1 The Field of Translating Classical Chinese Poetry and the Genesis of Waley’s Translations

When Waley started out translating classical Chinese poetry in the late 1910s, he had several well-trodden paths before him. He might follow the footsteps of nineteenth-century British sinologists. Although Chinese poetry had remained in a relatively marginal position in the sinological discourse, primacy having been given to the Confucian classics and the lighter literatures like fiction and drama, by the late nineteenth century we saw a series of retranslations of the Shijing 詩經 (The Book of Poetry), and translations of classical Chinese poetry began to proliferate in the sinological discourse.² The British sinologists of the nineteenth century, who possessed extensive experience in the China field as missionaries, traders, officers, and diplomats, carried out lively debates in the sinological journals that flourished in the vibrant culture of “China-coast sinology.”³ In the meanwhile they also wrote for the home literary audience, clothing their translations with poetic garments familiar to the Victorian reading public, chiefly by the use of conventional verse forms and the substitution of culturally specific terms.

The works of John Francis Davis (1795–1890), James Legge (1815–1897), Clement Allen (1844–1920), William Jennings (1847–1927) and others exemplified the diversity of approaches to poetry translation in nineteenth-century British sinology. The widely influential works of Herbert Giles—Gems of Chinese Literature (1884), Chinese Poetry in English Verse (1898), and A History of Chinese Literature (1901)—further brought Chinese literature, and especially Chinese poetry, to greater prominence both in the sinological sphere and among the general reading public. Giles described his Gems of Chinese Literature as “the first and sole existing work of its kind,” an introduction to “the immense bulk of Chinese authorship,” comprising “short extracts from the works of the most famous writers of all ages.”⁴ The enormously influential A History of Chinese Literature, which contains large portions of translations interwoven with historical survey and extracts from native commentary, is “the first attempt … to produce a history of Chinese literature.”⁵ Writing in retrospect about A History of Chinese Literature, Giles noted that “[n]o work had (or has) given me greater pleasure,” and he was evidently pleased with the “shower of flattering reviews, English, American, and Continental”: “in fact, I have been unable to discover a dissentient voice. It is now (1919) being translated into Spanish, and in 1924 a 2nd edition was issued by Appleton and Co., New York.”⁶

The warm reception of Giles’ works is an index of the reading public’s interest in Chinese culture around the turn of the century; the distinctly sinophilic flavour that infuses Giles’ writings must also have played its role in steering the reception.⁷ Giles had the general reader very much in mind, and he was targeting popular conceptions of China when he wrote that “the odious comparisons drawn by superficial observers to the disparagement of China, of her slowly-changing institutions” and “her massive national characteristics” needed to be corrected.⁸ The remarkable volume and range of Giles’ sinological output, his quarter-century-long service as consular officer in various parts of China, his subsequent appointment in 1897 to the Chair of Chinese at Cambridge,⁹ and the dual publication of his works by the China-coast publisher Kelly & Walsh and major London publishing houses like Bernard Quaritch and William Heinemann, contributed to the wide circulation and acclaim of Giles’ works on Chinese literature.

The popularity of Giles’ works continued well into the twentieth century, as evidenced by the numerous reviews, successive reprints and new editions, notably the 1922 edition of Gems.¹⁰ In the meanwhile, other sinologists also published translations of classical Chinese poetry around the turn of the century: James Dyer Ball’s Rhythms and Rhymes in Chinese Climes (1907), Charles Budd’s Chinese Poems (1912), W.A.P. Martin’s Chinese Legends and Other Poems (second edition, “much enlarged” 1912), and W.J.B. Fletcher’s Gems of Chinese Verse (1918).

The works of Giles and others had deeper permeating effects than the widening of general readership. The literary cosmopolites, in their pursuit of the New Poetry and a poetics of modernity “built from and speaking to the conditions of twentieth-century life,”¹¹ set out to (re)translate, adapt, imitate, and write about Chinese poetry, integrating it into the cultural landscape of the early twentieth-century literary world in diverse and creative ways. They are the poet-translators, who did not have direct knowledge of the Chinese language and yet felt a special affinity with the poetic spirit of Cathay; they translated indirectly, via textual intermediaries (oftentimes sinological works) or some form of collaboration. Launcelot Cranmer-Byng (1872–1945), who founded the influential Wisdom of the East series, published a series of indirect retranslations based on the works of Giles and Legge, describing his intertextual travel as sojourning in a golden past.¹² Clifford Bax’s (1886–1962) Twenty Chinese Poems (1910) originated from his visit to Japan, where he collaborated with the Japanese poet and scholar Tsutomu Inoue (1850–1928).¹³ Helen Waddell (1889–1965) compared her work in Lyrics from the Chinese (1913) to journeying to the dim and unexplored regions of literary Babylon via the translations of Legge and Davis.¹⁴ In the transatlantic networks of the modernist private presses, little magazines, and poetry clubs, diverse rewritings of Chinese poetry proliferated, and the “transcultural root” of literary modernism strengthened.¹⁵ In the first Imagist anthology Des Imagistes (1914), edited by Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Chinese materials are on a par with those related to Greek sources, and Pound’s Cathay, the celebrated example of modernist creative appropriation of classical Chinese poetry, came out in 1915.¹⁶

