Background
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.
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Lionel Giles
Edit ProfileLibrarian linguist philosopher
Education
Educated privately in Belgium (Liège), Austria (Feldkirch), and Scotland (Aberdeen), Giles studied Classics at Wadham College, Oxford, graduating Bachelor in 1899.
Career
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 by Sun Tzu and The Analects of Confucius. The 1910 Giles translation of succeeded British officer Everard Ferguson Calthrop"s 1905 and 1908 translations, and refuted large portions of Calthrop"s work.
In the Introduction, Giles writes: lieutenant 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 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 (AD 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.
Some one 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!.
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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:.
