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Arthur David Waley (born Arthur David Schloss, 19 August 188927 June 1966) was an English oriental studies and Sinology who achieved both popular and scholarly acclaim for his translations of Chinese poetry 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."
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 Putonghua or Japanese and never visited either China or Japan.
Waley was of Ashkenazi Jews 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.Peter Kornicki, Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan (London: Hurst & Co., 2021), pp. 31–32.
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 Waley in May 1966, one month before his death on 27 June.Alison Waley. A Half of Two Lives (1982) 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,
His many translations include A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919), The Noh 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 Bai (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 language and Mongolian, and some Hebrew language and Syriac language.
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).
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