By the early twentieth century, classical Chinese poetry had gained a conspicuous presence in the sinological sphere, the reading public in the home market, where classical Chinese poetry assumed the traditional verse forms of English poetry, and in the avant-garde literary circles, where philological accuracy was disregarded (or even considered a hindrance) and creative transcultural rewriting was embraced. Being the Assistant Keeper of the Oriental Sub-Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum who was progressing rapidly with his Japanese and Chinese studies, and a member of the Bloomsbury group—the “Bloomsberries,” to use Molly MacCarthy’s moniker for this group of friends—whose sensibility was steeped in the new literary currents of the time, Waley was not content with any of these options. He was appointed Assistant Keeper in June 1913, the Oriental Sub-Department having been recently established, with the poet and art historian Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) as its first head. Waley’s primary task was to catalogue the Museum’s collections of Chinese and Japanese paintings and woodcut prints, and he soon set out to learn Chinese and Japanese.¹⁷

In his own recount of the “strangely accidental way” in which his Chinese translation began, Waley wrote that he went on to consult the Library at the School of Oriental Studies (also newly founded). Although there was in those days “no catalogue and the books were arranged in a rather haphazard way,” he soon discovered “hundreds of volumes of poetry”: “I began to make rough translations of poems that I thought would go well in English, not at all with a view to publication, but because I wanted my friends to share in the pleasure that I was getting from reading Chinese poetry.”¹⁸

The first person who suggested that Waley publish his translations was the Bloomsbury painter and art critic Roger Fry (1866–1934), who launched the Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910, the year to which Virginia Woolf ascribed the “change” in human character.¹⁹ Interested in the prosodic features of Waley’s translations, Fry proposed printing Waley’s translations “in lines that undulated in a way that reinforced the rhythms,” offering to try out this experiment in his Omega Workshops, an enterprise that supported young artists through their work in design and decorative arts, and a precursor to the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. The plan did not come to fruition, however; but through the meeting at the Omega Waley got “some vague idea about the cost of getting a small work printed,” and he subsequently had his little booklet of translations printed, “bound the sheets in some spare wall-paper” and sent them to a number of friends, “as a sort of Christmas card.”²⁰

As can be gathered from the distribution list drawn up by Waley, this slim volume of Chinese poems found its way to the key writers, artists, and intellectuals of the day—Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Leonard Woolf, R.C. Trevelyan, Edward Garnett, Francis Birrell, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Bertrand Russell, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Logan Pearsall Smith, Clifford Bax, Sydney Cockerell, Clive Bell, Dora Carrington, Laurence Binyon, among others.²¹ The scope of Waley’s circle of friends and acquaintances is illustrative of his intellectual formation—poets, artists, and critics active in the modernist literary scene, his mentors and friends at Kings, and those who helped him embark on his Oriental studies. It also points to the trajectory that Waley’s translation practices would take in the coming years.

In 1917 the School of Oriental Studies launched the Bulletin, and Waley was invited to contribute to its inaugural numbers. “Pre-T’ang Poetry” and “Thirty-eight Poems by Po Chü-i” appeared in the first issue of the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies (1917), followed by “Further Poems by Po Chü-i” in the second issue (1918).²² The “[r]eal turning point,” as Waley recounted, came with the leader that Arthur Clutton-Brock wrote for the Times Literary Supplement (November 15th, 1917; see above): Logan Pearsall Smith called the attention of Constable’s to this encomium, and A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems came into existence in July 1918.²³ A year afterwards George Allen and Unwin brought out More Translations from the Chinese (1919), and in the same year Waley published The Poet Li Po (1919), originally a paper read before the China Society at the School of Oriental Studies. After an interval of three years which saw Waley’s Japanese translations, The Temple and Other Poems came out, in 1923. These volumes comprise the core of Waley’s early translations of classical Chinese poetry. Running parallel with this is the appearance of Waley’s translations in the modernist little magazines—the vital “institution of modernism” for the literary avant-garde—notably The Little Review and Poetry.²⁴

From this brief account we learn that Waley’s translations engage the sinological sphere, the general reading public, and the literary avant-garde. This is an index of Waley’s knowledge of the field of translating Chinese poetry, and he definitely had a particular “sense of placement” and “feel for the game,” to use Bourdieu’s terms.²⁵ The affiliation with the British Museum and the School of Oriental Studies, and moreover his personal connections with the Bloomsbury group and the wider circles of poets, writers, critics, and editors endowed Waley with the cultural and social capital to sustain and promulgate his work. These intersecting networks—personal and professional—facilitated Waley’s unique entrance into the field of translating Chinese poetry and the subsequent trajectory of his translation practices.

The response from his circle of literary friends on the privately printed volume Chinese Poems (1916) gave Waley some initial ideas about how to further pursue his translation. Indeed, the publication of these translations in book form was warmly encouraged by Waley’s friends in Bloomsbury. Enclosing a copy of his article “Notes on Chinese Prosody,” Waley wrote to Lytton Strachey that “in reality there is no one there who understands anything at all about Chinese verse.”²⁶ Strachey wrote in reply: “[t]he vistas of folly and ignorance you open up are alarming … I wish you would write a book on Chinese literature. It’s badly wanted.”²⁷ During this time Waley was meeting with the Pound-Eliot circle for Monday evening dinners in Frith Street.²⁸ Pound was the foreign editor of The Little Review and the foreign correspondent for Poetry, which published and reviewed Waley’s translations.²⁹

Waley was also contacting his publisher to make sure that his works would be known and reviewed in both circles. He wrote to Unwin to draw the attention of Kelly & Walsh to More Translations, so that it would appear in their catalogue of books on China.³⁰ He also asked Unwin to send a copy of More Translations to the literary magazine Coterie:

Coterie (in spite of its unfortunate name) is a quite reputable publication, similar to ‘Art & Letters’, ‘New Paths’ etc. It is edited by an Indian who was at Oxford. I see it on the tables of the sort of people who go to the Poetry Bookshop etc. I cannot recollect the contents of the last number, but I think it contained poems by Davis, Eliot and others.³¹

Following Waley’s interchange with these various networks of agents in the field of cultural production, we arrive at a better view of Waley’s “position-taking” in a field in constant evolvement.³² Furthermore, this “external analysis” of translation practices can be interconnected with “internal reading[s]” of the translations themselves:³³ Bourdieu puts forth a hypothesis of the dialogic interplay, or “homology,” between the “space of positions” in the field of production, and the “space of works”—a writer’s particular formulation of stylistic, thematic, generic choices and other aesthetic elements.³⁴ The sociological dimensions of Waley’s translation practices can thus be correlated with the textual/discursive particulars of his translations. Exploring the (para)textual realms of translation, we can trace the discursive manifestations of how Waley charted out his trajectory in the space of works.

