RAFT LimitsTranslationMethod 2012

The Limits of Translation: Method in Arthur Waley's Translations of Chinese Poetry
Author(s): ZEB RAFT

Source: Asia Major , 2012, THIRD SERIES, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2012), pp. 79-128
Published by: Academia Sinica
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ZEB RAFT
The Limits of Translation: Method in
Arthur Waley's Translations of Chinese Poetry
Arthur translator
translatorWaley
fromfrom
Japanese
(1889-1966),
and Chinese,
Japanese
remains
and the
something
Chinese,ofearly
an twentieth remains century's something greatest of an
enigma. By all contemporary accounts, Waley was an extremely private
person, his prodigious scholarly output matched by an extreme reti-
cence on personal matters. To judge from the testimonials included in a
tribute volume published shortly after his death, even those who knew
him did not seem to know him well.1 A recent book byjohn Walter de
Gruchy has taken on this mystery, identifying three major undercur-
rents in Waley's life and work: a suppressed Jewish identity, socialist
sympathies, and a hidden tendency towards homosexuality.2 Indeed,
how better to understand Waley's sympathy for Asian points of view
than to note that he himself, born Arthur Schloss, was something of
an ethnic outsider in the English upper-middle class?3 Does his early
and vigorous preference for the plain-spoken and socially engaged po-
etry of Bai Juyi not make more sense when we know him as a Fabian
socialist? And does a repressed sexuality not provide the best subtext
for the tenor of the following characterization of Chinese poetry, from
his first volume of translations?
To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing
of supreme importance and mystery. To the Chinese, it is something
commonplace, obvious - a need of the body, not a satisfaction of
the emotions. These he reserves entirely for friendship.4
The author would like to thank Asia Major's two anonymous reviewers for their comments
on an earlier draft of this essay.
1 Ivan Morris, ed., Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Anthology and Appreciation of Ar-
thur Waley (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
2 See John Walter de Gruchy, Orienting Arthur Waley: Jap onism, Orientalism, and the Cre-
ation of Japanese Literature in English (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), p. 10,
and especially chap. 2.
3 Waley was his mother's maiden name, adopted by the family on the eve of the first World
War. This raises an interesting aesthetic question: Would a "Waley translation" have the same
ring to it if it were a "Schloss translation"? Would Schloss's translations have had the same
cultural impact as Waley's?
4 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (London: Constable, 1918; also New York: A.A.
Knopf, 19 1 9), p. 4.
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De Gruchy's case is well documented, but it is ne

stantial, and barring the emergence of some startling
unlikely that this sort of psycho-historical approac
fruit. In this essay I propose not to unravel Waley's
but to utilize that genius, or a very small portion o
into the translation of Chinese poetry. I begin by set
inclusive" model of translation and proceed to sh
a very explicit instantiation of this model to stake
some sort of claim to poetry. After contextualizing
a response to Giles and Pound, I take a critical look
of early Waley translations to see what kinds of pr
his literalist method was put into practice. Turning
ship, I look at what "literal" signified to them, con
tionship of Waley's limits and limitations with those
and suggest how limits contributed to the creation o
Waley's translations. In a brief conclusion I return
beyond method and beyond poetry.
TRANSLATION AND METHOD
A large part of the otherwise intellige

public still labor under the delusion t
the ventriloquist is endowed by natu
with the power of throwing his voice .
but what the ventriloquist really does is to
tate as exactly as possible a sound as it is h
by the ears after it has travelled some dist
A ventriloquist's manual, E.L. Doctorow, World
The anxieties that gather around translation ar

standable and misplaced. If I read a work in translati
the spirit of the original? What might have been lost
language-oriented art like poetry? To deny the valid
ments would be highly unsympathetic, yet to accept
esce to a view of the world entirely too naïve. Transla
a choice; it is a condition, not a position. We do not
and decide to translate things foreign into things clos
cessity is forced upon us - even when we take it up
commonly treat translation as a possibility, it is inap
a possibility that cannot be negated is no such thing
ū New York: Random House, 1985, p. 275.
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LIMITS OF TRANSLATION
Translation is a fact of life partly because c

from the beginning of history (might this
tory"?) been coming into contact and acquiri
sometimes less accurate information about each other. But its roots are
much deeper than that, even more intrinsic to human experience, be-
cause translation does not just happen between cultures, between dif-
ferent languages. In the words of Roman Jakobson, "[t]he meaning of
any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign,
especially a sign 'in which it is more fully developed.'" (i When those
signs appear in the same language, it is what Jakobson calls "intralin-
gual translation." This concept underscores the essential unity of trans-
lation and interpretation, understanding "interpretation" in the most
basic sense, as something we do with every single linguistic utterance
in order to get its "meaning." It is happening right now, as you trans-
form these words into your thoughts.
On a most essential level, then, translation is part of our cogni-
tive process, inherent in the way in which we process experience.7 If
you do not accept translation, then you have sealed yourself into so-
lipsism, because no one will ever understand you, nor will you ever
understand them, without some "translation" into more personal sets of
signs. But such a broad and idealistic formulation of the matter leaves
many holes to fill, amongst which three are of particular significance
for this essay. First, pointing out the pervasiveness of translation in no
way diminishes its problematic nature. Like other fundamental elements
of socialized human life - war, for example - translation can never be
fully resolved into philosophy or science. It always, as we shall see with
Waley, leaves some jagged edges. Second, there may be a qualitative
difference between the essence of translation - "intralingual transla-
tion" - and its most pressing reality - "interlingual translation," or
translation between languages - such that translating between cultures,
especially cultures with largely discrete histories, is in fact quite dif-
ferent from the negotiations of interpretation we perform in everyday
life.8 This qualitative distance was one of Waley's main concerns, and
Roman Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," in Krystyna Pomorska and Ste-
phen Rudy, ed., Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987), p. 429. The
internal quotation is from Charles S. Peirce. See also the critical discussion in Umberto Eco,
Experiences in Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 67-74.
7 George Steiner is the most persistent expositor of this view of translation. For a recent for-
mulation, see Steiner, "Translation as Conditio humana ," in Harald Kittel, Juliane House and
Brigitte Schultze, ed. Translation: An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Vol.
i. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), pp. i-i 1.
8 At the same time it must be stressed that assertions of historical difference are prone to
exaggeration. In a hundred years, there will certainly still exist a historical gap between Chi-
8l

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ZEB RAFT
it was this that prompted him to say of Judith Gau

extremely popular book of French translations from
"if she had been able to translate [the poems] correct
not have become a classic; for the originals aboun
customs, traditions and places unfamiliar to Wester
historical distance may present more intractable
philosophical issue.
Finally, by linking translation to the cognitive p
duce a complicating factor into our discussion. When
lation is fundamental to the way in which we experience
something different than saying that translation is
experience of the world, even if the latter statement
as a translated poem may be thought of as a "meta-
of translation must be considered a "meta-act," one
both itself and the grounds on which it occurs.10 It
translation is a kind of criticism, as criticism involv
tiqued and the grounds for the critique itself.
This last point bestows new importance on both
plicit discourse on translation. It entails that statem
tion - about the way in which a translation is done -
as supplementary explanation but as part of the pro
itself. (See figure 1.) Consider, for example, one hal
ment on the art of translation: "I have endeavored,"
"to make Virgil speak such English as he would him
he had been born in England, and in this present ag
izing approach to translation is one of the most wel
quently attacked) positions on the subject, and it cou
to Arthur Waley's work, which famously found a r
andjapanese voices in Bloomsbury-era English. The p
pronouncement on translation, no matter how strai
surface, always arrives in the form of paratext, as a
a holistic act of translation. As such, discourse on tr
nese and English, but it may be no more (albeit no less) remarkable t

and German, for instance, in the present day.
9 Times Literary Supplement (hereafter TLS ), August 14, 191 9, p.
10 The useful term "meta-poem," used to denote the fact that a tr
poem itself and a perspective on another poem, or a kind of criticism
Holmes in his 1969 essay "Forms of Verse Translation and the Tra
included in Holmes, Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and T
sterdam: Rodopi, 1988), pp. 23-33.
11 See Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, ed., Theories of Translati
says from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
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"rhetorical," in that what is said is less at issue th

is said. Here, Dryden is not describing his transl
ecology in which his translations will exist. "I ha
way he would have ... if he had been ..." - this de
lations but the translator's attitude to the translat
is supposed to emerge as feeling when the wor
are read. The statement is part of the "ground" ac
translations are to be read, which is no different
part of the translations themselves.
Figure i . Two Models of Translation
A. PROCESS-EXCLUSIVE B. PROCESS- INCLUSI VE
MODEL MODEL
(target text) J / (target text) '

C (target Translation text) A J / / (target Translation text) '
^ / 4p* '
! p ! 1 R 1
! R ! ! o ¡
; o ; 1 ¡ci /
's! ' 1 s 1 /
: s : ' ♦ s ♦ / /
V (source text) J V (source text) J
Model A would suggest that "process" merely serves to generate target text
from source text. Model B depicts the role of process more accurately , with
process explicitly or implicitly a constituent part of the target text .
The quotation at the head of this section illustrates this point.

Translation (ventriloquism) is not about "throwing [one's] voice."
Rather, it is the complex mimetic process of "imitatfing] as exactly as
possible a sound as it is heard by the ears after it has travelled some
distance." What is the difference? To throw one's voice is a direct ef-
fect. In translation terms, it is the equivalent of transparency, the no-
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ZEB RAFT
tion that the translation process can be skipped over

make a translation read like an original. But transla
whatever process or "distance" is involved, be it bet
and puppet, translation and original, or translator a
contrary, one creates that distance, realizing it in th
teners or readers by producing not just a voice but
for the voice to appear in. This is an essential dif
means that translation is not just "carrying over" bu
process of "carrying over," a view of its own act. W
a play, one does not see clothes, shadows and peo
lighting and characters. The effect is in the establish
tion of distance, not in its closure or erasure.
WALEY'S METHOD
For many a fair precept in poetry is, like a

demonstration in mathematics, very specio
diagram, but failing in the mechanic ope
John Dryden, preface to Ovid's Epistles (
The foregoing discussion makes clear the integr

in translation. It is integral not because we need to
lator's motives were before we can read his or her t
cause the nature of translation as a mimesis of pro
translator's method, or process, will figure in the t
explicitly stated methodology or implicitly in the tr
and detail. Here I look at what ideas were involved
later we will see what kind of poetry his method p
The model outlined above would favor a "visible" translation
strategy, or at least the visibility of the translator's invisibility, and t
is indeed where Waley positions himself. Thus he concludes a grudg-
ingly appreciative 1923 review of Shigeyoshi Obata's translations
Li Bai by saying:
Their great merit is one which is generally considered a defect.
They read like translations, not like originals; so that the imagina
tion, conscious that it is dealing with things incomplete, is incited
to supply as well as may be what has been left out.13
12 Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, p. 22.

13 TLS, January 25, 1923, p. 52.
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The failure of the translation to attain the flue

precisely its means of success. This is not to say t
the translations themselves successful. The difference is that between
saying a piece of music is beautiful, presuming an attribute that we
then perceive or fail to perceive, and saying that the music provokes
reflection on beauty, which puts emphasis on the effect of the piece
without speaking directly of any inherent quality. Waley could not
bring himself to approve of Obata's translations in and of themselves,
but he did approve of their catalytic effect on the reader's mind, incit-
ing the powers of imagination to recreate the poetry of the original. It
may be that a more successful translation, free of "defect," would fail
to achieve this effect.
Waley expresses similar thoughts when he speaks of his own work.

