A translator rather than an original writer, Arthur Waley (1889-1966) achieved both academic and popular acclaim. He was the first to bring Japanese tanka to an English-speaking readership with his 1919 book ‘Japanese Poetry – the Uta’ (reprinted 1976 and available second-hand) which contains about 200 tanka (or uta) showing romaji Japanese alongside the English translation.
He worked at the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings from 1913-1929 and while there taught himself to read classical Chinese and Japanese. He encouraged his readers to do the same: “Japanese poetry can only be rightly enjoyed in the original. And since the classical language has an easy grammar and limited vocabulary, a few months should suffice for the mastering of it”. But he spoke neither language, and never visited either country. His first major publication was ‘170 Chinese Poems’, published in 1918, followed by the Uta poems in 1919 and ‘The No Plays of Japan’ in 1921. Afterwards he translated mainly from Chinese and his books on Chinese philosophy ‘The Way and its Power’ (1934) and ‘The Analects of Confucius’ (1938) remain widely available.
As one of the few readers of Japanese in the country Arthur Waley worked for the Ministry of Information during World War II. He was made CBE in 1952 and Companion of Honour in 1956. He never held an academic post, although he gave infrequent seminars at SOAS, and preferred to choose the works he translated. He saw himself as a mediator between Eastern and Western cultures - his poetry translations, including Japanese tanka and the No plays, are lucid and fresh. ‘If I have failed to make these translations in some sense works of art – if they are merely philology, not literature – then I have indeed fallen short of what I hoped and intended.’ He succeeded: many of his English versions of Oriental poems are included in major poetry anthologies.
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