Journal of Italian Translation

40 Journal of Italian Translation
30. Among his many translations I would like to list here: A Hundred and
Seventy Chinese Poems (Londra: Constable & Co, 1918 [1917]); More Translations
from the Chinese (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1919); The Poet Li Po
Ad 701-762 (London: East and West Ltd, 1919); Japanese Poetry. The «Uta»
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1919); The Nô Plays of Japan (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1921); Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art (London: Benn, 1923); An
Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting (London: Benn, 1923); The Temple
and Other Poems (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923); The Pillow Book of
Sei Shônagen (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928); Translations from the
Chinese, illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge (New York: A.A. Knopf [1941],
1964); The Tale of Genji (New York: Modern Library, 1960), translated into
Italian as Il Racconto di Genji (Milan: Bompiani, 1947).
31. Francis A. Johns, A Bibliography of Arthur Waley (London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1968), p. 18.
32. Jonathan Spence in ‘The Explorer Who Never Left Home – Arthur
Waley’, in Renditions, 5 (Autumn 1975), pp. 75-80, p. 75. Waley worked as
curator of the Oriental Sub-Department of Prints and Drawings of the British
Museum between 1913 and 1929.
33. Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang
Wei. How a Chinese Poem is Translated (Berkeley, CA: Group West-Moyers Bell,
1987), p. 35.
34. Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathai (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1969), p. 101.
35. It remains unclear what Wai-Lim Yip means by literal translation.
Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathai, p. 89, note 26.
36. ‘Arthur Waley was apparently very unhappy with Pound’s translation
[of Li Po], and he decided to show Pound a few things by retranslating Li
Po’s poems that Pound had rendered. These are found in a paper that he read
before the China Society at the School of Oriental Studies in London, on November
21, 1918.’ Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathai, p. 88. Yip describes how Achilles
Fang first observed that Waley’s speech was an attack against Pound in his
article ‘Fenollosa and Pound’, Harvard Journal of Asian Studies, 20; 2 (June
1957), pp. 213-238, p. 221.
37. ‘The Explorer Who Never Left Home’, p. 76; Spence quotes Waley’s
introduction to his first book, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1917) to
argue in favour of a view of China in which friendship dominates over romantic
love. Waley was a harsh critic of his own early positions in the 1962
re-edition.
38. ‘It is not, after all, as though the translator has to be or even had better
be a creative genius’, Madly Singing in the Mountain. An Appreciation and Anthology
of Arthur Waley, ed. Ivan Morris (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), p.
157.
39. Madly Singing, p. 156.
40. Paz, Nineteenth Ways of Looking.