In a 1929 essay on Japanese literature, he calls early Japanese poetry
"the most completely untranslatable" of all the world's poetries, and to
address this problem he issues some stage directions to his readers:
In translation, only the thought survives; the poem no longer
"goes," any more than a watch goes if you take its works out of
their casing and empty them upon a sheet of paper. In the few
examples that I am about to give, the reader must for himself dis-
cover the possibility of poetry. If he is a poet, this will present no
difficulty; just as a watch-maker would see in the scattered springs
and wheels the possibility of a watch.14
Waley's starting point, somewhat surprisingly, is a radically nega-
tive position in the debate on translation, namely that the poem trans-
lated is no longer poetry. We will see him take a more optimistic
position, below, and here he is admittedly speaking specifically of the
Japanese waka , yet the statement is significant nonetheless. Waley's ap-
proach to translation is essentially theoretical, dealing not in the sub-
stance of the poem but in its grounds for existence, in its "possibility."
He accepts, or asserts, that the poem in translation does not "go," or at
least does not "go" in the same physical, organic sense of a real poem.
His solution is to remove the poem from its "casing" (the original lan-
guage) and spread the parts out for the reader to see, so that the poem
can "go" conceptually. As was the case in his comments on Obata's
translations, the translation is meant to expose something which in
its very insufficiency will stir the reader's imagination to discover the
14 From "The Originality of Japanese Civilization," first published 1929, collected in Mor-
ris, Madly Singing, p. 334.
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"possibility" of the poem's operating mechanism. Th

make the poem "go" virtually - "If he is a poet," th
These examples date from a slightly later period i
but this model of translation as an exposition of insu
ing on the translation methodology Waley set out f
tions, first in the 191 7 Bulletin of the School of Orienta
somewhat expanded form in A Hundred and Seventy
U.S. edition 1919) under the heading "The Method
The latter begins with a circumspect statement simil
"It is commonly asserted that poetry, when literall
to be poetry." "This is often true," he concedes, but
that he has selected for literal translation poems that
barrier: "I present the ones I have chosen in the bel
retain the essential characteristic of poetry." The f
lematic. Do the poems he has translated remain p
merely "retain the essential characteristics of poetry
Obata's imperfect translations seem to have, in Wal
return to this question below.
Waley's method lays the groundwork for whatja
labeled "mimetic form," that is, a translation which
formal qualities directly from those of the original.16 B
mimetic form is as much constructed as it is distill
Any literal translation of Chinese poetry is boun
extent rhythmical, for the rhythm of the origin
If one translates literally, without thinking about
version, one finds that about two lines out of th
definite swing, similar to that of the Chinese line
Here Waley presents a method of translation that
and it falls to us to dissolve that appearance. The pr
that any translation from Chinese will be "to some e
is that one could say the same of anything , since rhyth
sounds, can be identified in any string of words approac
in mind, ("...in any string of words approached with
What Waley presents here is no neutral descripti
that the original poem will "obtrude" through the t
15 Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 1.1: 53-54, A Hundred

ems, pp. 19-20. Quotations below are from the book version.
16 See Holmes, "Forms of Verse Translation," pp. 24-25. It might b
"directly mimetic form," since Holmes's "analogical form," discu
of mimesis.
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Read as I tell you, Waley says to his readers, a

definite swing" supposed to be reflective of th
The remaining lines are just too short or to
very irritating to the reader, whose ear expe
tinue. I have therefore tried to produce reg
similar to those of the original.
Waley's assertion on behalf of literal translat
an eminently naturalistic formulation. The tr
an emanation of the original, done "without th
and presumably the reader should be able to
ively. But here Waley recognizes that in transla
ralism will only carry one so far. There must be
creation, and this portion of the discussion pr
Waley's artifice. What is noteworthy is that cr
ralistically: "just too short or too long ... very
whose ear expects..." By a rhetorical sleight
his own reactions to his readership in general,
of his translations a choice driven by common
his own motivations.
Waley's pursuit of "regular rhythmic effects," then, cuts two ways.

On the one hand, such regularity is, as he says, inherent to the original
poems (Chinese s hi Kf-poetry being composed almost exclusively in
isometric lines). On the other hand, "regularity" refers not to the po-
ems but to the expectations he seeks to naturalize, and as such it has
less to do with the original poem than with representing it in a chosen
aesthetic fashion. The rhythmic regularity he pursues is an active mi-
mesis, related to concerns for literalness and naturalness but not at all
dictated by them. He proceeds to the details:
Each character in the Chinese is represented by a stress in the
English; but between the stresses unstressed syllables are of course
interposed. In a few instances where the English insisted on being
shorter than the Chinese, I have preferred to vary the metre of my
version, rather than pad out the line with unnecessary verbiage.
Here surfaces a key term - "represent." The stark contrast between
the syntactic concision of classical Chinese and the virtual require-
ment of auxiliaries, articles, prepositions and conjunctions in English
means that there is slight chance of achieving an easy identity between
17 Ming Xie observes that "swing" was one of Pound's favored terms; see Xie, Ezra Pound
and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay , Translation , and Imagism (New York: Gar-
land, 1999), p. 195.
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Chinese word and English word, or phrase and ph

tion is ingenious in its way, and has been regarded
ment in the development of translation strategies fo
The English word typically has several syllables b
stress. By establishing an equation between that str
the monosyllabic Chinese character, Waley is able to
translation that, when read with this method in min
the same number of "beats" as the Chinese one. It does not matter
that this is not true: a Chinese line of five syllables typically has thr
stressed beats (the first, third and fifth syllables) when read naturall
whereas there is no established pattern of stress amongst the words
the kind of line fashioned by Waley. What matters is that Waley ha
set up a theory of equivalency to explain how the translation repre-
sents the original and implemented that theory, with instructions a
justifications for his readers.
The second sentence here, referring to variation in the meter, is
absent in the 1 9 1 7 journal version and appears only the following ye
in the book form of Waley's "Method of Translation." The additi
is significant because it shows Waley hedging on his theory, pulling
back under the guise of naturalism and fidelity to the original. He h
presented a method, but when either the original or the translat
"insists" he declares that he will not resist.
Thus, a direct mimetic form has been established, but it is firmly

ensconced in a natural habitat. This is the direction of his ensuing com-
ments as well:
I have not used rhyme, because it is impossible to produce in Eng-

lish rhyme effects at all similar to those of the original, where the
same rhyme sometimes runs through a whole poem. Also, because
the restrictions of rhyme necessarily injure either the vigour of
one's language or the literalness of one's version. I do not, at any
rate, know of any example to the contrary.
Here we must remember that rhyme had only recently lost its
status as a common component of English poetry. To translators of a
generation prior, rhyme would quite reasonably have been regarded
both as a valid aspect of the mimetic form - reproducing a signifi-
cant quality in the original poem - and as a natural feature of verse.
To Waley, it was no longer the latter. As to the former, if, as Waley
18 For a characterization of Waley's method stressing its impact on later translators, with
remarks on its potential shortcomings, see Wilt Idema and Lloyd Haft, A Guide to Chinese Lit-
erature (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997), pp. 66-67.
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asserts, it is difficult to carry a single rhyme

poem, it would not seem that varying the rhym
a concession any different from his attempt t
count of the original through English stresses
to think rhyme harms the "vigour of one's lan
might mean. What is true is that achieving rh
literalness hard to achieve. Thus, the real reaso
rhyme in Waley's translation are, first, its abs
poetic mode he was working in, and second, it
the prosaic style he was establishing.19
In the English tradition, "blank verse" was
for poetry without rhyme. Thus Waley conc
particular formal possibility:
What is generally known as "blank verse"
for translating Chinese poetry, because the
is that it varies the position of its pauses, w
stop always comes at the end of the couplet
Blank verse is an easy target, for exactly th
enjambment is used very selectively between l
etry, and never, strictly speaking, between co
foreclosing another kind of mimetic possibility
"analogical form," that is, a form selected in t
legitimate analogy to the form in the source l
ment could be made that insofar as the enjamb
characteristic in English poetry, it could reaso
equivalent of the dominant stopped line in Chi
possibility, however, is to move away from lite
what, above all, Waley has declared his transla
In sum, Arthur Waley's statement on metho
concern is literalness. A literal rendering is sup
the "essential characteristics" of the poetry. But
rest there, in the "insufficiency" of a literal tr
a literal rendering also carries over the poetic f
with this "obtrusion" as his basis he creates a mimetic form meant to
19 The general absence of rhyme from scholarly translation from Waley onward seems to
be a concession to the difficulties such an enterprise would entail when one is setting out to
translate a large number of poems accurately, but at least one good justification for omitting
rhyme has been proposed: reviewing rhymed versions by James J. Y. Liu, Hans Frankel ob-
serves that rhyme is unnecessary because it is one aspect of Chinese poetry that native speakers
of English are thoroughly familiar with from their own poetic tradition and perfectly capable
of supplying imaginatively. See HJAS 24 (1962-63): 260-70, p. 269.
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represent the original's formal qualities. The result

longer transparent or natural, but an obtrusively pr
of translation that later ages would immediately re
Is the product of this method a translatorial triump
merely "very specious" (i.e., attractive) in its design
from Dryden at the beginning of this section has it?
WALEY'S PREDECESSORS: GILES AND POUND
Superior people will be pained at the flatness of

Common people will hate the plainness of th
from Bai Juyi, "Illness and Idleness," trans. Arth
The one passage from "The Method of Translatio

above reads:
I have aimed at literal translation, not paraphrase. It may be per-

fectly legitimate for a poet to borrow foreign themes or material
but this should not be called translation.
Above all, considering imagery to be the soul of poetry, I have

avoided either adding images of my own or suppressing those of
the original.21
These are pointed words. Far from being a general statement of his
approach, this pronouncement is directed towards Waley's two mos
important interlocutors in the translation of Chinese poetry into Eng-
lish, one, Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), a generation older, and
the other, Ezra Pound (1885-1972), a contemporary.
Giles was a prolific translator, but not of poetry. Relatively little
poetry appeared in his 1884 anthology, Gems of Chinese Literature, where
he remarked of the Tang that "[i]t was the epoch of glittering poetry
(untranslatable, alas!)."22 Whatever he may have meant by this com-
ment - that poetry is essentially untranslatable? or perhaps that he
was not yet confident dealing with the poetic idiom? - he would later
20 Arthur Waley, More Translations from the Chinese (London: Allen and Unwin, 19 19; also
New York: A.A. Knopf, 1 9 1 9), p. 35; Bai Juyi ji jianjiao Zhujincheng
ed. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1988), p. 331: lš]- This is a good example
of the treacheries inherent in translation. Shang ... xia ... can be used very loosely, almost in
the sense of "on the one hand ... on the other" (see Morohashi Tetsuji Dai Kan-Wa
jiten [rev. edn. Tokyo: Taishūkan shoten, 1984] vol. 1, p. 196, no. 13, def. 16),
and if a value is being implied here, it more likely refers to two grades of critical acumen than
explicitly to two grades of people. Waley's "superior" and "common people" is too strong,
but what would be just right?
21 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 19.
22 Gems of Chinese Literature (London: Bernard Quaritch, and Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh,
1884), p. viii.
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Peng Dingqiu et al. ed., Quart Tang s hi ^Üfgvf (Beijing: Zhonghua, i960) 83.902
take on the challenge with a full book of poetry

Poetry in English Verse (1898). This work was the
bibliography for A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poe
note: "Combines rhyme and literalness with won
Perhaps he wished to show some deference to
aware that the two would engage in a protracted
Giles published a critique of Waley's efforts.24 It
Waley's characterization of rhyme quoted above
that it "necessarily injure[s] the literalness of one
wrote Waley there, "... know of any example to
we look at Giles's translations, we will see, as Wa
Giles took immense liberties with them, to the ex
better termed "paraphrase." Here is one examp
My eyes saw not the men of old;
And now their age away has rolled
I weep - to think I shall not see
The heroes of posterity.25
This is a quatrain that will be immediately
who has learned a few of the schoolboy's favorit
Giles's rendering it might be unrecognizable. P
which is almost literal, and the general theme wil
original, the "Song of Youzhou Terrace" of Ch
completely obliterated the play on words in the f
directional words "in front" ( qian ) and "behind
temporal meaning, "of times past" and "in the f
Likewise the scene, of a lone man ascending to a
endless ( youyou ) vista, is meant to mesh with th
the eternal (also youyou) workings of the cosmos,
in Giles's version.
Virtually all of Giles's translations exhibit this same quality, and

sometimes the hackneyed paraphrase is far worse, as when he places a
cliché like "He'll find some day the bird has flown!" into the mouth o
the speaker of the closing line of the first of the "Nineteen Old Poems,
'23 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 21.

