Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English

by John W. de Gruchy, Josie Herr (Designed by), Santos Barbasa Jr. (Designed by)

Hailed recently as "the greatest translator of Asian literature ever to have lived," Arthur Waley (1889-1966) had an immeasurable influence on Western perceptions of Asia and on the development of Asian studies in the West. Waley was the single most important force in creating what the English-speaking public understood to be "Japanese literature" with his popular and critically acclaimed translations of Japanese poetry, no plays, and the celebrated eleventh-century court romance The Tale of Genji. Orienting Arthur Waley, the first book-length study of Waley and his Japanese translations, provides a provocative examination of Waley's contribution to twentieth-century English literature and culture.

John de Gruchy "orients" Waley as a member of an elite Anglo-Jewish family, a top graduate of Rugby and Cambridge, and a younger member of the Bloomsbury Group. He examines how these social contexts influenced Waley's work, and he further locates Waley's Japanese translations within the political contexts of the japonism movement, British socialism and imperialism, and the development of Japanese studies in England. How a "cult of things Japanese" in the early modern period in Britain led to the emergence of one of the twentieth century's most important translators is a fascinating story in itself.

Genres: Biography

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Ad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Japanese culture was an important part of the modernist movement in the arts and literature that took place in Europe from the late 19th c to the early 20th c. Japanese arts exerted a strong influence on impressionism, imagism, and on poets as Yeats and Pound. Less well-known is the crucial role played by English translator Arthur Waley (1889-1966), who introduced Japanese and Chinese literature to a wide public. Waley wrote nearly forty books and more than 130 articles. Of course, not all of these were about Japan - Waley's first translation was "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems" (1918) and, from the mid-1930s when Japan invaded China, Waley stopped translating Japanese literature but focused on China.

In this study, John de Gruchy examines the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding Waley's translations from the Japanese. He "orients" Waley as a member of an elite Anglo-Jewish family; a top graduate of Rugby and Cambridge; and a younger member of the Bloomsbury group. He also locates Waley's translations within the political context of the japonism movement, British imperialism, and the development of Japanese studies in England.

De Gruchy looks in detail at three major translations Waley made from the Japanese: (1) "Japanese Poetry: The Uta" (1919); (2) "No Plays of Japan" (1921); and (3) "The Tale of Genji", in six volumes, (1925-1933). These three works mirror the development of Japanese studies in Europe. First came the struggle with the language, when dictionaries and grammars had to be compiled - this is reflected in "Japanese Poetry", which in contrast to Waley's beautiful translations from Chinese poetry made around the same time, gives only literal translations, with extensive grammatical notes - in other words, this small volume is not a literary translation, but a textbook which teaches how to read classical Japanese poetry.

It is a big step to the "No Plays of Japan", which presents us with a beautiful literary translation, although also this book is a scholarly text with a historical introduction and bibliographies of sources. Waley truly deserves the honor to have unearthed the important Japanese dramatist and critic Zeami.

The situation changes completely in "The Tale of Genji", which abandons the scholarly apparatus and presents itself as a modern English novel - it is the best and most important translation Waley ever made, with an unforgettable hero, and was very influential as English literature - and it is still eminently readable, although we now have three more full translations of the Genji. There were even English critics in Waley's time who (falsely) believed he had taken major liberties with the text, for they couldn't imagine a Japanese novel from around the year 1,000 could be that good... With his translation of "The Tale of Genji" Waley challenged contemporary European notions of cultural supremacy.

About Waley's personal life almost nothing is known (there are no diaries or letters) - he had a lifelong relationship with English ballet dancer and dance critic Beryl de Zoete, whom he met in 1918, but they never married; one month before his death, when he was already mortally ill, Waley married Alison Grant Robertson. Although he had many friends and traveled every year on the European continent, Waley was something of a "hermit scholar." De Gruchy speculates that Waley was a closeted homosexual who found in Japanese No plays and in the Genji "an aesthetic outlet for a suppressed and inhibited sexuality," but such connections - if they exist - are indeed very subtle.

Waley was different from modern scholars in the sense that he avoided academic posts (he had a connection with the British Museum for about 16 years, but for the rest he lived from his translations) and also that he never visited China or Japan - or even felt inclined to do so.

