Lionel Giles CBE (29 December 1875 – 22 January 1958) was a British Sinology, writer, and philosopher. Lionel Giles served as assistant curator at the British Museum and Keeper of the Department of and Printed Books. He is most notable for his 1910 translations of The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Analects of Confucius.
Giles was the son of British diplomat and sinologist Herbert Giles.
Early life
Giles was born in Sutton, the fourth son of Herbert Giles and his first wife Catherine Fenn. Educated privately in Belgium (Liège), Austria (Feldkirch), and Scotland (
Aberdeen), Giles studied Classics at Wadham College, Oxford, graduating BA in 1899.
[John Minford, Sinology, Old and New China Heritage Quarterly, China Heritage Project, Australian National University, No. 13, March 2008.][Forbes, Andrew; Henley, David (2012).'Lionel Giles' in: The Illustrated Art of War: Sun Tzu. Chiang Mai: Cognoscenti Books. ASIN: B00B91XX8U]
The Art of War
The 1910 Giles translation of
The Art of War succeeded British officer Everard Ferguson Calthrop's
[Calthrop was killed in action in December 1915 in Flanders. Everard F. Calthorp's only sister, Hope Calthorp (1881–1960), married Lieutenant-Colonel Hermann Gaston de Watteville in 1914.] 1905 and 1908 translations, and refuted large portions of Calthrop's work. In the Introduction, Giles writes:
It is not merely a question of downright blunders, from which none can hope to be wholly exempt. Omissions were frequent; hard passages were willfully distorted or slurred over. Such offenses are less pardonable. They would not be tolerated in any edition of a Latin or Greek classic, and a similar standard of honesty ought to be insisted upon in translations from Chinese.[Lionel Giles, The Art of War by Sun Tzu – Classic Collector's Edition, ELPN Press, 2009 ]
Sinology
Lionel Giles used the
Wade-Giles romanisation method of translation, pioneered by his father Herbert. Like many sinologists in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, he was primarily interested in Chinese literature, which was approached as a branch of classics.
Continuing to produce translations of Chinese classics well into the later part of his life, he was quoted by John Minford as having confessed to a friend that he was a " at heart, and I can well believe it, since he was fond of a quiet life, and was free of that extreme form of combative scholarship which seems to be the hall mark of most Sinologists."
Translations
The prodigious translations of Lionel Giles include the books of:
Sun Tzu,
Lao Tzu,
Zhuang Zhou,
Lie Yukou,
Mencius, and
Confucius.
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The Art of War (1910), originally published as The Art of War: The Oldest Military Treatise in the World
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The Sayings of Lao Tzu and Taoist Teachings (1912), now known as the Tao Te Ching
[Lionel Giles and Herbert Giles, Tao: The Way, ELPN Press, 2007 ]
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Musings of a Chinese Mystic: Selections from the Philosophy of Chuang Tzŭ. 1906
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Taoist Teachings from the Book of Lieh-Tzŭ. Wisdom of the East. 1912.
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The Analects of Confucius (1910), also known as the Analects or The Sayings of Confucius
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The Book of Mencius (1942)
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The Life of Ch'iu Chin
book access should be at the bottom of the page
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The Lament of the Lady of Ch'in
[T'
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A Gallery of Chinese Immortals (1948), excerpts from the Liexian Zhuan (列仙傳)
[, reprinted 1979 by AMS Press (New York).][Herbert Giles, Frederic Balfour, Lionel Giles, Biographies of Immortals: Legends of China, ELPN Press, 2010 ]
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Biographies from Lives of Immortals (列仙傳; Liu Xiang 劉向) and Lives of Divine Mortals (神仙傳. Ge Hong 葛洪)
[John Minford, Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations, Columbia University Press, 2000 ]
See also
External links
