= Arthur_Waley =

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= Arthur_Waley =
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Introduction
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Arthur David Waley (born Arthur David Schloss, 19 August 188927 June
1966) was an English orientalist and sinologist who achieved both
popular and scholarly acclaim for his translations of Chinese and
Japanese poetry. Among his honours were appointment as Commander of
the Order of the British Empire in 1952, receiving the Queen's Gold
Medal for Poetry in 1953, and being invested as a Member of the Order
of the Companions of Honour in 1956.

Although highly learned, Waley avoided academic posts and most often
wrote for a general audience. He chose not to be a specialist but to
translate a wide and personal range of classical literature. Starting
in the 1910s and continuing steadily almost until his death in 1966,
these translations started with poetry, such as 'A Hundred and Seventy
Chinese Poems' (1918) and 'Japanese Poetry: The Uta' (1919), then an
equally wide range of novels, such as 'The Tale of Genji' (1925-26),
an 11th-century Japanese work, and 'Monkey', from 16th-century China.
Waley also presented and translated Chinese philosophy, wrote
biographies of literary figures, and maintained a lifelong interest in
both Asian and Western paintings.

A 2004 profile by fellow sinologist E. Bruce Books called Waley "the
great transmitter of the high literary cultures of China and Japan to
the English-reading general public; the ambassador from East to West
in the first half of the 20th century", and went on to say that he was
"self-taught, but reached remarkable levels of fluency, even
erudition, in both languages. It was a unique achievement, possible
(as he himself later noted) only in that time, and unlikely to be
repeated."

Life
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Arthur Waley was born Arthur David Schloss on 19 August 1889 in
Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. The son of an economist, David
Frederick Schloss, he was educated at Rugby School and entered King's
College, Cambridge, in 1907 on a scholarship to study Classics, but
left in 1910 due to eye problems that hindered his ability to study.

Waley briefly worked in an export firm in an attempt to please his
parents, but in 1913 he was appointed Assistant Keeper of Oriental
Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum. Waley's supervisor at
the museum was the poet and scholar Laurence Binyon, and under his
nominal tutelage, Waley taught himself to read Classical Chinese and
Classical Japanese, partly to help catalogue the paintings in the
museum's collection. Despite this, he never learned to speak either
modern Mandarin Chinese or Japanese and never visited either China or
Japan.

Waley was of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. He changed his surname from
Schloss in 1914, when, like many others in England with German
surnames, he sought to avoid the anti-German prejudice common in
Britain during the First World War.

Waley entered into a lifelong relationship with the English ballet
dancer, orientalist, dance critic, and dance researcher Beryl de
Zoete, whom he met in 1918, but they never married.

Waley left the British Museum in 1929 to devote himself fully to
writing and translation, and never held a full-time job again, except
for a four-year stint in the Ministry of Information during the Second
World War. In September 1939, he had been recruited to run the
Japanese Censorship Section at the Ministry of Information. Assisted
by Captain Oswald Tuck RN, he was responsible for checking the
dispatches of Japanese journalists in London, private mail in Japanese
and intercepted diplomatic signals from the Japanese Embassy in
London.

Waley lived in Bloomsbury and had a number of friends among the
Bloomsbury Group, many of whom he had met when he was an
undergraduate. He was one of the earliest to recognise Ronald Firbank
as an accomplished author and, together with the writer Osbert
Sitwell, provided an introduction to the first edition of Firbank's
collected works.

The poet Ezra Pound was instrumental in getting Waley's first
translations into print in 'The Little Review'. His view of Waley's
early work was mixed, however. As he wrote to Margaret Anderson, the
editor of the 'Little Review', in a letter of 2 July 1917: "Have at
last got hold of Waley's translations from Po chu I. Some of the poems
are magnificent. Nearly all the translations marred by his bungling
English and defective rhythm. ... I shall try to buy the best ones,
and to get him to remove some of the botched places. (He is stubborn
as a donkey, or a 'scholar'.)" In his introduction to his translation
of 'The Way and its Power', Waley explains that he was careful to put
meaning above style in translations where meaning would be reasonably
considered of more importance to the modern Western reader.

Waley married the poet Alison Grant Robinson in May 1966, one month
before his death on 27 June. He is buried in an unmarked grave (plot
no. 51178) on the western side of Highgate Cemetery in front of the
grave of the sculptor Joseph Edwards.

The writer Sacheverell Sitwell, who considered Waley "the greatest
scholar and the person with most understanding of all human arts" that
he had known in his lifetime, later recalled Waley's last days,

Honours
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Waley was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in
1945, was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire
(CBE) honour in 1952, received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in
1953, and was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of
Honour (CH) in 1956.

