Background
I was watching a documentary about the life of Miyamoto Musashi, famed (and heavily mythologized) historical samurai from 17th century Japan who famously, and perhaps apocryphally, never lost a single duel, among nearly 5 dozen duels throughout his life. He died at age 60.
In his final months, he wrote “The Book of Five Rings” (Go rin no sho), a treatise on the art of the sword, martial strategy, and what it takes to be unstoppable. I sometimes relate it to people as “the Japanese version of Sun Tzu’s Art of War,” which is semi-accurate in the sense of it being:
- an old book from southeast Asia
- written about the strategy of martial arts
- written by a famed martial artist
- a text whose lessons can be abstracted (some of them anyways) to generalized strategy
Upon closer examination they’re really not “the same book” at all, but it’s enough to at least give someone the right idea.
One of the challenges in reading this book is that it’s translated… from handwritten Japanese… using 17th century idioms. There have been several “official” translations of the source text into English, over the years. Each of them dances around the original point but the fact that they all use different words suggests to me that none of them quite fully capture the original meaning.
Overview
My goal here is to to find 5 or 6 translations of the text, arrange them in parallel and then break it out line by line to really see what each line means. My hope is that by doing this, the intersection of the translations will point more clearly to what the original intent was.
The steps for this will be:
- Acquire 6 translations of the text.
- Enter them all into a single InDesign layout
- Reconcile each translation line-by-line
- Get a copy printed and bound for myself
(This all gave me an idea for a much bigger work, which will be added later, but the first step felt like “get a better unders”)