24 Giles published a critical appraisal of Waley's first book in Cambridge Review 40 (1918)
and they carried on an extended debate in the pages of The New China Review , published in
Shanghai from 19 19 to 1922. There is an excerpt of the latter in Morris, Madly Singing , pp
297"3°5-
'2r* Chinese Poetry in English Verse (London: Bernard Quaritch, and Shanghai: Kelly and
Walsh, 1898), p. 43.
2« "Deng Youzhoutai ge" l£HR:
Peng Dingqiu et al. ed., Quan Tang s hi iéJüllffí (Beijing: Zhonghua, i960) 83.902.
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where she literally says "An empty bed is hard to k

tî'27 Yet we ought not rush to judgment on Giles's e
may sound antiquated, but before the advent of "m
simply sounded that way. Had he translated into the
ley would employ, his translations would have been
cribs, not "English verse." And though Giles had les
ver theoretically, less space to create a mimetic for
in utilizing "with wonderful dexterity" the possibil
form, using rhyming iambic meters to echo the fo
originals, and even, one could argue, English poetic
use of cliché in Chinese poetry. Did the sound of
not signify to an educated Chinese as did the tradit
forms to the educated European?
Furthermore, Waley's "method of translation"
very significant issue: that in poetry there will alwa
simply impossible to translate literally. The fourth
Zi'ang quatrain is a case in point. Literally du chuang
mean something like "I alone feel forlornly and my
We may not agree with Giles's solution - he has essen
line, condensing it into "I weep" - but the problem i
Waley in fact falls into this very trap in his criticism
which Giles had rendered (in his prose version of B
the Lute" Pipa xing ïbSfj) "So fell the plectrum o
strings, with a slash like the rent of silk" ' ES®- -Sř$P
ļk i^r, Waley responds: "This ... is not even an attempt to translate the
text. Surely the sense is: 'When the tune was ended she withdrew her
plectrum, sweeping it (as a painter sweeps his brush) across her breast,
and the four strings (played in arpeggio ) sounded with a slash like the
rent of silk.'"28 As a scholarly critique, this may be unobjectionable.
But how exactly would Waley see his literal understanding making its
way into a stylized prose version, to say nothing of a verse rendering?
Is Giles's version in this case such a poor compromise? To turn Wa-
ley's own words back on him, translation itself sometimes "necessarily
injureļs] ... the literalness of one's version." The most that can be said
about Giles, and the formal restrictions he worked within, is that he
strayed from literal meaning too easily.
Giles was a relic of the nineteenth century, but Ezra Pound pre-
sented a different sort of problem. Pound's significance in the intro-
27 Giles, Chinese Poetry , p. 13.

28 See Morris, Madly Singing , p. 299.
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duction of Chinese poetry in the west and his in

well known. William Butler Yeats, in his introdu
Book of Modern Verse , proclaimed that "Ezra Pou
manner followed with more learning but less sub
Arthur Waley."29 One recent scholar of the mod
a slightly more positive twist on the relationship
translations were no doubt meant to meet the
by Pound's Cathay ," but still following Yeats in v
as "pretty lame excuses" of "little originality."30
andjapanese, however, have seemed reluctant to a
connection to Pound. Thus A.C. Graham, writing
issue more generally, saying that "[t]he art of tr
etry is a by-product of the Imagist movement"
ley as "the unique instance of a sinologist who
Morris, editor of the Waley tribute volume, seem
of Waley's originality:
A good deal has been said about the influence
of Pound, Eliot, and especially Gerard Manl
whether it was important. In his reactions agai
of rhyme and the iambic he belonged to the ge
war poetry; and his discovery of the flexible u
of unequal length came before he had ever rea
of "sprung rhythm."32
There is certainly some truth in the gentler v
tisans. The influence of the Far East - initially c
the visual arts, with Chinese poetry a latecom
diffuse in the rise of the modernist aesthetic. Pound was the straw that
stirred the drink, but East Asian themes and "aesthetic" were already
very much in play. Nevertheless, Pound's direct influence on Waley
29 Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, i8g2-ig$5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936),
p. xl. This of course follows T. S. Eliot's oft-quoted claim that "Pound is the inventor of Chi-
nese poetry for our time"; see Ezra Pound, Selected Poems , ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and
Faber, 1928), p. 14.
30 Xie, Ezra Pound , p. 6, p. 174.
31 A.C. Graham, Poems of the Late T'ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 13.
32 Morris, Madly Singing , pp. 72-73. The question of Hopkins and "sprung rhythm" is a
vexed one, but again Morris is too ingenuous. On at least two occasions late in his life (both
included in Madly Singing ; see pp. 137, 158) Waley asserted that he had never heard of Hop-
kins when he formulated his method of translation, but in an interview in that same period
(also Madly Singing , p. 144) he admitted that Hopkins's work was known to him "long before"
Robert Bridges published it in 1918. There was certainly a line of influence, if only an indirect
one. Of course, the results of Waley's methods sound nothing like Hopkins's "sprung rhythm"
effect - at least in Waley's first two books.
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must be insisted upon. Pound received the Fenollosa

fall of 19 1 3 and worked his way through them th
The result, Cathay: translations by Ezra Pound; for the m
Chinese of Rihaku, from the notes of the late Ernest Fen
pherings of the professors Mori and Ariga , appeared in
expanded in 1 9 1 6 as a portion of Pound's Lustra. The e
lication on modern poetry was immediate and perma
independence we may grant him Waley was perfo
Cathay. Furthermore, we know from Pound's letters
him in June of 191 5, immediately after the publica
view the Fenollosa materials,34 and in 1916 Waley
poem translations printed privately, his first effort
Wai-lim Yip has observed that it contains many wo
translations, a method Waley by and large aband
publications.36 This may be viewed both as the infl
losa manuscripts, which contained word-for-word
reaction to Pound's transformation of those manusc
decidedly not literal.
Pound's reaction to Waley is also informative. Po
for the publication of Waley's work in the October
Little Review , one of the primary venues for modernis
but Pound was an advocate for Chinese poetry, not
was eager to see Waley's work reach a broader audie
because he saw him as a reliable scholar, not beca
his translations. Hence in an April 191 7 correspond
ret Anderson, the founding editor of The Little Revi
the possibility of obtaining translations from "Wale
scholar in English, with an eye for good poems (but
33 Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of Chin
(Durham: Duke U.P., 1995), p. 61. In addition to the works mentione
Fang, Yip, Kenner, Qian and Xie, two valuable starting points for
nection are Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacements: Ethnography,
tual Travel in Twentieth Century American Literature (Berkeley: Unive
2002), and Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein, ed., The C
as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition (New York: Fordham U.P
34 From a letter to his father in late June 191 5: "Chap, named Wal
night to see Fenollosa mss"; quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serio
Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), p. 279.
35 Pound's name is on a list of sixty-one intended recipients; see F
ography of Arthur Waley (New Brunswick: Rutgers U.P., 1968), p. 8.
36 Yip, Ezra Pound's Cathay (Princeton U.P., 1969), pp. 26-28; a
1 43-45, 182. A facsimile reproduction was issued by Rutgers Univer
tiges of his word-for-word approach are still visible in A Hundred an
where it is being displaced by the method under discussion here. Int
of the poems in the 1916 work reappear in his publications of 191 7
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fects in his translatorial style)." In June he co

ity of the translations, saying that "if I had to
I should simply lose the man." And in July,
some suitable poems, Pound reports:
Have at last got hold of Waley's translations
of the poems are magnificent. Nearly all the
by his bungling English and defective rhyth
english [sic] an improvement on his earlier s
I shall try to buy the best ones, and to get
of the botched places. (He is stubborn as a ja
yours annoyed (i.e. because Waley has so

without having just a bit more. DAMN fool
Cathay instead of falling below it.)37
"Stubborn" is simply Pound's gloss on W
Pound's style of translation. When Waley pref
ing that "[i]t may be perfectly legitimate for a
themes or material, but this should not be called translation," he is
certainly referring to Pound, who had explicitly labeled Cathay a book
of "translations."38
One brief example will suffice for specific evidence of the challenge
Pound represented to Waley. Pound's rendering of the first couplet of
a famous medieval ballad ("Moshang sang" EJlH) reads:
The sun rises in south east corner of things
To look on the tall house of the Shin.39
Pound derived his version from Fenollosa, whose translation

reads:
The sun rises in the South East corner,

And it shines on the villa of the Shin clan.40
37 The correspondence in this paragraph is quoted from Thomas L. Scott and Melvin J.
Friedman, ed., with Jackson R. Bryer, Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to
Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence (New York: New Directions, 1988).
38 On the Japanese side, it has been argued that Waley's work on Nõ drama was also in-
tended as a corrective to the Pound-Yeats collaboration; see de Gruchy, Orienting Arthur
Waley , pp. 87 ff.
39 Lustra of Ezra Pound (London: Elkin Mathews, 1916), p. 90. This poem does not appear
in the original Cathay.
40 A digital image of this page of Fenollosa's notebook is available on the Beinecke Library
website: http://beinecke. library. yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/photoneg/oneITEM. asp?pid=3goo2
°43897348&iid=4389734 (accessed February 1, 2012).
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Fenollosa's translation of the couplet ( 0 £ti3ÍljÍjf

quite literal.41 This is by no means Pound at his
changes are generally symptomatic of his approach
natural definite article, "the," in the first line, thus
language of the text, if not giving it a pidgin effec
in generalized non-sequitur, as in the tag "of thing
line, which has no basis in Fenollosa's notes. In the
rejected the natural verb for sun, "to shine," in favo
morphic "look on," and his "tall house," while not w
word-for-word version has "two-storied house"), has
suggesting that all things in a Chinese poem can be
most basic and primitive elements (thus "tall" over
"house," certainly not "villa").
This is not a criticism of Pound. As Hugh Kenne
articulate defender, has said of the fanciful etym
later experiments with Chinese, "[a]ny sinologist is
that this is like finding iron in irony ; but Picasso b
found a baboon's head in the shape of a toy car."42
is "perfectly legitimate" work for a poet. But in the
Literary Supplement ( TLS ) review of Cathay , "Mr.
the distance of these translations, and we should like
his language makes them more abrupt than they are
Waley emerged to answer this perfectly legitimate
To sum up, Waley struck a middle path between
Neither of his predecessors was literal and both were
tic excess, Giles's old-fashioned, Pound's new-fash
naturalness, by contrast, were the foundation for W
here emerge two problems. First, from the simple e
and naturalness he actually constructed something n
would necessarily, despite his protestations to the c
and transform the translation into something not li
and of itself this is not problematic, insofar as no tr
be literal (because languages are not equivalent) o
the truly natural cannot be interpreted). The questi
41 In his word-for-word crib, Fenollosa does have "our" for wo in
42 See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of Ca
144, referring to Pound's use of the character xian H in Canto 91. T
ner's book, incidentally, belies a work of idiosyncratic brilliance by o
tury's great readers of poetry.
43 "Poems from Cathay" [Review of Ezra Pound, Cathay ], TLS Apr
the long essay on Waley's translations discussed below, this article i
as the work of Arthur Clutton-Brock in the TLS index.
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poetry this method produced. But that leads t

whether or not Waley in fact expected it to pro
above how Waley appeared to limit himself to
"essential characteristics of poetry" in his first
book, More translations from the Chinese (19 19), he
for his work as poetry:
While many of the pieces in 170 Chinese Poem
form in English, others did no more than give
nese in almost as crude a way as [a word-for-w
was probably because of this inconsistency that
the book as an experiment in English unrhyme
was the aspect of it which most interested the wr
work I have aimed more consistently at poetic
The reader (and reviewer) is put on notice to r
as experiment in verse. But does this mean that
meant to "go" as poems? Is Waley's avoidance
in this passage a coincidence, or is he hedging ag
some kind of deliberate "insufficiency" in his cr
case, the result of his efforts may well be, to bor
ley's Bai Juyi, the "plainest," "flattest" book of v
the English language.
WALEY'S POETRY
There is no one among men that has not a speci

And my failing consists in writing ver
Bai Juyi, "Madly Singing in the Mountains," trans. Ar
Modernist "free verse" was both opportunity an

Arthur Waley. The essence of free verse is not that it
usual formal restraints of verse form, but that form
by the individual poem. This is exactly what Pound d
poems; but put this way, what first seemed a suitab
eral translation becomes on second examination a nea
for how is one to allow a literal translation the free
something not literal? Waley's method was a curious
this gap. By replacing freely generated form with o
specific strictures - his mimetic beat-rhythm - Waley
44 Waley, More Translations , p. 6.