Waley described his translations of Chinese poetry as “an experiment in English unrhymed verse”.³⁵ His choice of this medium for translation partakes in the spirit of innovation in the verse culture of the time, when poets tried to shake off “the fetters of stereotyped poetic language” and vigorously rethink the expressive capacities of the English language.³⁶ Pound remarked with characteristic self-mythologizing that “[to] break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” and Victorian poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) were resurrected as precursors of modernist prosodic experimentation.³⁷

Waley’s “experiment in English unrhymed verse” is thus an act of position-taking that aligns his practice with the heterodoxic position of new verse forms. We will get a better sense of the newness of this medium when we further consider the field of translating classical Chinese poetry in the early twentieth century. The practice of translating Chinese poetry with traditional verse forms continued well into the 1920s—Giles’ translations were reissued in revised and enlarged form in 1922/3, and the translations made by sinologists like W.J.B. Fletcher, James Dyer Ball, and Charles Budd were contemporaneous with Waley’s. The Edwardian poet-translators set their translations in prosodic schemes with fin de siècle variations, and Helen Waddell, whose Lyrics from the Chinese was described as “the first translations into English … which belong to the new movement in English poetry,” also cast the Chinese poems in rhyme.³⁸ The first collection of Chinese poetry translations that embodies the “vers-libre principle” is Ezra Pound’s Cathay.³⁹

The coming together of classical Chinese poetry and the poetic experimentalism of the turn of the century exemplifies how East Asia provides “a privileged site for witnessing the increasingly global character” of literary modernism.⁴⁰ Writing in the introduction to The New Poetry: An Anthology (1917), which “led the way” as “the first anthology that attempted to capture the products of the new spirit in twentieth-century poetry,”⁴¹ the editor Harriet Monroe remarked that “the modern ‘vers-libertines’ … are doing pioneer work in an heroic effort” to remove “obstacles that have hampered the poet and separated him from his audience” and to “make the modern manifestations of poetry less a matter of rules and formulae, and more a thing of the spirit, and of organic as against imposed, rhythm”. In this “enthusiastic labor” they are moved by “influences from afar … most important of all, [they] have bowed to the winds from the East.”⁴² Pound proclaimed that English literature was “kept alive” by “a series of exotic injections”: it “lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translations.”⁴³ Making the practice of translation “an integral part of the modernist program of cultural renewal,”⁴⁴ Pound invented a transhistorical and transcultural genealogy for the poetry of “our time”: “[t]he romantic awakening dates from the production of Ossian. The last century rediscovered the middle ages. It is possible that this century may find a new Greece in China.”⁴⁵ The opening up of prosodic form is analogous to the widening of transcultural imaginary, and the embrace of foreign literary influence is a way of counteracting the chauvinistic, rousing beat of patriotic poems and militaristic metres.⁴⁶ Seen in this light, Waley’s use of unrhymed verse as the medium of translation sets classical Chinese poetry at the centre of the cosmopolitan vision of literary modernism.

But to regard Waley’s translation solely as a means to reform English poetry or a form of cultural appropriation along the lines of Pound’s Cathay, the significance of which Hugh Kenner places “securely within the effort, then going forward in London, to rethink the nature of an English poem,”⁴⁷ is to obscure the other important dimension of Waley’s practice as a sinologist-poet-translator. By the early twentieth century it had indeed become quite the fashion among the literary avant-garde of the time to dabble in literary chinoiserie, and “composition à la mode chinoise”⁴⁸ had gained enough currency to occasion some parody. Allen Upward (1863–1926), for example, who had been enlisted involuntarily into the Imagist camp with the inclusion of his chinoiserie poems in Des Imagistes and subsequently banished from the movement at another turn, penned “The Discarded Imagist” as a parody of the vagaries of literary fashion, contrasting “the day of swift movements … the impertinences of the West” with China’s “millenniums of perfect art.”⁴⁹

Although Waley was interested to explore what Chinese poetry might bring to the rejuvenation of English poetry, he had taken care to distance his practices from what he later called, writing to his publisher, the “pseudo-Chinese.”⁵⁰ He did this by demarcating a sphere of proper translation:

I have aimed at literal translation, not paraphrase. It may be perfectly 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.⁵¹

Waley tried to distinguish his own translation from other contemporary practices by defining what should and should not be called “translation.” While it is “perfectly legitimate” for poets to “borrow foreign themes or material,” this should be called “paraphrase,” and not, properly speaking, “translation.” Waley is evoking what Bourdieu called the power of naming and definition by delimiting “translation proper,” drawing a boundary between what lies within the proper sphere of translation and what lies beyond it.⁵²

Within the legitimate boundary of translation defined by Waley, “literalness,” which can be understood here as accuracy in verbal meaning, shall be one of the primal concerns, and this implicitly disqualifies those who do not have sufficient knowledge of the Chinese language from performing the task of translation. Furthermore, Waley explained that his decision against using rhyme is partly made on the basis of this concern for literalness:

I have not used rhyme because it is impossible to produce in English 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.⁵³

Waley thus differentiated his practice not only from the freely adaptive methods of the poet-translators, but also from some of the sinologist-translators, whose efforts in sustaining regular rhyme schemes work to the detriment of literal accuracy.

