into statecraft, business and sport. Bamboo texts of it excavated in 1972 confirmed how anciently it had been copied and studied.
John Minford, translator of Chinese classics, renders the terse original for Penguin Classics with the accumulated commentaries of two thousand years, in the deluxe edition of 2009. Reading text and commentary together restores the book to what it has always been in China, less a manual than a subject of continuous meditation.
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