45 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 144; Zhu, ed., Bai Juy
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the momentum of modernist verse, fitting it with a

reminiscent of traditional poetics. This is well attes
interest here is the fact that his method also led him
translation, his ostensible starting point and goal.
"I have aimed at literal translation... ." Thinki
Waley's translations, we always comes back to this c
are his translations? Where and in what ways do th
ing literal? And what exactly do we mean by "lit
has made a useful distinction between "two levels of
one being the reproduction of the mode of represen
ing to the syntactical literalness ..., the other being
the prose sense or dictionary sense alone," the latte
Waley.47 Indeed, scarcely a line in Waley's translati
bends the conventions of English prose grammar. In
not altogether a bad feature. Laying out the basic m
poetry in clear English, free of any obfuscation, me
period. But as Yip's formulation implies, this kind o
tion would not seem to support poetry, since it is no
the art of language in the original poem. Waley, to
realized this dilemma, sought a way around the p
metrical method that he alleged would elevate his t
mere prose. But did it work?
Consider Baijuyi's "On Board Ship: Reading Yiia
("Zhouzhong du Yuan jiu shi" Ä^sÄTUAH#):48
I take your poems in my hand and read them be
The poems are finished, the candle is low, dawn
With sore eyes by the guttering candle still I sit
Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, stri
the ship.
mmmmmmm • mmmmmm •
mmmmmm^ ■ mmmmmm °
This is a classic example of Waley's mimetic form. Read accord-

ing to his method, seven stresses can reasonably be attributed to each
line, creating a steady rhythm throughout the poem. But what has he
achieved by maintaining such a rhythm? Read the poem aloud. One will
be hard-pressed to find anything poetic in its language and cadences.
4ťi For example Xie ( Ezra Pound. , p. 195), who concludes that Waley's "'swing' is not gener-
ated organically [but] remains something lifted over and imposed from the outside."
47 Yip, Ezra Pound's Cathay , p. 89 n. 26.
48 A Hundred and Seventy , p. 142; Zhu, ed., Baijuyi ji jianjiao , p. 947.
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There is something grating, and inappropria

in the curt vowel assonances of "dawn not yet
"still I sit in the dark" hangs there limply in a
biguity.49 This is "mimetic form" in its crude
replication of certain qualities of some origina
What do we want from a translation, and wh
one? As Pound testified, Waley had "an eye fo
ley was right that a literal translation can conv
sential characteristic" of a good poem, which m
of the poem's imagery ("the soul of poetry," a
the poem's conceit or idea. The conceit of this p
two friends who find themselves separated an
together not just through the sharing of poems in
the finitude of those material-bound poems and
nal loneliness of midnight. The imagery of th
the synesthetic crescendo in the fourth line. W
line is the heart of the poem - but this brings
of literal translation, because while the first th
be deemed literal, the fourth line is decidedly
The reason for this departure from literal r
his statement of method, Waley carefully avoid
his translations stray from literalness. Explicit
rhythm of the translation, which in "about tw
naturally mimic the line length of the origina
will be "just too short or too long." The unstat
is that a significant proportion - one of every
stray from literal rendering in order to maint
intends.50 Thus, it is possible that a literal rend
produce the requisite number of beats. But th
perhaps more pressing. The fourth line of thi
that does not convert simply into an English p
translation might have:
4i) In a later edition, Waley revises the third line to "My eye
go on sitting in the dark"; see Chinese Poems: Selected from ly
tions from the Chinese, The Temple, and The Book of Songs (L
1946), p. 154. This fixes an earlier mistake (the verb-object r
but introduces a new instance of horrid diction with "eyes sm
-5° A sample from Waley's translations bears out this statisti
lations of eight Li Bai poems (More Translations pp. 20-23), m
eral" (that is, with no or minimal adjustment to wording and
eral" (that is, with some adjustments made for smoother Eng
(paraphrases in Waley's mimetic beat-rhythm). Although the
these categories, it is not far from the mark to deem one out
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A headwind blows the waves: the sound of their

mmmmmm
For Waley, this is unacceptable because he requires his Chinese

poets to speak in highly naturalized English prose.
It must be said that Waley was an impeccable prose stylist, and
here his art does shine through - his line has a certain "wave-like" ca-
dence to it. But the line also reveals a fundamental weakness of Waley's
translations, that he pays little attention to the actual language of the
poems, or to the ways of expression that underwrite a poem's so-called
"essential characteristic." It is fortunate that we have some special evi-
dence suggesting how Waley viewed the problem of language for the
line in question. This poem was published, in short succession, in the
Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies , the Little Review , and A Hundred
and Seventy Chinese Poems , and since Waley handled the last line differ-
ently in each of these versions we might be able to detect some traces
of his thought process.
The earliest version, in the Bulletin , reads:
To the sound of waves that strike the ship driven by a head-
wind.51
This is the most literal version, likely reflecting the Bulletin's schol-
arly and pedagogical orientation.52 In the Little Review version, intended
for the eyes of the modernist poets in America, the line becomes:
Listening to the waves that strike the ship driven by a head-
wind.53
Which is not far from the one cited above from A Hundred and
Seventy Chinese Poems :

Listening to waves that, driven by the wind, strike the prow of
the ship.
The crucial addition made between the first and second versions
is the presence of a full verb, "listening." This word does not appear
in the Chinese, where the fourth line comes as a sort of open aesthetic
comment, anchoring the experience related in the first three lines.
Still, even Waley's Bulletin version overdevelops the very loose gram-
mar of the original, and with his second version, in the Little Review ,
51 BSOS i . i : 69.
52 de Gruchy, Orienting Arthur Waley, pp. 69-72, has argued that Waley's book of Japa-
nese uta ( 1 9 1 9) was intended to facilitate language learning at the newly established School
of Oriental Studies, and it seems likely that his translations of Chinese poetry in the School
bulletin's inaugural issue were offered in the same spirit.
53 The Little Review , October 19 17, p. 4.
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he has made a full prose clause. On the third re

to have sensed that his first two versions read to
the ship that was "driven by a head-wind"? He rep
smoothly styled prose line, its relative clause emb
mas, its beat-rhythm crisp and clear with the red
"head-wind" to "wind."
We might imagine a similar process behind lines like the second

couplet of a quatrain by Lu You:
Through the leafless branches I see the temple in the wood;
Over the dwindling stream the stone bridge towers.54
We do not know what literal version Waley started off with, but
the result is pure paraphrase, acceptable to him only because it is clear
prose and because the translation gives, when sympathetically read, the
requisite number of "beats." Following those beats, one might model
a (false) word-for-word translation as:
Leafless - branches - see - temple - wood
Dwindling - stream - stone - bridge - towers
Part of the problem seems to be that Waley has misconstrued the

first two characters as noun-adjective modification rather than a topic-
comment relation, an error he makes elsewhere.55 Restoring that adds
some of the animistic energy back to the line, but his diction has also
dulled the sense of the words. More literally, the couplet might read:
As the leaves are carved away, a mountain temple emerges,
As the stream grows thin, a stone bridge rises tall.
Grammar notwithstanding, Waley's "leafless" is a weak synonym

for "carved away" (diao), which works with the parallel "grows thin"
( shou' not "dwindles") to create a metaphor twice removed: as a man
grows old and sees his visage "carved away" like stone, so the things o
nature shrink in autumn, but, in a positive twist on the scene, as nature
shrinks one sees the aesthetic accomplishments of human civilization -
the temple, the bridge - just as one presumably sees the achievement
of the man radiate from his wizened (wise ned) form. Moreover, in the
first line Waley has introduced the human agent into what should be
a pure perception. Just as in "On Board Ship" there had to be a poe
.54 "Boating in Autumn ("Fan Zhou"), A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 99 'Jiannan
shigao jiaoz.hu finiti, ed., Qian Zhonglian (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1985),
j. 25, p. 1822.
55 For example, line 2 of "The Poem on the Wall," More Translations p. 31. Recall however
that Waley was working without a commentary: see his remarks at BSOS 1.1:53.
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"listening to" the waves, here the poet must activel

which cannot simply "emerge" ( chu ).
Undoubtedly this "prosaicization" of the Chine
tended as an intervention into exotic ideas of Orien
in his time, including Pound's translations. The C
is saying, thinks in clear, coherent thoughts just li
raises a difficult question, for Waley and for any tr
poetry. The Chinese poetic language is a sort of cod
very simple meanings condensed into clipped phrase
tional reader would silently unpack. Are we to trans
meant, beyond the language? Or what it says, on the
of expression? And if the reasonable answer is "both
to be accomplished? Can an English version capture
without exoticizing it? Or will it always veer betwe
coded and too explicit?
Waley is decidedly in the camp of "meaning" ove
but his method adds a twist: imitating the form of
supposed to "recode" the poem, adding an express
meaning he states so plainly. Consider how, in a Bai
"After Passing the Examination" ("Jidi hou gui jin, l
RUíèlSiã, ©SIIÜIrI^), the poet describes how he s
capital after his success:56
My covered coach is ready to drive away;
Flutes and strings blend their parting tune.
Hopes achieved dull the pains of parting;
Fumes of wine shorten the long road.
ffjMftfrfe • •
This poem is in the fiv

has a steady five-beat rh
an appearance surely bols
but how does it relate to
the ways of expression of
ally be rendered "My cov
or perhaps better, "My
travel." It is very hard to
to criticize Waley for th
sense is the more artful r
with the second line, a lit
they raise the sound of p
More Translations , p. 24; Zhu,
I02

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complementary senses between the two lines, of

appearance (se, "phenomenon," a culturally loa
This aspect is lost in Waley's translation. Does it
sort of parallelism Waley elsewhere describes as
irrelevant to and even impeding the poem?57 It
ley has left something important out. As in the
couplet has the appearance of a word-for-word t
Covered - coach - ready - drive - away
Flutes - strings - blend - parting - tune
But it is not. It is a simulacrum of literal translation.
The second couplet is much closer to being word-for-word, if one

excepts the "fumes of wine" for the idiom which literally says "half
tipsy" ( ban han), but it too slips just where the language would seem to
warrant attention. Waley's verbs are "dull" and "shorten." "Dull" actu-
ally produces an intriguing contrast with the emotional vector of "hopes
achieved," but nothing can be said for "shorten" other than that it is an
immediate choice for combination with "long road." The verbs of the
original are actually "lessen" (jian, or "cut down") and "lighten" ( qing ),
two words which can be put together as a near-synonym compound.
The effect is to bring the two lines together as one idea, success and
drunkenness, long parting and long traveling.
Waley's translations, then, have a two-pronged language problem.
They consistently dismiss significant points of focus in the syntax and
diction of the original poems, substituting careful prose in their place.
At the same time, the very method by which he would sublimate his
prose into verse turns out to have an opposite effect, enforcing a leaden
rhythm on the poems. To Waley, the even rhythm and stopped lines
were features of the original and hence available for legitimate mimesis.
This reasoning is fine in theory, but Waley regarded his translations
as an experiment in verse, as practice, not theory, as doing something
more than just displaying the inner workings of a clock. Consider his
translation of the Bai Juyi quatrain "A Talkative Guest" ("Zeng tanke"
The town visitor's easy talk flows in an endless stream;

The country host's quiet thoughts ramble timidly on.
"I beg you, Sir, do not tell me about things at Chang'an;
For you entered just when my harp was tuned and lying bal-
anced on my knees."
•57 A Hundred and Seventy , p. 12.

