Reddit reviews The Art of War (Penguin Great Ideas)

I may be in an unusually good position to answer this question, as I spent all day at work yesterday trying to figure out the same thing.

One of the best-known translators of The Art of War is Thomas Cleary. There's a great new edition on the market, however, translated by a student of his, Thomas Huynh. The title of his edition is The Art of War—Spirituality for Conflict and can be found here. The translation project required more than a decade of work and the process involved collaboration with numerous Art of War scholars. Businessweek wrote a short blurb about it, and Huynh himself responded in the comments section to questions and objections raised by other site members. I highly suggest you read his posts, he demonstrates a deep knowledge of the source material and provides great rebuttals to arguments by other members of the site. That page is here.

One comment of his you might find particularly relevant is his discussion of other translations:
> After 10 years of public discourse on Sun Tzu's The Art of War, I find the one factor that's most important is the level of familiarity the reader has to the book. In other words the best version depends on what you expect from that version. If this is your first Art of War book, I would highly recommend Thomas Cleary's (along with my own version). That's exactly how I started 20 years ago. If you're very familiar with the text, try Minford's. His translation is extremely succinct and can confuse first time readers yet is a delight to old timers like me!

>So here is a listing of Sun Tzu versions ranked from the beginner to the advanced reader (DON'T confuse "beginner" with "less accurate"; it is how clear the book is in explaining Sun Tzu's concepts):

>Cleary (with Huynh)

>Wing

>Giles

>Huang

>Sawyer

>Griffith

>Ames

>Sonshi

>Denma

>Minford

I picked up a copy of this edition yesterday, which features the Minford translation (the one discussed in the quoted text above). It is an enjoyable read, but I understand completely Huynh's comments on the difficulty of this translation due to the succinctness of the language used. I picked up this copy because I knew the Minford translation is a trusted one and I liked this edition. More importantly, I'm reading quite a few books right now and I didn't want to be weighed down with annotations and commentary. I just wanted the source text.

Hopefully this helps you make a decision.

I loved the Penguin Books Great Ideas version. This whole series is just beautifully designed.