Wong Kwok-pun
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Wong Kwok Pun (also known as Laurence Wong, Chinese: 黃國彬; Cantonese IPA: [wɔŋ11 kwɔk33 pɐn55]; Jyutping: wong4 gwok3 ban1; Mandarin Pinyin: Huang Guobin) is a Hong Kong scholar, poet and translator. He is most famous for rendering Dante's La Divina Commedia into Chinese while preserving the terza rima rhyming scheme, an approach no Chinese translator has ever tried to take.
He was born in Hong Kong in 1946 and grew up there, his original hometown being Canton (now Guangzhou). He received his BA (English and Translation) and MPhil (English) from The University of Hong Kong and his PhD (East Asian Studies) from the University of Toronto. He taught in the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature at The University of Hong Kong from 1982 to 1986 and in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University in Canada from 1987 to 1992. Currently he is Professor in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
He is familiar with Classical Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, as well as Chinese and English. He studied for some time in Florence in order to better understand Dante.
One of his poems (Listening to Louis Chen's Zither), selected into textbooks, was familiar to the secondary school students in Hong Kong.
Most of his books are published in Taiwan, including the ground-breaking Dante translation, though he lives and works in Hong Kong.
He has published several books of literary criticism; and he is fond of comparing one poet with another as if they were heroes in martial arts novels.