More Translations , p. 61; Zhu, ed., Bai Juyi ji jianjiao, p. 2266.
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If one removed the line breaks this poem would

able from prose. All in all, the first three lines are i
even if they are straitjacketed into Waley's beat-rhy
to say how the end of line two should be translated
idly on" is certainly wrong, and it is there, almost
its triple accent fits the form Waley has established.
line that stands out as paraphrase. Once again, th
in the guise of literalness. Following the stresses, o
the Chinese words read:
Entered - just - harp - tuned - lying - balanced - knees

The true line is much like the last line in the poem "On Board Ship."
It is not a statement but an open comment, lending aesthetic ballast to
the scene described explicitly in the first lines. Word-for-word it is:
Knees - on - wind - pure - harp - just - tuned.
A literal rendering might be:
The wind on my knees is pure: my zither just tuned right.
As in "On Board Ship," there is something undeniably poetic in
the conceit, here of a well-tuned zither (Waley's "harp") rejecting an
out-of-tune guest. This comes across in Waley's translation. But despite
having averred imagery to be the soul of poetry, Waley drops the im-
agery. The notionally pure breeze, representing at once an inner state,
a physical sensation, and the magical efficacy of music - this image
complex is diluted to the zither alone. At best, a generous reader could
say only that Waley has transferred the image into a not unpleasant
"balance."
The last six lines of Bai Juyi's "Planting Bamboos" ("Xinzai zhu
®TÜctt) offer another example of the triumph of conceit over languag
and imagery:
Do not say that their roots are still weak.
Do not say that their shade is still small;
Already I feel that both in garden and house
Day by day a fresher air moves.
But most I love, lying near the window-side,
To hear in their branches the sound of the autumn wind.59
.59 More Translations , p. 28; Zhu, ed., Baijuyi ji jianjiao, p. 466. Later editions read "court-
yard" for "garden."
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The five-beat rhythm stands out. The first

a minor conversion, from "not yet strong" ( w
formed" ( wei chenģj to "still weak" and "still sm
signify? Does it matter that in the original th
rather than weakness perpetuated? On what g
that judgment?
The third line contains an infelicity that is
of understanding or to the demands of Waley's
pound tingyu is really just "home" - but the fourt
atic. Literally, it would have something like "G
comes to possess (you) a surplus purity." Waley
of his beat-rhythm imperative, and of a prop
supplies a carrier ("air") for the purity, and an
in place of simple possession or existence.
The penultimate line is literal, but the last line,
of an active verb, is once again diluted of its a
ally the line might read, "With the autumn w
(you) sound." Translated that way, the line doe
and on this count Waley must have our sympa
of any given translation decision notwithstand
"to hear" in the final line of this poem spoils t
and erases the echo of possession from the fou
So far we have primarily focused on cases i
tions, to fill out the prose sense and to complete h
over-substantialized lines that should be more
ever, Waley's inattention to language subtly al
Waley's rendition of "Illness and Idleness," for
Illness and idleness give me much leisure.
What do I do with my leisure, when it com
I cannot bring myself to discard inkstone a
Now and then I make a new poem.60
mrnm^rn • ° mmmm • •
This completely forsakes the "idlenes

of "leisure" (xia) in the first two lines. Xi
last position in line one, and then straight
line two, as a topic that prompts playful
Oh leisure, what can I do with it?" The se
full awareness of the paradox between lei
Waley's version, the two lines are dead st
tio More Translations, p. 52; Zhu, ed., Baijuyi ji jian
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rhythm, lacking expressive connection to one anoth

plet that follows.
Tone was one of Waley's distinctive achievements.
immediately recognizable and easily parodied, it m
as much in Waley's personality as in the poems he t
one final poem, Bai Juyi's "Invitation to Hsiao Chii-
chushi" fS^iSdr) , quoted in full:
Within the Gorges there is no lack of men;
They are people one meets, not people one cares
At my front door guests also arrive;
They are people one sits with, not people one kn
When I look up, there are only clouds and trees;
When I look down - only my wife and child.
I sleep, eat, get up or sit still;
Apart from that, nothing happens at all.
But beyond the city Hsiao the hermit dwells;
And with him at least I find myself at ease.
For he can drink a full flagon of wine
And is good at reciting long-line poems.
Some afternoon, when the clerks have all gone h
At a season when the path by the river bank is dr
I beg you, take up your staff of bamboo-wood
And find your way to the parlour of Governmen
mñitm A, mrnimm ° ftoím«, «sí*«» °
îmu9m, mmmmft ° mm mtu mmmmm °
mmm±, w^mmm • m&mtt a, •
mmmm, ïmt&ftm ° mmmm t, -mmm °
Waley has excised the rhetorical question from line one, making a
plain statement out of what should be a lightly ironic complaint. Like-
wise in the third line, the third character, yi ¿ft, does mean "also," but
it has an emotional valence that somehow must be conveyed. "People
one cares for" (more appropriately, people one longs for) and "people
one knows" are not abstract entities in the reflections of the poet, but
vectors of feeling shooting forth from a poetic tradition in which long-
ing and understanding are foundational values.
řil In the words of Donald Keene, speaking of both Waley's Chinese and Japanese work:
"Whatever new translations scholars may produce in the future, hoping to improve on the ac-
curacy of Waley's versions, they are unlikely to alter his tone" [Madly Singing , p. 57). Keene's
prediction proved untrue, but it testifies to Waley's influence.
<i2 More Translations , p. 48; Zhu, ed., Baijuyi ji jianjiao , p. 588.
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Where is the emotion in Waley's version? W

ing happens at all" (1. 8), when in fact the point
nothing at all," that is, compelled by no special d
playmate for the poem's recipient. Of this recipi
that he "is good at" reciting poetry (1. 12), but su
ger is needed for the word shan , which invol
propensity. But the translation is most incongru
"And find your way to the parlour of Governme
of Waley's simulacra. The original line is impossi
once - go forth - district - residence - appointm
must capture the sense of rush in yi fu like w
the gorges, and something must carry the ine
pointment or even a tryst that should not be br
son is tinged with anxiety. The point is not that
capture the original, but that the potentialities t
for him have been given such a cold reformulati
"essential characteristic" may remain.
***
Any translation involves decisions that introduc

as such any translation can be critiqued for what i
analyzing here a small but representative portion of
lations, I make two arguments. First, I have sought
Waley, faced with a choice between making his tra
intelligible and sacrificing clarity for a more strict foc
features of Chinese poetry, chose the former course
carefully crafted prose register. This was his choic
imply that it was the wrong one, given the outlan
poetry then in circulation. In 1915, Harriet Mon
founding editor of Poetry : A Magazine of Verse , had c
king travelogue with this image:
The Son of Heaven sits motionless in his yellow ro
symbols of power, his brow lit green by the ma
after hour he sits cross-legged, contemplative, w
cession waits in the sun.
For the Son of Heaven is making a poem - a little poem in five

lines which shall give sound and shape to the world/'3
Had Waley stressed the special linguistic effects of Chinese po-
etry, he would have contributed to the defamiliarization of something
ti3 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, August 191 5, p. 247.
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already none too familiar to his audiences. His pr

to the myths of his age, handing his exuberant cont
needed dose of "plainness" and "flatness."
My second argument may be harder to distingui
tive judgment. Waley did not accept that his pro
nese poetry were just that - prose. To the contrary,
with a mimetic form Waley thought that his prose
the valence of poetry. It is not that a steady rhyth
priori deficient. Take for example a 1916 poem by E
entitled "Hokku":64
I lift my eyes from the humus

Up the sea-green stalk to the flower.
The base of the petals is red as blood;
But I cannot see the line that divides
The rim of the petals from the sun light.

It is true that part of this poem's achievement comes from its
weirdness, the flower juxtaposed with blood, but even so its aural ele-
ment is superbly crafted. In the Waley examples given so far we find
some elegant prose cadences but never a line like the third one here,
in which "p"s play with "b"s and an "r". Masters's poem has a basic
four-beat rhythm and its grammar is essentially indistinguishable from
prose, but read it aloud and contrast the sound with one more example
from Arthur Waley:
Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.
I will clothe myself in spring-clothing
And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
By the mountain-stream a mist hovers,
Hovers a moment, then scatters.
There comes a wind blowing from the south
That brushes the fields of new corn.65
iä&mm • mm&m • mnmrn • wmMn •
lummm • mnmm m&mm °
The poem, in its "essential characteristic," is a masterp

translation? A.C. Graham had the audacity to claim that
not being completely literal, sees Waley "soar[ing] on the
64 The Little Review, June-July 1916, p. 19.

65 "New Corn," A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 79; Lu Qinl
Qin Han Wei Jin nanbeichao shi (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1983),
quite different versions of line six have been transmitted in editions of T
here I print the one Waley evidently followed.
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his own English," writing "on a different and higher

versions" of Tao Qian.6ři In a not unrelated claim
"[i]t required Waley's talent and special affinity
verse without turning it into the flattest prose."6
that it is curious that the phrase "flattest prose"
Graham's tongue. We must respect the talents and
thur Waley, but we need not genuflect. Perhaps,
Baijuyi, poetry was just his "special failing."
This raises serious questions about the trans
Chinese poetry in general. Waley's method ma
his approach is not, for the idea that Chinese
be represented by literal translation, in some
frequently accepted without further inspection.
the alternative - renditions, like Pound's, that do
meaning - is rejected out of hand as not translat
was rejected by Waley in 191 7. ("It may be pe
a poet to borrow foreign themes or material, bu
called translation"). We may agree with this verd
of translation, but to do so in no way justifies th
that literal translation is a sufficient means of translation.
It might be argued that, given doubts about the legitimacy of both

literal translation and free adaptation, one is entitled to choose one
option and pursue it with a blind faith in its potential. Examination of
Waley's translations suggests, however, that faith in literal translation
ought not be too blind, blinding us from sensing its obvious shortcom-
ings and accepting the doubts that come with it, doubts which far from
being hidden shadows can be fleshed out as legitimate problems. Literal
translation entails acceptance of a limited set of choices for words and
Poems of the Late Tang, p. 33. If we accept Graham's judgment at face value, I am es-
sentially impugning his taste, and for that there is no real recourse to evidence. But to the ex-
tent that his judgment was motivated (for the moment my own motivations can be left aside),
there is good reason to doubt him. The first couplet of this translation happens to be the very
one quoted as an illustration by William Empson in his famous work Seven Types of Ambigu-
ity (1930). Since Graham has just cited Empson as an authority (pp. 19-20), one suspects a
sort of "horizon of expectations" at work, an influential early judgment emboldening the later
critic's high appraisal. Ming Xie ( Ezra Pound , pp. 74-75 and 158-59) cites some other con-
temporary invocations of this translation.
(i7 Graham, Poems of the Late Tang, p. 31. Graham acknowledges Waley in the preface to
the book, and one might suggest that Graham saw himself filling the same role for the 1960s
as Waley had in the 1910s, the reliable scholar-poet.
A good deal of literal translation is done for research purposes, or for the purposes of fur-
ther exposition, and as such is relatively immune to questions about its aesthetic value. How-
ever, these translations are frequently repurposed for larger audiences, a practice that has not
received much critical examination.
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syntactic patterns. Within that set of choices nume

can be produced, and no doubt some of them will b
successful translation would seem to require that al
of the translator's choices be aesthetically successfu
tion the paltry set of literal choices purely by statis
little chance of satisfying.
Translations done in the literalist faith are like g
are dressed to fit the part but, not knowing how to d
the wall while the others pick their partners. We sho
clothes for the man, or allow the occasional success
the general principle: that the strictures of literal
produce poetry. One alternative is to return to Wal
desired insufficiency, accepting that the translation
a poem and that its proper role is as a diagram, show
works, if perhaps an artfully drawn diagram. Perh
drawn plainly and flatly, to force the imagination t
could the diagram alone - which is to say, the idea
poetry - which is to say, an aesthetic force? This is
tion, one that shines a light on the nature of "aesthe
thetic be a perception that is somehow felt, as if by
be purely something perceived, completely within
Can the mind feel? Is a purely theoretical mimesis v
place in practice, and convincingly to the senses, "a
ears after it has travelled some distance?" Can the t
score and expect the reader to supply the music?69
Thus Waley's method is suspect as a poetic dev
call forth questions about literal translation in gene
translations are as prosaic as Waley's, but many sha
explain "what the poem is saying," as opposed to "h
even where the literal translator devotes her attentio
forceful presumption rears its head - that the tran
to make sense. We read translations for clarity, to
other culture, to know as best we can what an ancie
would maintain that this is not how we read poetry
not expect everything to make sense, as we accept t
A related issue is that there appears to be a hierarchy of senses,

seeing are at the top and in control of the arts, while taste, smell a
most sensuous and scandalous of the group) are only exceptionally
aesthetic perception. The top of the hierarchy is more closely assoc
bottom with the appetites and desire. This suggests that a purely ra
much an odd impossibility as a perversion of justice, the way a lord
of land cultivated by his serfs.
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of a poem will produce a partial understanding. T

literal translation is to erase all partialities.
Need our (literal) translations carry any poeti
should we continue to dress them up in evening c
out sorely in the ranks of poetry? Does translati
or merely a decorum? Pursuing this thought fur
admit that translation and poetry do different t
equivalent to admitting that translation of a poe
answer to these questions was given in the secon
there is no answer, because translation is a condi
No dim view of the translatability of poetry will
ing it, but we might be wary of letting the inevi
lull us into too rosy a view of its possibilities, or
the positions translators establish for themselve
WALEY'S RECEPTION, WALEY'S LIMITS
Pound's translation, of course, I've always known and

admired; but when one comes to read yours, it seems t
me that the feeling that one is getting a more accurate
translation adds a great deal... .
Roy Fuller, interview with Arthur Waley, 196370
Of Mr. Waley 's qualifications as a translator I say nothin

John Gould Fletcher, review of A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , 1
The preceding section might be summarized by saying tha

produced a legitimate translation strategy but the limits inher
led to a very limited kind of poetry. Here I turn to Waley's re
looking at some contemporary responses to Waley's early wor
relationship to those responses, and then considering how the
concept of "audience" might have had a role in Waley's metho
As we have seen, Waley prefaced his second book with the
plaint that readers had not recognized his work as poetic expe
70 Madly Singing, p. 148.