This is a fascinating study in which De Gruchy presents Waley's translations, especially the Genji, which strongly appealed to Western nostalgia for an aesthetic golden age, as an important part of English literature and culture in the years between both world wars.

I am only left with one question: when do we get a book about Waley's translations from the Chinese?

See my introduction to the Tale of Genji on my website: https://adblankestijn.blogspot.com/20...

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Orienting Arthur Waley is a noble attempt to study the life and thought of perhaps the foremost translator of Chinese and Japanese literature of the 20th century. Although Ezra Pound receives more attention because of his prominent place in American modernist and avant-garde poetry, Waley's translations were actually held in higher regard by most educated readers. But his books were not only best-sellers; they are still respected as fine translations by Sinologists today.

John W. de Gruchy's aim in this book is to study Waley's translations from Japanese as works of English literature, situating (or "orienting," to use the titular pun) him in his own time, as a younger member of the Bloomsbury group, as a cataloguer at the British Museum, as an English Jew, and as a man of "ambiguous sexuality." While this is a great goal, de Gruchy's methodology has severely hindered his work. For one, by choosing only to study his translations from Japanese, his misses a good 3/4 of Waley's oeuvre, including: his translations of Chinese poetry, his adaptation of Journey to the West (西遊記) called Monkey, his scholarly articles, his biographies of Chinese poets, his books on early Chinese thought, his translations of the songs of the Ainu (a Japanese minority group), and his translations of Buddhist texts.

Another problem is that de Gruchy avoids comparing the translations to the original texts (or at least, the versions of the texts Waley had). De Gruchy makes a big methodological point of this, saying that he's interested in studying Waley as a writer, not judging the quality of his translations. While I understand his desire to focus on the translation rather than the original, this ignores the fact that translations are not themselves original texts, and that they are, by definition, bound to another texts. That is to say, translation is always a navigation between two languages, an attempt to find matches of one kind or another. Therefore, studying a translation is impossible without some recourse to the original. If you want to understand the translation, you must try to figure out the kinds of decisions facing the translator, and why s/he chose one option over another. This de Gruchy fails to do, because he's interested in Waley exclusively in the English context.

Which brings me to the book's final problem: that it is overly determined by identity politics. It seems to me that Orienting Arthur Waley subscribes to the critical credo of the '90s that an individual is completely shaped by the groups to which s/he belongs. Thus, because Waley is Jewish, de Gruchy draws on accounts of anti-Semitism in early 20th century England, explains that Waley must have experienced something similar, and that is why he became a private individual. But this doesn't tell us that Waley actually felt the brunt of anti-Semitism (in fact, his family was quite well assimilated), and it ignores the fact that not all Jews shied away from public life. Dare I suggest that, perhaps, Waley was just a shy or introverted fellow? Occam's razor sits collecting dust.

The other big identity de Gruchy ascribes to his topic is "sexual ambiguity." However, unlike Waley's Jewishness, there is in fact no real evidence for this. There's also no definitive evidence against it (whatever that could be). Sure, Waley lived with a woman (Beryl de Zoete) for 44 years without marrying her, and then, after de Zoete's death, married another woman (Alison Robinson), but perhaps these weren't sexual relationships. de Gruchy draws on accounts of homosexuality within the Bloomsbury group, seeming to imply that if any of the Bloomsburians are queer, they all must be. But so little evidence survives (Waley's letters and diaries were destroyed some time ago) that any sexual identification of Waley is speculation at best, innuendo at worst. This is unfortunate, as much of de Gruchy's thesis depends upon an effeminate Waley identifying with the Orientalist depiction of a "feminine" East.

If one wishes to learn about Arthur Waley, the best place to turn is still Madly Singing in the Mountains, a collection of anecdotes about Waley, along with a selection of his work. Although this volume is a bit too hagiographical, it at least gives the reader some general impressions of the man. Edward Schafer, one of Waley's younger contemporaries in Sinology, reviewed Madly Singing in the Mountains for Pacific Affaris in 1971, ending with a call for "a good critical biography" of Waley. That call has still not been answered.