Dr. Arthur Waley was born in London in 1889 and died on June 27th, 1966 at his house in Highgate, after injury by a motor-car accident. He was not only representative of British Japanology and Chinology, but the most widely- known Orientalist in the world. Without Waley’s workings, the classics, especially classical poetry, of Japan and China would not have been recognized as such an important part of the heritage in the Occidental world.
‘Greatness in men is a rare but unmistakable quality,’ Professor D. Hawkes says, in his Obituary on Dr. A. Waley, from Oxford: ‘In our small profession it is unlikely we shall see a man of such magnitude as he again.’
In our country, although he is so famous in the professional sphere, few people know what kind of life he led, why he entered the field of Japanology, and how grand his works are. I would like to write on these points as an introduction to his achievements and in the field of Japanese Classical Literature, such as the translation of The Tale of Genji and other masterpieces. The main points I commented on in the present paper are :
(1) The Department of Oriental Antiquities, and Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, where he worked and studied Chinese and Japanese languages.
(2) Bloomsbury where he lived, after living in Cambridge, as a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
(3) Uta and Nō play he translated and published as his first achievement.
(4) The translation of The Tale of Genji, his monumental work, published in 1926.
(5) Virginia Woolf’s encouraging criticism about the first volume of The Tale of Genji.
(6) His farewell to the Japanese Literature during and after World Wax II. In writing this paper I am indebted to A Preliminary List of the Published Writings of Dr. Arthur Waley, compiled by Mr. F. A Johns of Rutgers University, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in Asia Major in 1959.
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