Waley’s demarcation of a proper sphere of translation is further articulated in the paratextual framing of his volume. In contrast to the indirect translations of Cranmer-Byng and Bax, who framed their translations of Chinese poetry as a sentimental journey to an ideal past and grounded them in readerly experience and poetic sensibility, Waley addressed his readers with a sobering sense of matter-of-factness, prefacing his translations with sections on “Technique” and “The Rise and Progress of Chinese Poetry.” Waley’s tone of precision and objectivity contrasts sharply with the language of sentimentality that characterizes the works of the poet-translators, who wrapped their world of classical Chinese poetry in a mystifying aura of nostalgia.⁵⁴ Waley was speaking through his scholarly, or sinological, persona, a voice which we also recognize in his other works like the series of articles on Chinese art written for the Burlington Magazine, and his works on ancient China published in the thirties—The Way and Its Power (1934), The Book of Songs (1937), and The Analects of Confucius (1938).⁵⁵

These features in the paratexts of translation can be read as implicit statements of sinological competence, which is further stated in Waley’s selection of poems:

In making this book I have tried to avoid poems which have been translated before. A hundred and forty of those I have chosen have not been translated by anyone else. The remaining thirty odd I have included in many cases because the previous versions were full of mistakes; in others, because the works in which they appeared are no longer procurable. Moreover, they are mostly in German, a language with which my readers may not all be acquainted.⁵⁶

Here we see a firm statement of sinological competence, implying the ability to undertake original scholarship—most of these poems “have not been translated by anyone else”—and the attempt to rival previous sinological efforts by correcting their “mistakes.” The “Bibliographical Notes” in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems lists and passes judgments on twelve works published in Europe: Hervey St. Denys’ Poésies des Thang is “reliable—except in its information about Chinese prosody”; August Pfizmaier’s two articles on Po Chü-i are “so full of mistakes as to be of very little value, except in so far as they served to call the attention of the European reader to this poet,” and in Zottoli’s Cursus litteraturæ sinicæ, “the Latin is seldom intelligible without reference to the Chinese.” Waley also noted that “translators have obviously used Zottoli as a text. Out of eighteen Sung poems in Giles’s book, sixteen will be found in Zottoli.” Giles’ Chinese Poetry in English Verse was given the description: “combines rhyme and literalness with wonderful dexterity.”⁵⁷

Examining the networks of agents that facilitated Waley’s translation practices and the (para)textual spaces of his translations, we arrive at a better idea of how Waley’s works interrelate the literary field and the sinological field. In the next section, we will delve deeper into Waley’s engagement in the professional sinological sphere, zooming in on a polemical episode in his career—his dispute with the sinological doyen of the time, Herbert Giles.

2 The “High Noon Duel” between Giles and Waley: Literalness as Sinological Competence

With such proclamations of originality and competence, Waley’s translations cannot fail to attract the attentions of the unfailingly acerbic Cambridge Professor of Chinese, Herbert Giles. We know that Giles was not only the prominent sinologist of the time; he was also a man of many quarrels, an embodiment of “Furor Sinologicus” with “ad hominem flourishes,” who was wont to use the term “demolition” to describe his treatment of fellow sinologists’ works.⁵⁸ The entry on Giles in Samuel Couling’s Encyclopaedia Sinica noted that “[h]e has always been a keen controversialist, and has dealt ruthlessly with all that he considered false scholarship in Chinese studies. Much amusement as well as instruction may be got from the perusal of his ‘sparring’ with PARKER [E.H. Parker] and other sinologues in the pages of the China Review and elsewhere.”⁵⁹ The reviewer of Giles’ second edition of Gems in The New China Review, surprised by the unbelievably “mild and benign” countenance shown in Giles’ portrait, exclaimed: “[i]s this indeed the man who has recently given such shrewd thrusts to Parker and Waley in the pages of this Review? Who on page 8 of this volume describes some of the translations of Sir Thomas Wade as ‘beneath contempt’? Whose sinological history has been one long controversy? Truly, ‘there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’ ”⁶⁰

When Waley entered the sinological scene with his translations of classical Chinese poetry, Giles deemed it incumbent on him to give his verdict on Waley’s sinological qualifications. The November 22nd 1918 issue of The Cambridge Review published Giles’ review of Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems: while bestowing a few compliments on the young novice, Giles doubted the efficacy of Waley’s method of “literal translation” and enumerated Waley’s “mistakes” in one of the translated poem. Waley replied to Giles’ criticism in the December 6th 1918 issue of The Cambridge Review, pointing out the possibility of “alternative readings” and—in riposte—cited a Japanese scholar in support of his interpretation, adding that this Japanese scholar was “amazed at the large number of mistranslations” in Giles’ works.

