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Arthur David Waley CH CBE (born Arthur David Schloss, 19 August 188927 June 1966) was an English Orientalist and sinologist who achieved both popular and scholarly acclaim for his translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry. As one recent evaluation puts it, "Waley was 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. 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." 〔E. Bruce Brooks, ("Arthur Waley" ), Warring States Project, University of Massachusetts.〕 ==Life== Arthur Waley was born "Arthur David Schloss" on 19 August 1889 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, the son of an economist, David Frederick Schloss. He was educated at Rugby School and entered King's College, Cambridge in 1907 on a scholarship to study the Classics, but left in 1910 due to eye problems that hindered his ability to study. 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. Notwithstanding his ability in classical literature, Waley never learned to speak modern Mandarin Chinese or Japanese, in part because he never visited either China or Japan. Waley was of Ashkenazi Jewish 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 left the 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. 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 recognize Ronald Firbank as an accomplished author and, together with Osbert Sitwell, provided an introduction to the first edition of Firbank's collected works. 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 died in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. 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, : when he lay dying from a broken back and from cancer of the spine, and in very great pain, but refused to be given any drug or sedative. He had the courage to do so because he wanted to be conscious during the last hours of being alive, the gift which was ebbing and fading and could never be again. In this way during those few days he listened to string quartets by Haydn, and had his favourite poems read to him. And then he died.〔Sacheverell Sitwell. ''For Want of the Golden City'' (New York: John Day, 1973) p. 255〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Arthur Waley」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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