Arthur Waley

Arthur Waley around 1931

Arthur David Waley , actually Arthur David Castle , (born August 19, 1889 in Tunbridge Wells , England , † June 27, 1966 in Highgate , London ) was a British sinologist .

Life

Arthur David Schloss was the middle of the three sons of economist David Frederick Schloss. During the First World War, the family took the maiden name of their mother Rachel Waley, widowed in 1912.

Waley attended rugby boarding school . There he acquired a solid knowledge of ancient literature and won the Latin Prize . From 1907 to 1910 he studied classical literatures on a scholarship (classical fellowship) at King's College of Cambridge University , where he also learned a little Sanskrit . During a one-year stay in France and Germany, he got to know the languages ​​and literatures of these countries. Eventually he got a job at the British Museum , where he was employed in the Print Room ( Kupferstichkabinett ).

First employed in the boring European sub-department under Campbell Dodgson , he became Laurence Binyon's assistant in the sub-department for Oriental Prints and Drawings in June 1913 . His first assignment was to catalog Sir Aurel Stein's collection . He learned Chinese and Japanese by himself and deepened his knowledge of Sanskrit. It is not clear how Waley managed to learn two such difficult languages, but as John De Gruchy notes, Waley already knew 11 languages, including Portuguese and Dutch. He read the work of Karl Florenz on Japanese grammar and philology.

In 1929 Waley gave up his position as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum for health reasons in order to devote himself more to his literary interests. He held irregular seminars on Chinese poetry at the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS), where he could have taken one of the three chairs for Chinese at any time if interested. From 1918 until her death in 1962 he lived with the ballet dancer Beryl de Zoete . Arthur Waley died of spinal cord cancer on June 27, 1966 at the age of 77 after marrying Alison Robinson, whom he had known since 1929, on his deathbed. He has never visited China or Japan or spoken the two languages.

“Waley belongs, I mean, to what is known as the Bloomsbury Group - if they have more people like him in their group, then they are a happy group. He's different from anyone I've met. With the most polite manners that border on shyness and humble, he always gives the impression that he has the last word on any subject. "

- Edward Denison Ross

Honors

Waley received an Honorary Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge in 1945 for his services, an Honorary Lectureship in Chinese Poetry at the School of Oriental Studies in London in 1948, the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1952, and the Queen's Medal in 1953 for Poetry and in 1956 the Order of the Companions of Honor (CH), which has been awarded since 1917 in recognition of outstanding achievements in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion. Since 1945 he was a member ( Fellow ) of the British Academy .

Translations

Waley created an extensive translation work. Among other things, he translated from Chinese the anthology of classical Chinese poetry, Li Bai , the Daodejing , the Analects of Confucius and the popular novel Xiyouji (The Journey to the West), which is about the monk Xuanzang and the Monkey King Sun Wukong . From the Japanese he translated the most important classical Japanese novel, Murasaki Shikibu's Story of Prince Genji , Dame Sei Shōnagon's pillow book (selection). His English translations served as templates for further translations into other European languages, including German. His work The No-Plays of Japan was enthusiastically received in a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht . From the translation of "Taniko or The Throw in the Valley" became the didactic play The Yes Man . Today, Waley's translations themselves are seen as an important part of English literature, and in the case of the Genji Monogatari there are (according to Ivan I. Morris ) even voices who consider its translation to be more successful than the original.

Works

• Index of Chinese Artists Represented in the British Museum . 1922
• Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art . Luzac, London 1922.
• Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting . London 1923.
• The Originality of Japanese Civilization . Oxford University Press, London 1929
• Catalog of Paintings Recovered from Tun-huang by Aurel Stein . 1931 ( digitized version )
• Chinese poems . Unwick, London 1983, ISBN 0-04-895027-0
• Japanese poetry . Lund Humphries, London 1946
• The Real Tripitaka . London 1952
• The Opium War through Chinese Eyes . London 1958. New edition: Univ. Pr., Stanford, Calif. 1968, ISBN 0-8047-0611-5
• The Poetry and Career of Li Po . Allen & Unwin, London 1959, ISBN 0-04-895012-2
• Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China . Allen & Unwin, London 1939 digitized version (German under the title: Wisdom in Ancient China. Schröder, Hamburg 1947)

Translations

• One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems . 1918
• More Translations from the Chinese . 1919.
• Japanese Poetry: The 'Uta' . Clarendon, Oxford 1919. With notes on grammar and lexicon.
• The No Plays of Japan . Allen & Urwin, London 1921 ( digitized version )
• The Tale of Genji . Allen & Urwin, London 1925. The first of six volumes, later collected in: The Tale of the Genji: A Novel in Six Parts 1935
• The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon . Allen & Unwin, London 1928. (partial translation).
• The Lady Who Loved Insects . Blackamore, London 1929
• The Travels of an Alchemist. The Journey of the Taoist Ch'ang-Ch'un from China to the Hindukush at the Summons of Chingiz Khan. Recorded by his disciple Li Chih-Ch'ang London 1931 ( The Broadway Travelers )
• The Book of Songs. London 1937 (2 volumes)
• Confucius: The Analects of Confucius . New York 1938. Reprinted: Vintage Books, New York 1989, ISBN 0-679-72296-3
• The nine chants. Schroeder, Hamburg 1957
• The Secret History of the Mongols . 1963
• Chêng'ên Wu : Dear Monkey . Collins, London 1973

literature

• John W. de Gruchy: Orienting Arthur Waley. Japonism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English. Univ. of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2003. ISBN 0-8248-2567-5
• Francis A. Johns: A Bibliography of Arthur Waley. Rutgers Univ. Pr., New Brunswick NJ 1968, Athlone, London 1988 (new edition).
• Alison Waley: A Half of Two Lives . McGraw Hill, New York 1982. (Very subjective memories of his wife)

Web links

Commons : Arthur Waley  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Biography (English). Detailed overview.
• Literature by and about Arthur Waley in the catalog of the German National Library
• Arthur Waley in an extensive article in the Chinese National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ross, Both ends (1943), p. 265
2. ↑ Ross, Both ends (1943), p. 265; from English
3. ^ Fellows: Arthur David Waley. British Academy, accessed August 16, 2020 . 
4. ↑ Sabine Kebir : I did not ask for my share. Elisabeth Hauptmann's work with Bertolt Brecht. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-7466-8058-1 , p. 150ff.