71 Fletcher, "Perfume from Cathay," in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse , Februar
273-81.
72 When we speak of Waley's contemporaries, some acknowledgement should b
they constituted discrete, if interrelated, groups. An idea of this can be had from th
which Waley published most of his early translations. He published ninety-seven
the first three issues of the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies: ' this represen
ment in the scholarly community. The poetic community was represented by eig
The Little Review and ten in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Equally significant, how
the thirty-seven poems that appeared in a span of just over two years in the New
London organ of progressive intellectual culture.
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How, then, did they receive it? A favorable Times Li

notice of that second book could only speak blithely
charm which is, for the ordinary reader, the disting
his translations."73 "Atmospheric charm" sounds su
phemism. John Gould Fletcher, writing of A Hundred a
Poems in Poetry : A Magazine of Verse, would only comm
labor and scholarly skill of their translator."74 Decla
is above suspicion," Fletcher said nothing of the tra
"Let the extracts speak for themselves." This was
And Pound, ostensibly Waley's patron in the moder
was more direct. "The style of his versions is simple
free of dead and lifeless phrases, not always swu
cadences, but at any rate free of the trivialities and
predecessor Dr Giles."75 This is not much of an end
have seen his frustrations with Waley over the poe
the Little Review.™
The more positive comment by Roy Fuller at the head of this sec-
tion, however, identifies a key aspect of Waley's reception. Fletcher and
especially Pound show little of Fuller's reverence, but they essentially
endorse this same "feeling that one is getting a more accurate transla-
tion" as the reason to read Waley. These readers did not know Chinese
and they had no way of ascertaining Waley's accuracy independently,
but they trusted him. This trust was facilitated externally by Waley's
position as a researcher at the British Museum and by his reputation
in the scholarly community, but it was fostered internally by Waley's
declaration of "literal translation" and by the method he evolved for
presenting literal translations.
If Pound and others were nonplussed by the art of his mimetic
method, then, they were nevertheless believers in the mimesis. They
experienced an ethical gravitation to the literal, or to what was claimed
as literal, or to what appeared as literal. In fact, there is some evidence
that readers craved more literalness, not more art. When Waley issued
his complaint, he offered two word-for-word translations as examples
of poems he had appreciated but been unable to work into acceptable
poetic form, but the TLS reviewer just cited actually singles out these
two "exquisite" specimens for special praise; the translations-proper
73 H.O. Lee, "From the Chinese." TLS, October 9, 1919, p. 545.

74 Fletcher, "Perfume from Cathay," p. 279.
7,5 Future (Nov. 1918). Cited in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character , p. 270.
7(i In private correspondence Pound even referred to Waley as "corpse-like"; see ibid., p.
83, citing a letter to Wyndham Lewis.
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apparently provided only "atmosphere." More r

tion of the Oxford Book of English Verse has also
few word-for-word versions.77 This preferenc
the impression that Waley was read as a schola
This does not mean, however, that Waley's
as scholarship rather than as poetry. Review
enthusiastic, because they found, or believed t
"essential characteristic" Waley claimed to be t
is this reaction more articulately and fully de
Literary Supplement lead article by Arthur Cl
a prominent essayist of the time, singing the
translations Waley published in the inaugural
the School of Oriental Studies 7H Waley later
"turning-point" in his exposure to a larger aud
Planet," as it was entitled, is both a seminal do
Waley's success and a monument in the short
of criticism, that written about Chinese poetry
Chinese. Its flaws deserve to be pondered, both
and as potential insights into Chinese poetry.
The essence of "A New Planet" may be encap
it is a paean to the commonplace. That means,
monplace is no longer commonplace, as it h
so requires the creation of a strange economy
of the translation reflects a value in the origi
needed by the contemporary Englishman and
chased for nothing more than the forfeit of th
"[I]t is the peculiar virtue of Chinese po
writes,
that it remains poetry in a literal translation. ... Mr. Waley has
made his translation as close as he could ... and this poetry seems
to speak naturally to us in our own language, without any addition
of English poetic ornament. . . . [It] seems to supply something that
has always been wanting to the poetry of Europe.
77 Christopher Ricks, ed., The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford and New York: Ox-
ford U.P., 1999), p. 567.
78 For the review, which was published unsigned, see TLS, November 15, 191 7, p. 545; all
ensuing quotations are from this source.
79 In the new introduction to the second edition (1962) of A Hundred and Seventy Chinese
Poems ; see Morris, Madly Singing , p. 135.
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Every idea here has its source in Waley and his m

a twist. Waley had asserted that literal translatio
and that such an approach could preserve the essenc
had selected; Clutton-Brock takes Waley's word a
parently declaring that all Chinese poetry, in contr
other languages, is suited to and even requires liter
eral translation" has dual value here. It is desirable because the author
wants the poetry to "speak naturally" to the English reader, in the way
that literal translation of the prose-sense type does. Yet it is also desir-
able because in his view Chinese poetry is literal, in the sense of being
unmediated by language:
[T]he Chinese poet starts talking in the most ordinary language and
voice of the most ordinary things; and his poetry seems to happen
suddenly out of the commonplace, as if it were some beautiful ac-
tion happening in the routine of actual life. That, no doubt, is why
it suffers so little in a literal translation. Its beauty is the beauty of
thought itself; and the poet does not try to raise himself to beauty
of thought by beauty of language.
In this conception, there is no language-problem in the translation
of Chinese poetry, because, as he later says, "for the Chinese, poetry is
something beyond language." He then quotes one of the most famous
parables of the /ZJiuangzv.
"The raison d'être of a fish trap is the fish. When the fish is caught,
the trap may be ignored. The raison d'être of language is idea. When
the idea is expressed, the language may be ignored." And Chinese
poetry has a strange power of making us ignore language, as if the
pure idea happened to us when we read it.8()
Within the Chinese tradition itself, few notions have had a more
deleterious effect on criticism of Chinese poetry than this one, the
false idealism that would forget language, and it is just such a canard
that draws the attention of the English critic. The "pure idea" is all he
wants. This is not far from Waley, who at one point speaks of "only the
thought surviving]" in a translation, but again what to Waley seemed
sufficient is to Clutton-Brock ideal.
This idealization of Chinese poetry is taking shape against some-

thing: European poetic practice and, especially, the suspect "desire"
that motivates the European poet:
The internal quotation is slightly abridged from Herbert Giles's translation of the Zhtiang-
zi' see Giles, Chuang-tzu : Mystic , Moralist, and Social Reformer (London: Bernard Quaritch,
1869), p. 362.
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These poets have not that desire which makes u

ugly and restless. For them beauty is in things a
business is to find it, beauty in all the simple th
men, not in the peculiar misunderstood passion
In Clutton-Brock's eyes, English poetry has gro
ets wallow in their abject passions, "insisting] t
Chinese poetry, by contrast, "is more civilized th
own, more reasonable and nearer to prose." Nearer
point on which I have critiqued Waley's translatio
rified as a positive value, for being "reasonable"
Chinese poet, he continues, has "beautiful manner
poetry of the sober who need no incitement of th
mob-contagion to put them in love with life." Wi
what [he] is not," he owns a "passive attitude...
as if his art were a process of nature, as if he w
ing the sunlight and pouring it out again in sce
ern poets have always been too wilful; they h
to make this or that happen to them; and so th
poetic themes and also a poetic language.
The Chinese poets have no need for rhetoric. Th
degree-zero prose, because their poetry lies in wh
not what they do:
It is the universal that is in us all, men, women,
we do not need to force ourselves into some unnatural state of
mind to enjoy it. One could quote these poems anywhere and to
anyone, in the midst of conversation, without change of voice and
without any sense of incongruity; for to the Chinese poet there
are no incongruities and no separation of poetry and prose in life.
All life trembles into beauty like leaves stirred by the wind; and
it remains itself even while it trembles.
Clutton-Brock has experienced something beautiful in these po-

ems, and if it prompted a beautiful thought like that of his last sentence
it may not matter a great deal whether what he experienced was Chi-
nese poetry or not. Yet there is an unacknowledged kink in his line of
argument. The dichotomy of a foolishly impassioned European poet (or
would-be poet) and the wise dispassionate Chinese one is beyond doubt
idealized and overly simplistic, but the real stumbling point is in the
complexity of desire that Clutton-Brock avoids addressing, even as it
shows through his discourse. The European poet is told that in Chinese
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poetry he will find beauty "so quiet, so reasonable,

the actions of a saint" (emphasis added). In finding it
European reader of Chinese poetry loses the reasona
the poem is meant to convey. His desires, the very
Brock identifies, are stirred by it. They are stirred
read this poetry gives you a disgust for the outworn
our poets." And positively: "Here are the values,
subtle and clear, that we desire," he proclaims. A
poetry and the language and the desire of all men."
Passivity is a desire, and the fatal flaw of his essa
to recognize the possibility that it was so for the C
"[T]hey convince us that poetry is not a rare and
something that happens in life itself, something tha
watch for and record." Emphasis should be put on co
the complicity of prosaic translation in presenting
thing free of all desire. This knot in his argument
ously contorted exhortation in the concluding secti
Do not be afraid that the commonplace will ma
The commonplace is always your own failure, it
it. So it is useless to seek for that which is not com
in unusual experiences or in unusual words. To do
yourself from both experience and expression; and
the cause of the decadence of literature and all art. Behind all the
contortions of decadence, as behind the contortions of bad manners,
there is always inhibition , and the Chinese poets have such perfect
manners because they are free of all inhibitions.... The Chinese
poet gives us no commonplace because he does not make any; so
he has no need to flee from it. He cultivates his garden, and his
flowers grow in it. [emphasis added].
With the allusion in the last sentence to Voltaire's Candide we see
how fast Clutton-Brock has pinned his hopes on Chinese poetry as a
source of Enlightenment. Chinese poetry arises naturally, beyond the
inevitable imperfections that come with human "making." The Chinese
poet is free of "inhibition," while the European poet is caught up in it.
But what is it that is inhibited or free of inhibition? It is desire. In fact,
the desires of the Chinese poet are hardly elided from his poetry. They
disappear only under the covetous eye of the critic who wishes they
were not there, and the translator who dissolves emotional poetic lan-
guage into reasonable prose. After all his carping about the desires of
the European poet, it turns out he wishes only to give them free reign,
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in the belief that once free they will cease to exis

but desires, like free verse, are not really free.
"A New Planet" must have struck a chord with t
did it lead to Waley's being published in book form
also voiced (probably not coincidentally) by other
Gould Fletcher, in the same review cited above, w
poets' "absolute refusal to accept any make-believe
This refusal to see anything fine or heroic abou
tiny, is the elementary principle of the Chinese cha
it comes about that the Chinese poet has no use
speech, huddled adjectives, verbal climaxes, tor
and so forth, which his occidental rival uses so
vanity and the nothingness of existence, this is
tal idea that all these Chinese poets accept quite
complacently.81
In praise of the "complacency" of the Chinese po
a poem "where every word is sheer commonplace,
effect is simply overwhelming." Likewise, when
viewed both Waley volumes in the February 1920
zine, she wrote in terms strikingly similar to Clut
Acceptance of life, with all it brings, is implicit
There may be sorrow, but there is no rebellion
acceptance of his fate the Chinese poet loses dr
gains security ... [with] beauty the only sure ref
What can one make of such ideas? Are they
reflective of the desires of the Western reader, e
writing in the catastrophic tides of the Great Wa
grain of truth in them?
81 Fletcher, "Perfume of Cathay," p. 275.

