- Burton Watson
Burton Watson (born 1925) is an accomplished translatorStirling 2006, pg. 92] 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 1981cite web|url=http://www.ahadadabooks.com/content/view/125/31/|title=Ahadada Books-Burton Watson|accessdate=2008-06-03] 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 atYokosuka Harbor in 1945. Susequently, he majored in Chinese and Japanese studies atColumbia University . In 1951 [Halper 1991, pg. 53] he returned to Kyoto, this time as a Ford Foundation Overseas Fellow. In 1956 he completed a dissertation onSima Qian , earning a Ph.D. from Columbia University. 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 atKyoto University cite web|url=http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/YOSINT.html|title=Harvard University Press: An Introduction to Sung Poetry by Kojiro Yoshikawa|accessdate=2009-06-01] , and as a member ofRuth Fuller Sasaki 's team translating Buddhist texts into English. 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:
* "Late Poems of Lu You", Ahadada Books, 2007.
* "Analects of Confucius" , 2007
*The Tale of the Heike , 2006
* For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku ofTaneda Santōka with Excerpts from His Diaries, 2004
* The Wild Geese ("Gan", byMori 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", byIkeda 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", byIkeda Daisaku ), 1977
* The Living Buddha ("Watakushi no Shakuson-kan", byIkeda 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, 1961Much 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 ofWilliam Theodore DeBary given to students at Columbia University.Notes
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 978-1-59376-110-3External links
* [http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/30th/bio/bw.html Biographical sketch]
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