Madly Singing in the Mountains: an Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley by Ivan Morris

Madly Singing in the Mountains: an Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley Reviews

• 
  George

  This is an incredible tribute to Arthur Waley, including rare photos of Waley that are stirring.
• 
  Ad

  A collection of works by and about the famous Orientalist, Sinologue and Japanologue Arthur Waley (1889–1966), compiled four years after his death by fellow-scholar and translator-from-the-Japanese Ivan Morris.
  
  Waley achieved both popular and scholarly acclaim for his translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry and prose. He was one of the first great scholars of China and Japan, and quite different from modern scholars in the sense that he on the one hand avoided academic posts and on the other hand never visited China or Japan. Moreover, he was an autodidact, but all the same a great scholar who reached remarkable levels of erudition in both languages.
  
  Starting in the 1910s and continuing steadily almost until his death in 1966, he chose to translate a wide range of Chinese and Japanese classical literature for an English-reading public, starting with poetry, such as "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems" (1918) and "Japanese Poetry: The Uta" (1919), then an equally wide range of novels, such as "The Tale of Genji" (1925–26), the first great psychological novel in the world written in 11th c. Japan, and "Monkey," from 16th-century China. Waley also translated Chinese philosophy (both Confucian and Daoist), wrote biographies of Chinese writers as Li Bai, Bai Juyi and Yuan Mei, and maintained a lifelong interest in Chinese art.
  
  Waley's modern translations of Chinese poetry avoided the rhymed doggerel and Tennysonian iambics of the 19th century, and instead found inspiration in Pound, Eliot and Hopkins (especially his "sprung rhythm"), setting a new standard for the future.
  
  The first part of the present book contains memories about him by friends, family and colleagues, while the second part contains a wide selection of Waley's translations and essays, including some hard-to-find obscure pieces. Ivan Morris has himself written a own long essay "The Genius of Arthur Waley." Waley's achievement is unique, but also of its time - it could not be repeated in today's more ordered academic environment.