This exchange in The Cambridge Review marks the commencement of what Timothy Barrett called “the high noon duel” between Giles and Waley⁶¹—a heated and prolonged debate unfolded on the pages of The New China Review in the form of a battle over retranslation and correct interpretation. The February 1920 issue of The New China Review published Giles’ “A Poet of the 2nd Cent. B.C.,” a retranslation of the “Nineteen Old Poems” (“Gushi shijiu shou” 古詩十九首), previously translated by Waley in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, supplemented with Giles’ notes on how his translations differ from that of Waley’s. Another retranslation from Giles, “A Re-translation,” appeared in the August 1920 issue, and it aimed to correct Waley’s translation of the “Great Summons” (“Dazhao” 大招) published in The New Statesman. Waley responded with “Notes on the Lute-Girl’s Song” in the December 1920 issue of The New China Review, pointing out Giles’ mistakes and responding to criticisms raised in the previous two pieces by Giles. There followed three more back-and-forth exchanges on the correctness of interpretation and method of translation: Giles’ “Mr. Waley and the ‘Lute Girl’s Song’ ” (August 1921), Waley’s “The Lute Girl’s Song” (October 1921), and Giles’ “The Caps and Belts” (October 1922), which ended this crossing of swords between Giles and Waley.⁶²

This debate is at once sinological and translational—it is as much a contention for philological accuracy as an argument about the proper methods of translating classical Chinese poetry into English.⁶³ It thus reveals the evolving formation of British sinology on the one hand and the emergence of new cultural forms in the field of translating Chinese literature on the other. The rest of this discussion will delve into the ins and outs of this dispute, focusing on the multifaceted and elusive idea of “literalness,” a central point of contention in the debate.

When Waley wrote, in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, that he “aimed at literal translation, not paraphrase,”⁶⁴ he was describing the general orientation of his approach—the rendition of the meaning of the original was among his primal concerns, and he distanced his own practice from those that took undue liberties with the original for whatever purpose. He did not mean that he aimed for a strict word-for-word crib for specialists which closely follows the word order of the Chinese, although he also mentioned that a “strictly literal” (i.e. word-for-word) translation from Chinese into English is relatively easy when compared with a language like Japanese.⁶⁵ Waley had also made this affinity in syntactic structure the condition of possibility for his experiment in the methods of translation, which, as will be discussed in the next section, contributes to the special rhythmic features of his translations.

Waley’s statement about “literal translation” is thus an expression of his abiding concern for the accurate rendition of meaning, although as we all know, this is necessarily qualified by all the attendant demands of turning a Chinese poem into a poetically cogent English one, and it is oftentimes a matter of exercising translatorial license in moderation. This idea of literalness is therefore slippery and context-dependent, always caught up in the twists and turns of the minute, practical considerations of the translator at work. In the debate between Giles and Waley, however, this elusive idea of literalness was repeatedly dwelt upon by each party—it takes on a distinctively sinological aspect, serving the discursive function of setting up the stage for contesting philological accuracy and standing in for a yardstick of sinological competence. The persistence of literalness as the centre of contention is in line with the tradition of sinological debate in European sinology, where arguments about literalness go hand in hand with the establishment of “norms of fidelity, accuracy and learnedness.”⁶⁶

While both parties of the debate acknowledged the impossibility of absolute literalness in translation, both tended to attribute the failure of literalness in the other’s versions to the lack of sinological competence, downplaying the exigences of the translation process. Giles, for example, introduced his retranslation of the “Great Summons” in this way:

A version of this difficult rhapsody was published in The Statesman of 31st May, 1919, as “Translated by Arthur Waley,” and reproduced in “More Translations from the Chinese,” 1919. It was a bold attempt; and as a free, too free paraphrase—without the excuse of rhyme—it would have had a chance of escaping criticism; but as a translation, in justice to the poet and to readers who cannot verify from the original text, a good deal of amendment is necessary. Hence the attempt contained in the following pages, which may in turn be capable of improvement at the hands of students resident in China who can enlist, as I cannot, the services of a well educated native scholar.⁶⁷

In the notes to this retranslation Giles continued to point out Waley’s lapses in “literalness”: “his version is scarcely close enough for a translator who claims to be strictly literal”; “Mr. Waley paraphrases delightfully,” and again, “Mr. Waley indulges here in exuberant paraphrase. He finds in these two lines ‘cheeks aglow,’ ‘the blood-spirit dancing through his limbs,’ and an extra invocation … which does not appear at all in the text.”⁶⁸ Giles thus presented his retranslation as a more philologically correct, and hence more properly “literal,” attempt, pitting it against Waley’s translation, which Giles relegated to the category of “paraphrase,” a practice that Waley had specifically dissociated himself from.

Having received Giles’ “searching criticism,” Waley replied with “Notes on the Lute-Girl’s Song,”⁶⁹ where he enumerated Giles’ mistakes in his translation of Bai Juyi’s 白居易 (772–846) “Lute-Girl’s Song” (“Pipa Xing” 琵琶行) and responded to Giles’ criticisms on the reliability of his translation:

He [Giles] objects to my calling it a “translation.” Surely the only other term possible, namely “paraphrase,” has always been used of adaptations which have made much wider departures from the original than I have done. Professor Giles will agree with me that no literal translation of the poem can preserve its character as a poem. My object was to do this, and in the introduction to “More Translations” I called attention to the fact that this book aimed at fuller literary form, which necessarily implies a less literal method. It is unfair to say that I am “a translator who claims to be strictly literal” simply because in another book, I had said that in it I had aimed at literal translation not paraphrase.⁷⁰

The translations contested here—Waley’s translation of the “Nineteen Old Poems” from A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, the “Great Summons” from More Translations from the Chinese, and Giles’ translation of the “Lute-Girl’s Song” from A History of Chinese Literature—are all intended for the general reader. One would concede that in such translations the demands of producing a poetically appealing translation is of comparable weight to that of philological accuracy—we do not normally expect from these translations the kind of philological exactness, or “literalness” in the strict sense, on display in publications of the professional sinological sphere.⁷¹ In their retranslations and criticisms, however, both Giles and Waley were measuring such translations intended for the reading public against the standard of professional sinological publications, thereby using the perceived lapses in “literalness” to undermine the other’s sinological competence. Indeed, Waley’s “Notes on the Lute-Girl’s Song” is a similar move to Giles’ two retranslations, where the issue of philological competence was challenged upfront and the translational demands of producing a poetic translation for the general reader were kept in the background. As Waley put it, his motive in penning the “Notes” was “to show that it is from a very glassy house indeed” that Giles had “hurled his courteous and learned stones,” and he directed the readers to Giles’ translation of Sikong Tu’s 司空圖 (837–908) “Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry” (“Shipin” 詩品) for further proof.⁷²

