Arthur Waley
Arthur Waley Hanyu Pinyin | Yàsè Wěilì | |
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Wade–Giles | Ya-se Wei-li |
Transcriptions | |
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Romanization | Āsā Weirī |
Arthur David Waley
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."[2]
Life
Arthur Waley was born Arthur David Schloss on 19 August 1889 in
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
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.[3]
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.[4]
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.[3] 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.[5]
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
Waley married 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.[6]
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,
when he lay dying from a broken back and from cancer of the spine, and in very great pain, but refused to be given any drug or sedative. He had the courage to do so because he wanted to be conscious during the last hours of being alive, the gift which was ebbing and fading and could never be again. In this way during those few days he listened to string quartets by
Haydn, and had his favourite poems read to him. And then he died.[7]
Honours
Waley was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1945, was appointed a
Works
selected the jewels of Chinese and Japanese literature and pinned them quietly to his chest. No one ever did anything like it before, and no one will ever do it again. There are many westerners whose knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is greater than his, and there are perhaps a few who can handle both languages as well. But they are not poets, and those who are better poets than Waley do not know Chinese or Japanese. Also the shock will never be repeated, for most of the works that Waley chose to translate were largely unknown in the West, and their impact was thus all the more extraordinary.[8]
His many translations include A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919), The
Waley's translations of verse are widely regarded as poems in their own right, and have been included in many anthologies such as the
Despite translating many
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).
Selected works
Translations
- 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[9]
- The Story of Miss Li (The Tale of Li Wa) – pp. 113–136[9]
- The Story of Ts'ui Ying-ying (
- Japanese Poetry: 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
- 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 Tripitakaand Other Pieces, 1952 (with some original and previously published translations)
- The Opium Warthrough Chinese Eyes, 1958
- The Secret History of the Mongols, 1963 (with original translations)
See also
References
- ^ Johns (1983), p. 179.
- ^ Brooks, E. Bruce (1 July 2004). "Sinological Profiles: Arthur Waley". Warring States Project. University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
- ^ a b c d e Honey (2001), p. 225.
- ^ "Papers of Beryl de Zoete". Rutgers University.
- ^ Peter Kornicki, Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan (London: Hurst & Co., 2021), pp. 31–32.
- ^ "Obituary of Arthur Waley". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 17 April 2018.
- ^ Sacheverell Sitwell. For Want of the Golden City (New York: John Day, 1973) p. 255
- ISBN 0393033554) pp. 329–330
- ^ ISBN 9814287288, 9789814287289. p. xv.
Sources
- "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.
- Honey, David B. (2001). Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. American Oriental Series 86. New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society. ISBN 0-940490-16-1.
- Johns, Francis A. (1968). A Bibliography of Arthur Waley. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
- Johns, Francis A (1983). "Manifestations of Arthur Waley: Some Bibliographical and Other Notes" (PDF). The British Library Journal. 9 (2): 171–184.
- Morris, Ivan I. (1970). Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley. London: Allen & Unwin.
- Robinson, Walter (1967). "Obituaries – Dr. Arthur Waley". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1–2): 59–61. JSTOR 25202978.
- Simon, Walter (1967). "Obituary: Arthur Waley". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 30 (1): 268–71. JSTOR 611910.
- Spence, Jonathan. "Arthur Waley", in, Chinese Roundabout (New York: Norton, 1992 ISBN 0393033554), pp. 329–336. [1]
- Waley, Alison. (1982). A Half of Two Lives. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (Reprinted in 1983 by McGraw-Hill.)
External links
- E. Bruce Brooks, "Arthur Waley" Warring States Project, University of Massachusetts.
- Waley's translation of The Way and Its Power
- Works by Arthur Waley at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Arthur Waley at Faded Page (Canada)
- Works by or about Arthur Waley at Internet Archive
- Works by Arthur Waley at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Arthur Waley at Library of Congress, with 106 library catalogue records