Similarities here notwithstanding, when "A New Planet" first
assailed it as a late-arriving confirmation of what modernist poet
" Poetry from the first has been urging upon occidental poets the qu
[i.e., "A New Planet," reprinted in Literary Digest of December 191
- simplicity, immediacy, unpretentiousness, etc." Quoting from t
misses it as "an admirable reinforcement of principles no modern
See Monroe, "Back to China" (Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Febr
Elsewhere, Monroe gives one of the earliest accounts of th
which she regarded as "perhaps the most important of all" i
first, the arrival of graphic arts from Japan, after it was ope
"let out," in Monroe's alternative) by Commodore Perry; then J
and other forms"; and finally, the more recent discovery of Chine
roe and Alice Corbin Henderson, ed., The New Poetry: An Antholo
1918), pp. xi-xii.
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Which brings us back to Waley. Reading through

his work, of which "A New Planet" is far and away
cated, one might be led to two opposing conclusions:
accurate translations and contextualization Waley w
genuine need of his time, or that Waley, to the exte
ers continue to hash up old stereotypes and idealizat
his time with these people. Fletcher and Monroe bo
pains to evidence a blasé ignorance of the Chinese t
trying to represent. Fletcher complains that Waley
too many poems that are "dull, and crammed with
allusions" - that is, poems Fletcher was unfamiliar w
out the real classics - that is, poems Fletcher had re
lations, like Bai Juyi's Everlasting Wrong, , which he
finest poems ever written in Chinese or any other
roe is slightly less egregious, but when she calls Bai
closest parallel to Chaucer who may be found in lite
testifies to the utter paucity of reference points We
working with, despite Waley's efforts to expand th
There was something novel and almost scandalo
poetry as Waley presented it. His first book, for ex
omitted Li Bai (Li Po) and Du Fu, the two poets that
would most expect to find in a book of Chinese
book grudgingly included a handful of Li Bai poe
ture makes clear his distaste for the poet, or for re
who favor him: "Like Miss Havisham's clock, which
to nine on her wedding-day, the clock of Chinese
Li Po centuries ago, and has stuck there ever sinc
surmise that if a dozen representative English po
nese poetry in the original, they would none of the
or second place to Li Po."85 Waley gave his read
poems, and kinds of Chinese poems, that they could
83 Fletcher, "Perfume of Cathay," pp. 279-80.

84 Monroe, "Waley's Translations from the Chinese" ( Poetry : A M
1920, pp. 337-42), p. 341. Along these same lines mention should b
len Upward (1863-1926) in which he describes how he came to ap
He concludes: "And thou unborn literary historian (if you ever men
me down an imitator of Po Li and Shakespeare...." I hereby grant hi
carded Imagist," quoted in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, August 191
** The Poet Li Po: A.D. 701-762: A Paper Read before the China
Oriental Studies on November 21, igi8 (London: East and West, 191
Fang, "Fenollosa and Pound," HJAS 20.1/2 (1957): 213-38, pp. 221
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ined before.8*' To what extent his readership tru

his efforts is questionable.
Yet the matter of Waley's reception is not so
doing something new, an intervention into cont
again we find a befuddling ambivalence in his ex
tions. The most emblematic document in this reg
of his introduction to A Hundred and Seventy Chines
Limitations of Chinese Literature." Waley retrac
when the work was reissued in 1962, finding his
mature, and contemporary readers were less tha
When the very same Arthur Clutton-Brock revi
TLS , he complained that in his introductory rem
clined to depreciate Chinese poetry, perhaps beca
Chinese convention of politeness; for we are sur
John Gould Fletcher opined that "[eļither Mr. W
derstand the depths of the oriental temperamen
western observer, or his introduction is nothing
of camouflage designed to conceal his true views
Fletcher and the TLS reviewer thought Waley
littling his subject-matter. In fact, he was tryin
"idea" of Chinese poetry in their age, but was do
standpoint. Consider the rhetorical stance of the
To most Europeans the momentary flash of A
will seem worth more than all the centuries of Chinese assent.90
This can be boiled down to a central proposition (P), which is ex-

pressed using a statement (S) reformulated by an intricate process of
modification:
P: Chinese thought has its own distinctive worth.

S: Western thought is worth more than Chinese thought.
1. It seems that Western thought is worth more than Chinese thought.
2. To most Europeans it will seem that ...
3. To most Europeans it will seem that a momentary flash of Western
8<i The originality of Waley's selection can be contrasted with the utterly conventional se-
lection of Tang dynasty gems in a contemporary volume of translations by W.J.B. Fletcher,
Gems of Chinese Verse (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1919).
87 The passage on the relation of men and women, quoted in the introduction to this paper,
also comes from this section of Waley's introduction. Like all of Waley's writings, however,
this introduction does contain insights still worthy of consideration today.
«« "More Chinese Poems" [Review of A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems], TLS August
15, 1918, p. 380.
8i> Fletcher, "Perfume of Cathay," p. 276.
iK) A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 3.
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thought is worth more than all the centuries of Chin

4. "To most Europeans the momentary flash of Athenia
will seem worth more than all the centuries of Chinese assent
One might assume that Waley, having brought this book to publica-
tion, essentially wishes to make point "P." But he will not do so directly.
He begins with its antithesis, "S." He then projects that statement as
an imagined false consciousness (1), and attributes that false notion to
the plurality of his readership (2). How is this supposed to be received
by Waley's reader? Is it an invitation to distinguish oneself from the
common run of "most Europeans," or does it position Waley against his
reader? This ambivalence intensifies as Waley returns to modify the in-
terior of the statement (3). Casting the foundations of Western thought
as a "flash" has contradictory implications: is it a "flash" of brilliance
that opened the way for later ages, or a mere "moment" to which unduly
historic significance has been attached? His qualification of Chinese
thought works exactly the same way: "all the centuries" may describe
an ideal permanence, but it hints strongly at an unwanted condition of
stasis. Finally (4), he replaces "thought" with highly charged figures.
"Athenian questioning" is in fact Waley's approach to Chinese poetry,
approaching it with a skepticism too easily suspended by his contem-
poraries. "Chinese assent" is exactly what Clutton-Brock idealized as
the passionless state of the Chinese poet, what Monroe praised as the
Chinese poet's drama-free "security." But what exactly is it to Waley?
Is he siding with those who would praise that "assent," or is he imply-
ing that there is some truth in what would be the common reaction to
Chinese poetry if Europeans really understood it?
To some degree, the "limitations" of Waley's introduction were,
like his literal method of translation, an intervention into the wild ideas
his contemporaries held about Chinese poetry. At the same time, how-
ever, it is clear that Waley himself shared many of these limitations.
He basically shared Clutton-Brock's worldview, finding "rationality
and tolerance" in Chinese culture, and praising its poets for their abil-
ity to "excel in reflection rather than in speculation," for "a power of
candid reflection and self-analysis which has not been rivalled in the
West."91 He also shares Clutton-Brock's exasperation with the passions
of the European poets:
Accordingly we find that while our poets tend to lay stress on physi-
cal courage and other qualities which normal women admire, Po
Chii-i is not ashamed to write such a poem as "Alarm at Entering
91 Ibid. p. 4. "Self-analysis" begs for emendation.
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the Gorges." Our poets imagine themselves ve

portrayed them - bare-headed and wild-eyed,
toned at the neck as though they feared that
might at any minute suffocate them. The Chi
himself as a timid recluse, "Reading the Book
Northern Window," playing chess with a Taoi
ing caligraphy [sic] with an occasional visitor.
of the Author" had been the rule in the Chines
in such occupations as these that he would b
tranquil figure compared with our lurid front
We see here the same skittishness about "lurid" emotion that was
on display in "A New Planet." Certainly, no Chinese poetry for "normal

women."93 So in a sense Waley's limitations represent a kind of purity,
like the "manners" and the "passivity" Clutton-Brock espoused. They
are limitations for the masses who do not understand artistic subtlety.
But they are also limitations in a positive sense, for those who would
wish to pursue the passionless path that Clutton-Brock outlined, towards
an ideal commonplace.94
Central to Clutton-Brock's conception was the notion that literal
translation accurately conveyed Chinese poetry because Chinese poetry
itself was literal, in the prosaic sense. It was a poetry that was really
prose at heart. We have seen that Waley's method of translation led
to a similar "language problem," and the comments on the linguistic
aspect of Chinese poetry in Waley's introduction are worth quotin
at length:
The "figures of speech," devices such as metaphor, simile, and play
on words, are used by the Chinese with much more restraint than
by us. "Metaphorical epithets" are occasionally to be met with;
waves, for example, might perhaps be called "angry." But in gen-
eral the adjective does not bear the heavy burden which our poets
have laid upon it. The Chinese would call the sky "blue," "gray,"
or "cloudy," according to circumstances; but never "triumphant"
or "terror-scourged."
ir ¿ Ibid. p. 5. We do not know when Waley drafted his introduction, but it was published
well after the appearance of Clutton-Brock's essay and it is reasonable to assume that Waley
was writing in conversation with it and perhaps even under its influence.
93 "Normal" in this context commonly meant "heterosexual."
94 A "tribute to Marcel Proust" printed in the January 4, 1923 issue of TLS and signed by
Waley and a dozen luminaries of the time (Clive Bell, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Roger
Fry, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and others) also confirmed this ideal,
praising Proust's representation of "common and everyday experience, but enriched and made
beautiful and important by the alchemy of art."
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The long Homeric simile, introduced for its own

the monotony of narrative, is unknown to Chines
similes are sometimes found, as when the half-C
compares the sky over the Mongolian steppe wit
tent"; but nothing could be found analogous t
comparison of the sky to a "patient etherized on
What Waley says about Chinese metaphor is e
metonymy is probably a more useful concept to ap
poetic language.90 But Waley is laying the groundwo
of language, and its replacement by literal (prose) s
form. In other words, the limitations of the Chine
become justification for the imposition of limits in h
egy. "In general the adjective does not bear the h
our poets have laid upon it": Waley is perhaps le
Clutton-Brock, but he gives notice that the diction
will be flatter than what European readers of poetr
tirely without the jarring figures of modernism. Tr
but has Waley not "etherized" the potentialities tha
does have?
Waley, then, sought to place some limits on contemporary en-

thusiasm for Chinese poetry, but to that task he brought some of the
same limitations and some that were apparently his own. These limi-
tations play a role in the translation process. A text exists in a mean-
ingful sense only through some text-audience relation, and translation
likewise produces not a text but a relation. We have seen that Waley
adopted a directly "mimetic" approach to the poems, identifying a key
structure (syllable rhythm) and claiming that it could be replicated
in literal translation. His creation of an audience is more "analogi-
cal": Waley connects the source language text-audience relation to a
salient "structure" in his contemporary readership - their limitations
with regards to the Chinese poetic tradition. (See figure 2.) This mi-
mesis of insufficiency would explain the "plainness" and "flatness" of
the translations, and the diffident irony of his pronouncements on the
"limitations" of Chinese literature. Where Pound had made an inscru-
table distance the basis of his translations, Waley makes his distance
seem sharply delineated, almost "literal," at every turn. This, perhaps
iW5 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 5. The quotation from Eliot is from the open-
ing lines of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," first published in the June 19 15 issue o
Poetry : A Magazine of Verse.
For some ideas about metonymy, see J. H. Prynne, "China Figures," Modern Asian Stud-
ies 17.4 (1983): 671-88.
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is what it meant to represent Chinese poetry "as

after it has travelled some distance," that is, with
distance incorporated into the representation.
Figure 2 . Analogical and Organic Translations of Audience
a) analogical
SOURCE TARGET
^ Text ^ Í Text ^
▼
Audience Audience
V
y Target
1/ audience
structure
b) organic
SOURCE TARGET
^ Text "' f Text ^
Audience J Mind | ) 1 Audience