In this exchange the exigencies of offering a poetically appealing translation for the general reader are brushed aside, and the contestation over philological correctness and what qualifies for a proper sinological translation take centre stage. Here we see the recurrence of the “trope of retranslation as correction”: “correcting errors of earlier translations, advancing new interpretations of the text,” and making “arguments as to how Chinese texts should be translated.”⁷³ Retranslation, together with the accompanying notes and commentaries, is a form of crossing swords on sinological grounds—each party draws upon his particular set of skills and resources, mobilizing and garnering sinological capital during the exchange. This debate thus makes manifest the various forms of capital in the sinological field and the evolving formation of British sinology around the turn of the century.

The site of publication for Giles’ reviews and retranslations marks his sinological trajectory as a veteran in possession of abundant first-hand experience in the China field and the sinological doyen and incumbent of the Cambridge Chair of Chinese. His initial comments on Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, published in The Cambridge Review, were pronounced from a position of advantage in terms of institutional capital. Giles wrote that “as representing Chinese in the University,” he was “bound to point out” Waley’s mistakes.⁷⁴ The subsequent publication of Giles’ two retranslations in the newly-founded New China Review (Shanghai, 1919–1922) was facilitated by his connections with China-coast sinology. Samuel Couling (1859–1922), editor of The New China Review and compiler of the Encyclopaedia Sinica (1917), had solicited Giles’ contribution to the new journal.⁷⁵ Giles’ first contribution to The New China Review was his retranslation of the “Nineteen Old Poems” in the February 1920 issue.

These networks of sinological practices had not only determined the setting and material aspects of the debate; moreover, they point to the particular resources that Giles had at his disposal when engaged in the particulars of philological analysis. In addition to marshalling textual evidence in defence of his own reading, Giles also drew upon his extensive experience in the China field. An illustrative example is the interpretation of the line tianjiuhuideng chongkaiyan 添酒迴燈重开宴 in “The Lute-Girl’s Song.”⁷⁶

Waley queried Giles’ translation of huideng (回燈 in Waley’s quote) as “lamps trimmed again.” He noted that the phrase literally means “lamps turned round” and that “some texts read 攜 ‘carried,’ ‘brought,’ which is much easier.”⁷⁷ Giles replied that he was using the alternative text—xiedeng 攜燈, adding that Waley had “mistranslated both terms.” He argued for his translation on both philological and experiential grounds: “攜 has been, since the days of the 說文 a synonym of 提, which is often used for the colloquial 挑 in the sense of trimming, i.e. picking up the wick of a lamp to make it burn more brightly—how often have I seen it done and done it myself.”⁷⁸ Waley later replied that “I gladly accept Prof. Giles’ account of how 攜 comes to mean ‘trim’.”⁷⁹

This emphasis on the repository of first-hand, empirical experience of the China field is another important aspect in Giles’ sinological formation, and it has come to characterize the ethos of an earlier generation of British sinologists, who aimed to distinguish their practices from the scholastic, classics-centred “book-learning” of French sinologues.⁸⁰ Giles was tapping into the vibrant culture of sinological practices in the China field, the fertile contact zone for sinological knowledge production propagated through networks of publishing endeavours and nourished by the wealth of first-hand experience—be it the direct observation of the customs and mores of the Chinese people, or the empirical knowledge of the flora and fauna of the land—and connections with local informants.⁸¹ Giles’ call for “students resident in China who can enlist … the services of a well educated native scholar” and “the numerous competent sinologues now to be found in China” to join his debate with Waley is in keeping with the spirit of sinological discussion in the China-coast periodicals.⁸²

While his removal from the “rumbustious sinological scene of the treaty ports”⁸³ meant that the help of native scholars is no longer easily within reach, Giles’ position at Cambridge would bring him unique opportunities for similar purposes. His argument with Waley on the interpretation of the opening line of the “Great Summons”—qingchun shouxie 青春受謝⁸⁴—is illustrative in this respect. Waley translated this line as “Green Spring receiveth/ The vacant earth”; Giles, in his retranslation, gives “The green spring comes and goes.”⁸⁵ In his response to Giles’ criticism Waley put forth a poetic argument for his rendition:

To effect this purpose [i.e. to turn a Chinese poem into an English one] I have (as every translator of poetry must) often translated rather the implied meaning than the actual words. For example, in the first line of the poem (青春受謝) the metaphor is that of interchange, of one sentry relieving another,—or the like. This is better brought out by my translation “Green spring receiveth the vacant earth,” than Professor Giles’s “The green spring comes and goes.” It seems to me irrelevant to point out that the words “vacant earth” do not occur in the original.⁸⁶

Giles’ response shows how his capacity as the Cambridge Professor of Chinese can furnish him with special resources:

Shortly after dispatching my MS. to the editor, I was showing our splendid Chinese Library to the following gentlemen: 袁希濤 formerly Vice-Minister of Education, Republic of China; 王天柱 Chairman of Legislative Council of Kansu Educational Association; 水梓 Vice-President of Kansu Education Association; 任誠 Principal of No. 5 Normal School, Kiangsu; and 楊維興 Member of Board of Education, Peking. I seized the opportunity of submitting to them … the four characters in question; and these distinguished scholars rapidly and unanimously agreed that the meaning of 受謝 was simply 來往 “come go.” That ended my disquiet in the matter.⁸⁷

