Burton Watson

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Burton Watson (born 1925) is one of the world's best^[1] translators of Chinese and Japanese literature and poetry. He has received awards including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1981^[2] for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o.

Watson was born in New Rochelle, New York. He dropped out of high school at age 17 to join the Navy in 1943 and was stationed on repair vessels in the South Pacific. His first experiences in Japan came of weekly shore leaves when he was stationed on a ship at Yokosuka Harbor in 1945. Susequently, he majored in Chinese and Japanese studies at Columbia University. In 1951^[3] he returned to Kyoto, this time as a Ford Foundation Overseas Fellow^[2]. In 1956 he completed a dissertation on Sima Qian, earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University.^[1] He worked as an English teacher at Doshisha University in Kyoto, as a research assistant to Yoshikawa Kōjirō, who was Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Kyoto University^[4], and as a member of Ruth Fuller Sasaki's team translating Buddhist texts into English^[1]. He has also taught at Stanford and Columbia as a professor of Chinese. He moved to Japan in 1973, where he remains to this day, and has devoted much of his time to translation.

Notable translations include:

Analects of Confucius , 2007
The Tale of the Heike, 2006
For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries, 2004
The Wild Geese (Gan, by Mori Ōgai), 1995
Selected Poems of Su Tung-Po, 1994
The Lotus Sutra, 1993
Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty, 1992
Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home, 1991
The Tso Chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History, 1989
The Flower of Chinese Buddhism (Zoku Watakushi no Bukkyō-kan, by Ikeda Daisaku), 1984
Grass Hill: Poems and Prose by the Japanese Monk Gensei, 1983
Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan, 1977
Buddhism: The First Millennium (Watakushi no Bukkyō-kan, by Ikeda Daisaku), 1977
The Living Buddha (Watakushi no Shakuson-kan, by Ikeda Daisaku), 1976
Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-Shan, 1970
The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 1968
Records of the Grand Historian of China, 1961

Much of Burton Watson's translations have been published through the Columbia University Press.

He and colleague Professor Donald Keene frequently attend and participate in the seminars of William Theodore DeBary given to students at Columbia University.

[edit] Notes

^ ^a ^b ^c Stirling 2006, pg. 92
^ ^a ^b Ahadada Books-Burton Watson. Retrieved on 2008-06-03.
^ Halper 1991, pg. 53
^ Harvard University Press: An Introduction to Sung Poetry by Kojiro Yoshikawa. Retrieved on 2009-06-01.

[edit] References

Halper, Jon, ed. Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life (1991) Sierra Club Books. ISBN 0-87156-616-8
Stirling, Isabel. "Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki" (2006) Shoemaker & Hoard. ISBN 978-1-59376-110-3