Lionel Giles (1875 – 1958) was a Victorian scholar, translator and the son of British diplomat and sinologist, Herbert Giles. Lionel Giles served as Keeper of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, as well as Assistant Curator at the British Museum.
His 1910 translation of The Art of War succeeded an earlier attempt by a British officer named E.F. Calthrop in 1905. Publicly refuting large portions of Calthrop’s work, Giles writes in his introduction:
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.
Like many Victorian-era sinologists, Lionel Giles was primarily interested in classical Chinese literature, which Victorians approached as a branch of 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, as well as his opinion of the authenticity of the texts:
The extent of the actual mischief done by this “Burning of the Books” has been greatly exaggerated. Still, the mere attempt at such a holocaust gave a fine chance to the scholars of the later Han dynasty (A.D. 25-221), who seem to have enjoyed nothing so much as forging, if not the whole, at any rate portions, of the works of ancient authors. Someone even produced a treatise under the name of Lieh Tzu, a philosopher mentioned by Chuang Tzu, not seeing that the individual in question was a creation of Chuang Tzu’s brain!
Lionel Giles prodigious translations include the works of: Sun Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Mencius, and Confucius, including:
• The Art of War (1910)
• The Analects of Confucius (1910), or The Sayings of Confucius
• The Sayings of Lao Tzu and Taoist Teachings (1912)
• The Book of Mencius (1942), originally published as Wisdom of the East
• The Life of Ch’iu Chin and The Lament On the Lady of the Ch’in
• The Liexian Zhuan (1948), also known as Biographies of Immortals