Works
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Jonathan Spence wrote of Waley's translations that he

His many translations include 'A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems'
(1918), 'Japanese Poetry: The Uta' (1919), 'The No Plays of Japan'
(1921), 'The Tale of Genji' (published in 6 volumes from 1921 to
1933), 'The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon' (1928), The 'Kutune Shirka'
(1951), 'Monkey' (1942, an abridged version of 'Journey to the West'),
'The Poetry and Career of Li Po' (1959) and 'The Secret History of the
Mongols and Other Pieces' (1964). Waley received the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize for his translation of 'Monkey'. His translations of
the classics, the 'Analects of Confucius' and 'The Way and Its Power'
(Tao Te Ching), are still in print, as is his interpretive
presentation of classical Chinese philosophy, 'Three Ways of Thought
in Ancient China' (1939).

Waley's translations of verse are widely regarded as poems in their
own right, and have been included in many anthologies such as the
'Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935', 'The Oxford Book of Twentieth
Century English Verse' and the 'Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse
(1918-1960)' under Waley's name. Many of his original translations and
commentaries have been re-published as Penguin Classics and Wordsworth
Classics, reaching a wide readership.

Despite translating many Chinese and Japanese classical texts into
English, Waley never travelled to either country, or anywhere else in
East Asia. In his preface to 'The Secret History of the Mongols', he
writes that he was not a master of many languages, but claims to have
known Chinese and Japanese fairly well, a good deal of Ainu and
Mongolian, and some Hebrew and Syriac.

The composer Benjamin Britten set six translations from Waley's
'Chinese Poems' (1946) for high voice and guitar in his song cycle
'Songs from the Chinese' (1957).

Translations
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* 'A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems', 1918
* 'More Translations from the Chinese' (Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1919).
** 'The Story of Ts'ui Ying-ying' ('Yingying zhuan') - pp. 101-113
** 'The Story of Miss Li' ('The Tale of Li Wa') - pp. 113-136
* 'Japanese Poetry: The Uta', 1919. A selection mostly drawn from the
and the 'Kokinshū'.
* 'The Nō Plays of Japan', 1921
* 'The Temple and Other Poems', 1923
* 'The Tale of Genji', by Lady Murasaki, 1925-1933
* 'The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon', 1928
* 'The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and its Place in
Chinese Thought', 1934. A commentary on 'Tao Te ching', attributed to
Laozi, and full translation.
* 'The Book of Songs' ('Shih Ching'), 1937
* 'The Analects of Confucius', 1938
* 'Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China', 1939
* 'Translations from the Chinese', a compilation, 1941
* 'Monkey', 1942, translation of 30 of the 100 chapters of Wu
Cheng'en's 'Journey to the West'
* 'Chinese Poems', 1946
* '77 Poems', Alberto de Lacerda, 1955
* 'The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China', Qu Yuan,
1955
* 'Yuan Mei: Eighteenth-Century Chinese Poet', 1956
* 'Ballads and Stories from Tun-Huang', 1960

Original works
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* 'Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting', 1923
* 'The Life and Times of Po Chü-I', 1949
* 'The Poetry and Career of Li Po', 1950 (with some original
translations)
* 'The Real Tripitaka and Other Pieces', 1952 (with some original and
previously published translations)
* 'The Opium War through Chinese Eyes', 1958
* 'The Secret History of the Mongols', 1963 (with original
translations)

See also
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*List of Bloomsbury Group people

Sources
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*
[https://www.nytimes.com/1966/06/28/archives/arthur-waley-76-orientalist-dead-translator-of-chinese-and-japanese.html?sq=arthur+waley&scp=1&st=p
"Arthur Waley, 76, Orientalist, Dead; Translator of Chinese and
Japanese Literature"], 'New York Times'. 28 June 1966.
* Gruchy, John Walter de. (2003). 'Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism,
Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English'.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1ISBN 0-8248-2567-5.
*
* Johns, Francis A. (1968). 'A Bibliography of Arthur Waley'. New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
*
* Morris, Ivan I. (1970). 'Madly Singing in the Mountains: An
Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley'. London: Allen &
Unwin.
*
*
* Spence, Jonathan. "Arthur Waley", in, 'Chinese Roundabout' (New
York: Norton, 1992 ), pp. 329-336.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=M7LAH8ggQvAC&q=Waley]
* Waley, Alison. (1982). 'A Half of Two Lives'. London: George
Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (Reprinted in 1983 by McGraw-Hill.)

External links
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* E. Bruce Brooks,
[https://wsproject.org/current/sinologica/profiles/waley.html "Arthur
Waley"] Warring States Project, University of Massachusetts.
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20040604163103/http://afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/wengu.php?l=Daodejing
Waley's translation of 'The Way and Its Power']
*
*
*
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*

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