Lionel Giles
| Lionel Giles | |
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Lionel Giles, translator of The Art of War and the Analects of Confucius
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| Born | 29 December 1875 |
| Died | 22 January 1958 (aged 82) |
| Citizenship | British |
| Fields | History, Sinology |
| Alma mater | Wadham College, Oxford |
Lionel Giles (29 December 1875 – 22 January 1958) was a British scholar and translator. Lionel Giles served as assistant curator at the British Museum and Keeper of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books. Lionel Giles is most notable for his 1910 translation of The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Analects of Confucius.
Giles was the son of British diplomat and sinologist, Herbert Giles.
Giles was born at Sutton, the fourth son of Herbert Giles and his first wife Catherine Fenn. Educated privately in Belgium (Liège), Austria (Feldkirch), and Scotland (Aberdeen), Giles studied Classics at Wadham College, Oxford, graduating BA in 1899.
The 1910 Giles translation of The Art of War succeeded British officer Everard Ferguson Calthrop's 1905 and 1908 translations, and refuted large portions of Calthrop's work. In the Introduction, Giles writes:
It is not merely a question of downright blunders, from which none can hope to be wholly exempt. Omissions were frequent; hard passages were willfully distorted or slurred over. Such offenses are less pardonable. They would not be tolerated in any edition of a Latin or Greek classic, and a similar standard of honesty ought to be insisted upon in translations from Chinese.
Lionel Giles used the Wade-Giles romanisation method of translation, pioneered by his father, Herbert Giles. Like many sinologists in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, he was primarily interested in Chinese literature, which was approached as a branch of classics. Victorian sinologists contributed greatly to problems of textual transmission of the classics. The following quote shows Giles' attitude to the problem identifying the authors of ancient works like the Lieh Tzu, the Chuang Tzu and the Tao Te Ching:
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