^ ^ (target) ' ^
Mind
(source)
Model A shows the source text-audience relationship funneled into an analogi-

cal audience derived from some characteristic structure of the target readership.
For Waley, this structure was "limitations." Model B is a potential " organic "
alternative: some essence or "mind" is abstracted from the source relationship
and translated as a pre-projected mind governing the target relationship. The
challenge is how Waley , or any other translator, might effectively put this
organic model to use.
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WALEY'S TALENTS
Roy Fuller:
"I gather that you started by thinking of
yourself as a poet at a very early age."
Arthur Waley:
"Well, I really thought of myself as writing stories."
Interview, 1963 97
The reading of poetry, the writing of poetry,

the nature of poetry, the nature of the poet have
all been consistently overidealized throughout the
last hundred and fifty or even two hundred years.
Harold Bloom98
The achievement of Arthur Waley is indisputable. He presented a

relatively accurate picture of Chinese poetry in an age in which none
existed. He inspired poets writing in English to borrow from Chinese
poetry in ways that had not been possible before." He was virtually
the only scholar of the time to take Chinese poetry as a serious object
of study, and his example showed the way to students of Chinese po-
etry in several later generations.100
Furthermore, there are many points in his translations worthy of
admiration. While it is true that he generally paid too little attention
to diction and syntax, it is equally true that his skillful handling of dif-
ficult lines was at times alchemical, producing gold from what others
would leave as base metal. Consider for example the first line of one of
Tao Qian's most beloved poems. Literally it might read, "In my youth I
lacked the tone that would accommodate the ordinary customs"
f@sl. It is exceedingly hard to choose proper English words for the last
three characters ( shi , su and y un), to say nothing of arranging them in a
fair sentence. Here are a few translators' attempts to tackle the line:
97 Morris, Madly Singing , pp. 150-51.
98 Robert Moynihan, A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman,
J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986), p. 9. To apply this quota-
tion to the Chinese case, one has only to turn "hundred and fifty or even two hundred years"
into "one thousand five hundred or even two thousand years."
99 See, for example, the discussion of Waley's translations' influence on William Carlos
Williams in Qian, Orientalism and Modernism , pp. 128-141.
100 It is true that, as Waley mentions in the introduction to A Hundred and Seventy Chinese
Poems (p. v, pp. 21-22), there was a certain amount of German-language scholarship ongo-
ing in his time. A glimpse of this tradition can be had in the early issues of Asia Major. But it
is indicative of the circumstances that a survey of the premier sinological journal of the time,
Toung Pao, reveals hardly any discussion of Chinese poetry between 191 5 (when Pound pub-
lished Cathay ) and 1923 (when Waley published his third major volume of Chinese poetry),
the exceptions being Paul Pellioťs (1878-1945) review of the Giles-Waley debate (TP 20.2
[1921-22]: 174 and TP 2 1. 1 [1922]: 84-5), and a somewhat longer review essay by Pelliot dis-
secting the unreliable introduction in Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, Fir-Flower Tablets
(TP 21.2/3 [1922]: 232-42). Note also the study of Chinese prosody published by Waley in
the 1918 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
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In youth I had nothing / that matched the vulgar

From early days I have been at odds with the w
Hightower)
In youth I was out of harmony with the common rhythm (A.R. Davis)
My youth felt no comfort in common things (Stephen Owen)101
Acker has tried to be literal to the syntax as he apparently under-

stood it, but has also split the line in two and installed an iambic tem-
plate. Hightower seems to be trying to make it more natural with the
insertion of the idiomatic "at odds with." The less said the better about
Davis's mix of metaphors - "out of harmony" with "rhythm"? Owen

has chosen to add substance to the line, transforming "accommodate"
( shi , or "fit with") into the more intuitive "comfort," and "ordinary cus-
toms" (jm) into the more tactile "common things."
All owe something to Waley's version, which is at once the most
natural, the boldest, and the best:
When I was young, I was out of tune with the herd102
"Herd" is quite an image to be adding to a poem, particularly
for a translator who has flatly declared that he has added no image
to his translations. None of the later translators, all of whom were or
are members of an academic field that Waley helped initiate, dare go
so far as he. The insertion of a half-stop after the first clause contrib-
utes to a prosaic effect - the other translators seem to think it would
break the integrity of the line - but clarifies the conceit: youth, and
then reflection. "Out of tune" is such a harmonious rendering that one
suspects the translators quoted here avoided it simply because it was
already Waley's.103
101 See William Acker, Tao the Hermit: Sixty Poems (London and New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1952), p. 52; James Robert Hightower, The Poetry of Tao Ch'ien (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1970), p. 50; A.R. Davis, Tao Yìian-ming, AD 365-427: His Works and Their Meaning
(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1983), p. 45; and Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Lit-
erature: Beginnings to īgu (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 316. The poem is the first of the "Gui
yuantian ju" series; Lu, Xian-Qin Han Wei Jin nanbeichao shi , p. 991. None of the
translators seems to have followed the variant reading (HI, "longing") for the last character.
102 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 77.
103 Not all translators are too shy to share Waley's "tune." Thus Amy Lowell and Florence
Ayscough translate: "Even as a young man / I was out of tune with ordinary pleasures"; Fir-
Flower Tablets : Poems Translated from the Chinese (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,
192 1), p. 132. Robert Kotewall and Norman L. Smith: "In my youth I was out of tune with
the common folk"; The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). Wai-
lim Yip: "Out of tune with the crowd since young"; Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 219. Burton Watson: "In youth I couldn't
sing to the common tune"; The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thir-
teenth Century (New York: Columbia U.P., 1984), p. 129. But no one else, to my knowledge,
dares place Tao Qian in a "herd."
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ZEB RAFT
There are many such examples of the magic Wal

individual lines and couplets, but there are also whol
out. Here is one of Waley's discoveries, a little-known
century poet Zhan Fangsheng that Waley called
ward" ("Huandu fan" literally "A Sail Back to
Cliffs that rise a thousand feet
Without a break.
Lake that stretches a hundred miles
Without a wave.
Sands that are white through all the year.

Without a stain,
Pine-tree woods, winter and summer
Ever-green,
Streams that for ever flow and flow
Without a pause,
Trees that for twenty thousand years
Your vows have kept.
You have suddenly healed the pain of a traveller's heart.
And moved his brush to write a new song.104
° SífflŤSrf ° ° °
ymwmit » ° •
Waley's brilliance lies i

a whole. The first four
constructions. He seizes
them as clauses {"that r
lines of the original hav
difference to keep his
lines are far from liter
in his paraphrase he has
was translated in a 1967
Famed mountains, soar
Long lakes, crystal-cle
White sands, unsullied
Pine-forest, evergreen
Rivers, whose streams
Trees that stand firm
I lie awake, composin
Suddenly forgetting m
104 A Hundred and Seventy Ch
p. 944.
10,5 J.D. Frodsham and Ch'eng Hsi, An Anthology of Chinese Verse: Han , Wei, Chin and the
126

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The translators of this version are neither will

so far nor give up entirely the form Waley disc
Their first six lines are still clauses, but less obv
from the full verb forms (e.g., "soaring" to "soar,
crystal-clear"). Waley's lines rush forward; these
translators have tried to handle the last couplet
Waley abandons the literal and succeeds. 1()tì
The larger point that this analysis leads to is
successful, it is because he has grasped some narr
poem and crafted its momentum in his translatio
to his interviewer, Waley saw himself "telling st
look at his books through that prism we see som
from Graham's description of "a sinologist wh
Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems we already fi
lads, as well as marvelous long narrative poems f
could forget not the poetry but the story of Ba
("Fu Rong ren" M$CÀ), in which a "Tartar" capti
tive of the Chinese regions captured by the Tarta
to his native land after forty years only to be mi
bound in chains again.108 Waley's presentation of
works of Bai Juyi, chronologically arranged, a
narrative. With More Translations the sense is str
tales taking up a sizeable portion of the work, an
absent from the title. By his third book of Chine
had emerged into the master of narrative that wa
Temple and Other Poems (1923) was devoted to th
genre noted both for its narrative frames and fo
play. This is the book that contains Waley's m
free translations full of creativity in form (e.g.,
tion. 10i) Free - but by the standards he set out in
be called "translation."
Northern and Southern Dynasties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 98. This work is dedi-
cated to Waley.
1()(i Since "lying awake" makes little sense here, it is likely that HtłW should be read as .
This phrase, with roots in the Shijing (Mao 139 and parallel usages in Ruanji (Yong-
huai 17 and 19), is highly ambiguous but conveys a sense of abruptly arriving emotion.
107 de Gruchy {Orienting Arthur Waley , pp. 8-9), presenting Waley's translation of the Genji
as a masterwork of English prose literature, also stresses Waley's narrative talents.
108 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , pp. 127-30. Shorter poems can also possess a
strong narrative element; see for instance, "Parting from the Winter Stove" {More Translations,
p. 54), where the titular sentiment voiced in the last couplet lends a storyteller's frame to the
meditation on spring beauty in the poem's main body.
io«! Waley's "Bones of Chuang-tzu" (Zhang Heng, "Dulou fu" often cited as Wa-
127

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After these early works, Waley's attentions by a

away from Chinese poetry. The 1920s were spent on
translation of the Tale of Genji. The 30s saw Waley
and thought of early China - this was the context in
his translation of the Book of Songs ( Shijing , 1937)
(Journey to the West; 1942) may be his most popul
ing reprints of earlier publications, and his influen
poems from Han Shan ÜJJLí (1954), the work he
etry after the war was largely within the framework
phy - books on Bai Juyi (1949, still a masterpiece
Yuan Mei (1956) - and introduction to Chinese cultu
(1955, on shamanism), Ballads and Songs from Tun-h
vernacular tradition). The poems were important, b
the story of a life or a culture. To the end, Chinese
for Waley's purposes.110
But poetry was Poetry. No matter how prosaic
no matter how much it is outweighed by a body of
it was poetry for which Waley received an honorar
the School of Oriental Studies (1948), and for wh
Queen's Medal (1953). 111 One wonders what the Que
able, the translations or the pure idea of them.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
TLS Times Literary Supplement
ley's favorite out of all his translations, is a good example. By and large this free style does
not carry over into Waley's later translations.
110 An essay on translation published in 7 Tie Atlantic Monthly in 1958 (rpt. in Madly Sing-
ing , pp. 152-64; see also Chinese Poems , p. 5) suggests that Waley's method remained essen-
tially intact over his career, as do his reprints of earlier poems, where revisions are numer-
ous but generally limited to where his understanding of the sense had changed. Still, a careful
examination of these revisions might yield some insights: what does it signify when Waley
changes the first line of a poem from "We had rode long and were still far from the inn" ( More
Translations [19 19], p. 44) to "We had ridden long and were still far from the inn" ( Chinese
Poems [1946], p. 173)?
111 These dates and those above are from the chronology in Madly Singing , pp. 392-93.
128

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The Limits of Translation: Method in Arthur Waley's Translations of Chinese Poetry

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The Limits of Translation: Method in

Arthur Waley's Translations of Chinese Poetry

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De Gruchy's case is well documented, but it is ne

TRANSLATION AND METHOD

A large part of the otherwise intellige

The anxieties that gather around translation ar

ū New York: Random House, 1985, p. 275.

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Translation is a fact of life partly because c

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it was this that prompted him to say of Judith Gau

nese and English, but it may be no more (albeit no less) remarkable t

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"rhetorical," in that what is said is less at issue th

Figure i . Two Models of Translation

A. PROCESS-EXCLUSIVE B. PROCESS- INCLUSI VE

(target text) J / (target text) '

V (source text) J V (source text) J

The quotation at the head of this section illustrates this point.

fect. In translation terms, it is the equivalent of transparency, the no-

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tion that the translation process can be skipped over

For many a fair precept in poetry is, like a

John Dryden, preface to Ovid's Epistles (

The foregoing discussion makes clear the integr

12 Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, p. 22.

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The failure of the translation to attain the flue

Waley expresses similar thoughts when he speaks of his own work.

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"possibility" of the poem's operating mechanism. Th

15 Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 1.1: 53-54, A Hundred

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Read as I tell you, Waley says to his readers, a

Waley's pursuit of "regular rhythmic effects," then, cuts two ways.

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Chinese word and English word, or phrase and ph

Thus, a direct mimetic form has been established, but it is firmly

I have not used rhyme, because it is impossible to produce in Eng-

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asserts, it is difficult to carry a single rhyme

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represent the original's formal qualities. The result

WALEY'S PREDECESSORS: GILES AND POUND

Superior people will be pained at the flatness of

The one passage from "The Method of Translatio

I have aimed at literal translation, not paraphrase. It may be per-

Above all, considering imagery to be the soul of poetry, I have

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take on the challenge with a full book of poetry

Virtually all of Giles's translations exhibit this same quality, and

'23 A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems , p. 21.

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