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Burton Dewitt Watson (June 13, 1925April 1, 2017) was an American Sinology, translator, and writer known for his English translations of Chinese and Japanese literature. Watson's translations received many awards, including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1982 for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for his translation of Selected Poems of Su Shi. In 2015, at age 88, Watson was awarded the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation for his long and prolific translation career.
Watson left Japan in February 1946, was discharged from the Navy, and was accepted into Columbia University on the G.I. Bill, where he majored in Chinese. His main Chinese teachers were the American Sinologist L. Carrington Goodrich and the Chinese scholar Wang Chi-chen. At that time, most of the Chinese curriculum focused on learning to read Chinese characters and Chinese literature, as it was assumed that any "serious students" could later learn to actually speak Chinese by going to China. He also took one year of Japanese. Watson spent five years studying at Columbia, earning a B.A. in 1949 and an M.A. in 1951.
After receiving his master's degree, Watson hoped to move to China for further study, but the Chinese Communist Partywhich had taken control of China in 1949 with their victory in the Chinese Civil Warhad closed the country to Americans. He was unable to find any positions in Taiwan or Hong Kong, and so moved to Japan using the last of his GI savings. Once there, he secured three positions in Kyoto: as an English teacher at Doshisha University, as a graduate student and research assistant to Yoshikawa Kōjirō, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Kyoto University, and as a tutor in English, giving private lessons. His combined salary was about $50 per month, and he lived much like other Japanese graduate students. In 1952, he was able to resign his position at Doshisha, thanks to payment from Columbia University for his work on Sources in Chinese Tradition, and later in the year, a position as a Ford Foundation Overseas Fellow.
Watson had long been interested in translating verse. His first significant translations were of kanshi (poems in Chinese written by Japanese), made in 1954 for Donald Keene, who was compiling an anthology of Japanese literature. A few years later, Watson sent some translations of early Chinese poems from the Yutai Xinyong to Ezra Pound for comment; Pound replied but did not critique the translations. In subsequent years, Watson became friends with Gary Snyder, who lived in Kyoto in the 1950s, and through him Cid Corman and Allen Ginsberg.
In 1956, Watson received a PhD from Columbia for his dissertation "Ssu-ma Ch'ien: The Historian and His Work", a study of Sima Qian. He then worked as a member of Ruth Fuller Sasaki's team translating Buddhist texts into English under the auspices of Columbia University's Committee on Oriental Studies, returning to Columbia in August 1961. He subsequently taught at Columbia and Stanford as a professor of Chinese. He and Donald Keene frequently participated in the seminars that William Theodore de Bary conducted at Columbia.
Watson moved to Japan in 1973. He remained there for the rest of his life. He devoted much of his time to translation, both of literary works, and of more routine texts such as advertisements and instruction manuals. He never married, but was in a long-term relationship with his partner Norio Hayashi. He stated in an interview with John Balcom that his translations of Chinese poems were greatly influenced by the translations of Pound and Arthur Waley, particularly Waley. He also took up Zen meditation and kōan study. Although he worked as a translator for the Soka Gakkai, a Japanese Buddhist organization, he was not a follower of the Nichiren school of Buddhism or a member of the Soka Gakkai.
Despite his extensive activity in translating ancient Chinese texts, he did not visit China until he spent three weeks there in the summer of 1983, with expenses paid by the Soka Gakkai.
Watson died on April 1, 2017, aged 91, at the Hatsutomi Hospital in Kamagaya.
Translations from Japanese include:
Many of Watson's translations were published by Columbia University Press.
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