Waley was apparently at a disadvantage here. In his rejoinder, he hinted that Giles’ means of verification is not reliable—“With regard to the Great Summons and the interpretation of 青春受謝, Prof. Giles must surely know that distinguished educationalists in China (as elsewhere) are not necessarily experts in the byeways of ancient literature. I see no reason for accepting a judgement made off-hand, and possibly out of politeness.”⁸⁸ He then mobilized more textual evidence to back up his reading:

謝, in the sense of giving up one’s post is seen in the Book of Rites 大夫七十而致事若不得謝必賜之几杖: Cf. also in the 公羊傳: 謝國乎季子 ‘He resigned in favour of Chi-tzu’. I therefore take 受謝 to mean ‘to take on a job that some one else has vacated.’ This is at any rate an attempt to reach the meaning by the proper route. Any one who says that 受 means ‘to come’ must quote other passages to prove it.⁸⁹

This emphasis on textual knowledge, especially the familiarity with the textual repository of ancient China, which would come to be known as a feature of Waley’s scholarship, can be seen as a move to counterbalance the relative position of disadvantage that Waley found himself in. Waley insisted that this grounding in philological evidence should be the foundation of a fair debate and that Giles should be “taking the trouble to ascertain whether his own guess was right or wrong”:

When Prof. Giles wishes to emend my versions, unless they are palpably and obviously wrong, he must support his emendations by philological authority of some kind. No doubt the readers of the Cambridge Review all believed that Prof. Giles was right and I was wrong … For my part, I regard the mere pitting of one assertion against another as a complete waste of time. It is certainly a game which, were I Professor Giles, I should be ashamed to play: the advantage is too heavily on his side. For his prestige is world-wide; whereas mine is non-existent.⁹⁰

Another resource which Waley drew upon is Japanese scholarship, which was built on his parallel study of Chinese and Japanese, and facilitated by the scholarly environment of the British Museum.⁹¹ In his short response to Giles’ review of A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems in The Cambridge Review, Waley noted that his “interpretation both of the general meaning of the poem and of most of the passages” disputed by Giles is “confirmed by Mr Katsura in his Rekidai Kanshi Hyōshaku.” Katsura, Waley added, complained in his introduction that “on reading Professor Giles’s ‘Chinese Literature’,” he was “amazed at the large number of mistranslations.”⁹² In contesting Giles’ translation of xianxian yanyi 絃絃掩抑 in “The Lute-Girl’s Song” as “Every note she struck,” Waley proposed “with every string muted … (lit., covered and pressed down with the hand),” adding that this interpretation is supported by “the Japanese commentaries.”⁹³ In another instance, Waley queried Giles’ translation of quezuocuxian xianzhuanji 卻坐促絃絃轉急, which Giles translated as “sat down and quickly broke forth into another song.” Waley wrote that “[t]his is hardly translation. It should surely be ‘… sat down again, set the strings in motion, and the strings [under her plectrum] moved even more swiftly than before.’ Professor Giles does not bring out the adversative force of 轉 (corresponding to the Japanese utata which is written with this character).”⁹⁴

The various kinds of resources mobilized in this debate reveal the intellectual formation of Giles, the China field veteran and sinological doyen of his time, and Waley, who was rooted in the metropolitan milieu of the British Museum and whose approach to the Far East was primarily textual. Waley tested his mettle during the exchange, which had a formative influence on his sinological practice and how he positioned himself in the field of translating Chinese literature. The sinological dimension was thus constitutive of Waley’s translatorial habitus, which, in turn, restructured the field of translation in the early twentieth century.

Waley’s practice enriched and redefined the “space of possibles,”⁹⁵ creating new positions and possibilities in the field, while also presenting an “ensemble of probable constraints.”⁹⁶ To illustrate this point and to wrap up this section, I will quote from Waley’s communications with his publisher, George Allen and Unwin, two instances where he played the role of a regulator of the field. In February 1920 Mr. Unwin sent a manuscript entitled “THE MONKEY & THE HOG: An Adaptation of the Si Yoo Tsi, Memoirs of a Journey to the West,” written by George Soulié de Morant, to Waley for his opinion. Waley replied that “Soulié does not know Chinese & doubtless cribbed it from [Timothy] Richard”:

I think it was he who in the same way cribbed Giles’s ‘Stories from a Chinese Studio’. Soulié has spent his whole life ‘dishing up’ things without acknowledging where he takes them from. … I hope you are not going to set up as a purveyor of the pseudo-Chinese. I think one ought not to palm things off on people as translations unless they are; and if they are called ‘adaptations’, one owes it to the original translator to mention his name. … These few remarks may help your reader to form a judgment on the MS. A book of this kind will be sent for review to people like Prof. Giles, Dr. Giles his son, Prof. Parker (and probably to me.)⁹⁷

Unwin replied that “It is precisely because we do not wish to be associated with second rate Chinese stuff that I referred to you, and your verdict confirms my own suspicions. … I am relieved to feel quite safe about declining it.”⁹⁸ On a similar occasion Waley’s opinion was sought on Kate Buss’ Studies in the Chinese Drama (1922, Boston). Waley replied that it is a book that “continually speaks of the literary side of the drama, but demonstrates clearly that the author knows not one word of Chinese—this naturally seems to a specialist like myself to be rather a humiliation.” He added that although such a book might be “all right for the general public,” publishing it could risk “courting very bad reviews if the book falls into the hands of any one who knows about the subject, even of any one who is merely familiar with the European sources of information. Half-an-hour at the London Library would enable one to correct many of [the author’s] most glaring mistakes. Such books appear to me to be imprudent.”⁹⁹

