I am spending some of this year rereading Clausewitz’ On War and at a friend’s suggestion will
try to share the experience here. Given the size and complexity of the work,
the discussion is likely to be as episodic as the book itself.
As is often the case with a work not written originally in
English, the first question is which translation to read. I’m reading the
Eighth Printing of the Indexed Edition that came out in 1984 which was the text
used when I first read On War at the
US Naval War College Command and Staff Course, 1986-1987. This version was translated
by Angus Malcolm and Elsbeth Lewin, edited by Peter Paret and Michael Howard,
and indexed by Rosalie West (modeling this on the index presented in Professor
Werner Hahlweg’s 1952, 1972, and 1980 German editions). The translation upon
which this latest edition is based went back to that 1832 edition, supplemented
by the annotated German text prepared and published in 1952 by Professor Werner
Hahlweg. The addition of the index addressed one of the most telling complaints
first registered against the Paret/Howard version.
The Editor’s Note is the first of several introductions and
essays that preface the actual text of this translation of On War. Here the editors explain that this is actually the third
translation into English of On War.
The first was by Colonel J J Graham in 1874, republished in 1909 in London.
Unfortunately, this is considered to be both dated in style and suffering from
a “large number of inaccuracies and obscurities” primarily it appears because
he based his translation on the third German language edition of On War, which
is considered to have suffered at the hands of its German editors. It is worth
noting that Graham had himself authored a rather complex work on strategy in
1858 entitled Elementary History of the
Progress of the Art of War. There is an interesting article on this
background at http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/OnWar1873/Translator.htm
though the author refers to the earlier Paret-Howard edition which did not have
the index included in my edition.
A second translation by Professor O J Matthijs Jolles and was published in New York in 1943, a wartime translation to support the War
Department. Both Graham’s and Jolles’ translations were based upon German texts
that were significantly different from the 1832 First Edition.
The editors also reviewed four notes that were printed in
that 1832 edition, but written by Clausewitz at different times between 1816
and 1830 to be an introduction. These are presented here in the order in which
the editors believe they were actually written (rather than as published in
previous editions). They argue that in the sequence presented here, the notes
explain how On War took shape in the
author’s mind and what he had in mind for its final form. They also dropped the
previously used Preface by Marie von Clausewitz which was focused more upon how
that first edition was prepared and did not address the subject of the book
itself.
Since reading this and related articles I’ve picked up
copies of the other translations and will have to compare them after I’ve
finished rereading the Paret/Howard version again.
