14 Facts About Arthur Waley

Arthur Waley chose not to be a specialist but to translate a wide and personal range of classical literature.

Arthur Waley presented and translated Chinese philosophy, wrote biographies of literary figures, and maintained a lifelong interest in both Asian and Western paintings.

Arthur Waley was born Arthur David Schloss on 19 August 1889 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England.

Arthur Waley briefly worked in an export firm in an attempt to please his parents, but in 1913 he was appointed Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum.

Arthur Waley changed his surname from Schloss in 1914, when, like many others in England with German surnames, he sought to avoid the anti-German prejudice common in Britain during the First World War.

Arthur Waley entered into a lifelong relationship with the English ballet dancer, orientalist, dance critic, and dance researcher Beryl de Zoete, whom he met in 1918, but they never married.

Arthur Waley left the British Museum in 1929 to devote himself fully to writing and translation, and never held a full-time job again, except for a four-year stint in the Ministry of Information during the Second World War.

Arthur Waley lived in Bloomsbury and had a number of friends among the Bloomsbury Group, many of whom he had met when he was an undergraduate.

Arthur Waley was one of the earliest to recognise Ronald Firbank as an accomplished author and, together with the writer Osbert Sitwell, provided an introduction to the first edition of Firbank's collected works.

Arthur Waley married the poet Alison Grant Robinson in May 1966, one month before his death on 27 June.

Arthur Waley had the courage to do so because he wanted to be conscious during the last hours of being alive, the gift which was ebbing and fading and could never be again.

Arthur Waley was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1945, was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire honour in 1952, received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1953, and was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1956.

Also the shock will never be repeated, for most of the works that Arthur Waley chose to translate were largely unknown in the West, and their impact was thus all the more extraordinary.

Arthur Waley received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his translation of Monkey.