3 Literalness as an Emergent Translational Poetics

In a passage quoted earlier, Giles criticized Waley’s translation of the “Great Summons” as “a free, too free paraphrase—without the excuse of rhyme; as a rhymed translation it might escape criticism.”¹⁰⁰ It is telling that Waley had chosen not to use rhyme for both poetical and translational reasons—that one cannot turn a Chinese poem into an English one by “tagging rhymes on to the ends of the lines,” and “it is impossible to produce in English rhyme-effects at all similar to those of the original,” and “the restrictions of rhyme necessarily injure either the vigour of one’s language or the literalness of one’s version.”¹⁰¹ Rhyme, therefore, is something that can be dispensed with for Waley, and this freedom from the constriction of rhyme allows greater room for literalness while creating the opportunity for turning translation from the Chinese into a medium for transcultural poetic experiment. For Giles, rhyme is a crucial element of literariness, and the use of rhyme absolves the translator of charges of immoderate liberty. Giles’ and Waley’s different perceptions of what is essential to good poetry, therefore, had modified their ideas about what qualifies for the proper exercise of translatorial discretion.

This divergence is revealing of the developments in the literary field of the time and the positions taken by Giles and Waley. In defence of the use of rhyme in poetry translation, Giles quoted Swinburne: “a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing.”¹⁰² The mention of Swinburne is an interesting marker here, as this was the time when “verse revolutionaries” like Pound were “escaping from Swinburne to Cathay.”¹⁰³ In making his translation “an experiment in English unrhymed verse,” Waley was taking the heterodoxic position in the literary field, aligning himself with “emergent” cultural forms¹⁰⁴ as opposed to the more established practices of translating classical Chinese poetry with conventional verse forms. Waley noted in retrospect how his unrhymed translation stood in relation to the changing verse culture of the time:

Chinese poetry rhymes. At the time when these translations first appeared (1917) rhyme was considered the hall-mark of poetry, and there are still people who consider that a translator of poetry who does not use rhyme has not done his job. But rhymes are so scarce in English (as compared with Chinese) that a rhymed translation can only be a paraphrase and is apt to fall back on feeble padding. On the whole however people are used nowadays to poetry that does not rhyme or only uses rhyme as an occasional ornament, and I think lack of rhyme will not be generally felt as an obstacle.¹⁰⁵

Another important aspect in Waley’s translational experiment is his treatment of rhythm, and this is where “literalness” again comes in. We have discussed in the previous section how the idea of literalness serves the discursive function of opening up an arena for contesting sinological competence; Waley’s method of “literal translation” does more than establishing scholarly credibility—it is, furthermore, integral to the special rhythmic effect of his translations:

Any literal translation of Chinese poetry is bound to be to some extent rhythmical, for the rhythm of the original obtrudes itself. Translating literally, without thinking about the metre of the version, one finds that about two lines out of three have a very definite swing similar to that of the Chinese lines. The remaining lines are just too short or too long, a circumstance very irritating to the reader, whose ear expects the rhythm to continue. I have therefore tried to produce regular rhythmic effects similar to those of the original. 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.¹⁰⁶

Here, by “translating literally,” Waley meant not only the general faithfulness to the verbal meaning of the original, but also the attempt to follow, to a certain extent, the syntactic layout of the Chinese line. These two senses of literalness—the transmission of the general meaning of the original, and the narrower sense of adhering to word order and syntactic structure—work in conjunction in Waley’s translation. “Translating literally,” Waley transferred the Chinese characters to the stresses of the English lines, giving the English translation a corresponding number of stresses. For the stressed syllables, Waley had chosen words whose “sense and … vowel quality” are “capable of carrying [the] emphasis,”¹⁰⁷ and he departed from the conventional accentual-syllabic metre by varying the number of unstressed syllables between the stresses. The rhythmic pattern of the Chinese line was thus transposed and reinforced in the English translation, giving it a distinctive character and movement.

The poet R.C. Trevelyan (1872–1951) remarked that Waley had been “successful in solving the problem of how to suggest [the] Chinese five syllable metre in a language such as ours, which is by no means monosyllabic.” Waley’s method creates a mirroring effect between the metrical pattern of the Chinese line and the English translation: “the essential structure and swing of the Chinese rhythm is adequately suggested in the translation, which at the same time makes a charming and natural English poem in accentual metre.”¹⁰⁸

This brief account offers only glimpses into how Waley’s method of literal translation embodies an emergent translational poetics. In addition to the treatment of rhythm, there are other aspects in Waley’s translation that relate in one way or another to the multifaceted idea of “literalness.” Waley’s method of literal translation constitutes an experimental literalism that pertains to the use of poetic diction and the selection of materials. It articulates a special strand of modernism that distrusts poetic artifice and values the immediacy of expression.¹⁰⁹ The avoidance of rhyme and poeticism and the seeming lack of conventional artifice make these Chinese poems “deliciously candid and straightforward,” retaining “the inevitability of wording which is a profounder mark of the poet than rhyme or metre.”¹¹⁰ The adherence to the line arrangements of the Chinese and the attendant effort to keep the line as a unit of composition bring about a “strongly marked rhythm and an emphatic stress at the end of each line,” which foreground the “precision of design” and the “atmospheric charm” that characterize Waley’s translations.¹¹¹ The selection of poems that are less reliant on form and poetic conventions and hence lend themselves more readily to literal translation gives us a collection of translated poems that are “extraordinarily human,” with a palpable “rhythm of idea,” and a “stalwart and rugged adherence to the homelier facts and truths.”¹¹² These quotations from historical reviews give us an idea of how the various elements of Waley’s “literal exactitude”¹¹³ work in tandem to create a distinctive Chinese aesthetic for his early twentieth-century readers.