Tag Archives: Burton Watson

Burton Watson Named PEN/Ralph Manheim Medalist for Lifetime Achievement in Translation

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It is with great pleasure that PEN America announces today that the 2015 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation will be awarded to scholar and translator of Chinese and Japanese literature Burton Watson. One of PEN’s most prestigious lifetime achievement awards, the medal is given every three years to a translator whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of his or her work, and has been previously awarded to such distinguished translators as Gregory Rabassa, Edith Grossman, and Edmund Keeley, among others.

The winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal is chosen by the members of the PEN America Translation Committee, who are dedicated to highlighting the art of literary translation and advocating on behalf of translators. As the committee’s citation states, “Burton Watson is the inventor of classical East Asian poetry for our time.” Among other writers, Watson has translated the works of Chuang Tzu, Han-shan, Su Tung-P’o, and Po Chü-i.

Credited with making many classical Chinese and Japanese works accessible to the English-reading public for the first time, Watson’s translations also span a wide array of genres, from poetry and prose to histories and sacred texts. The committee citation continues, “For decades his anthologies and his scholarly introductions have defined classical East Asian literature for students and readers in North America, and we have reason to expect more: even at his advanced age, he still translates nearly daily.”

In 1982, Watson was a recipient of the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry by Hiroaki Sato (Anchor Press/University of Washington Press) and in 1995 for his translation of Selected Poems of Su Tung–p’o (Copper Canyon). PEN is thrilled to now recognize Watson for his valued and longstanding commitment to the art of translation, bringing great creativity and precision to his work and introducing great works of literature to a wider audience.

Watson will be honored, along with all 2015 PEN award winners, at the PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on June 8 at The New School in New York City.

Click the image for the full citation.

 

Open Letters Monthly Reviews Calligrams Titles

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literarymindandthecarvingofdragonsSteve Donoghue at Open Letters Monthly reviews three books from the “deservedly popular” Calligrams reprint series from New York Review of Books and Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, devoted to “writings from and on China”: Chinese Rhyme-Prose, translated by Burton Watson with a preface by Lucas Klein; The Literary Mind & The Carving of Dragons, by Liu Hsieh translated by Vincent Yu-Chung Shih; and The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, by Alfred Döblin translated by C. D. Godwin. Here’s a passage:

Chinese literature has one of the longest histories in the world; Chinese writers and poets and scholars were parsing fine points of rhetoric and prosody long before the Greeks had ever heard the song of Troy, and they were hotly debating critical fine points a millennium before the monks of Ireland wrote their first playful erotica with ice-cold fingers. The outflow has continued almost unabated for three thousand years, with major works spawning minor works and minor works spawning commentaries and the major commentaries spawning commentaries of their own. It’s an immense and frighteningly tangled bookish heritage.

For the full review, click on the image above.

Han-shan and the Cult of Translation

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The Poetry Matters blog has run an article titled “Han-shan and the Cult of Translation,” reading the various translations by Red Pine (Bill Porter), J P Seaton, Gary Snyder, Arthur Waley, and Burton Watson of a poem by medieval recluse poet(s) Cold Mountain / Han-shan 寒山. The poem in question is, in Chinese,

人問寒山道  寒山路不通
夏天冰未釋  日出霧朦朧
似我何由屆  與君心不同
君心若似我  還得到其中

and the article concludes,

This poem, as succinctly as few others, provides the link between these two distinct threads of Han-shan’s journey. It can also be said that, so attractive as a man apart from the world of men, this poem gives voice to Han-shan’s own personal contemplations on the matter, naming, as it were, what he himself felt about his social standing. This insight provides a toehold for those attempting to summit Cold Mountain and commune with its lone inhabitant.

Click the image above for the full piece.

Forthcoming: Burton Watson’s Chinese Rhyme-Prose Re-release

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Chinese Rhyme-Prose coverBurton Watson’s 1971 collection Chinese Rhyme-Prose will be re-released as part of the New York Review Books / Chinese University Press Calligrams series, with a short essay of mine as a preface. Here’s a sample of the jacket copy from the publishers:

The fu, or rhyme-prose, is a major poetic form in Chinese literature, most popular between the second century BCE and the sixth century CE. Unlike what is usually considered Chinese poetry, it is a hybrid of prose and rhymed verse, more expansive than the condensed lyrics, verging on what would be called Whitmanesque. The thirteen long poems included here are descriptions of and meditations on such subjects as mountains and abandoned cities, the sea and the wind, owls and goddesses, partings and the idle life.

Click on the image above for pre-ordering information.

Not Altogether an Illusion: Lucas Klein on Burton Watson

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Illustration from Feng Yunpeng's Jinshi suoAs part of a Translation & World Literature feature, World Literature Today has published my short article “Not Altogether an Illusion: Translation and Translucence in the Work of Burton Watson.” Here’s an excerpt:

Since Chinese poetry started being translated into English, poets and sinologists have presented poetry and sinology as if they were locked in eternal conflict. In 1921 Amy Lowell said, “Chinese is so difficult that it is a life-work in itself; so is the study of poetry. A Sinologue has no time to learn how to write poetry; a poet has no time to learn how to read Chinese”; in 1958 George Kennedy said of Ezra Pound, “Undoubtedly this is fine poetry. Undoubtedly it is bad translation”; drawing a distinction between the “poet-translator” and “critic-translator,” James J. Y. Liu wrote in 1982 that while the latter’s “primary aim is to show what the original poem is like, as a part of his interpretation,” the former “is a poet or poet manqué whose native Muse is temporarily or permanently absent and who uses translation as a way to recharge his own creative battery [and] write a good poem in English based on his understanding or misunderstanding of a Chinese poem, however he may have arrived at this”; and in 2004, against those who “believe that translations should consist of word-for-word cribs in which syntax, grammar, and form are all maintained, and in which the translator is merely a facilitator who allows the original poem to speak for itself in a new language,” Tony Barnstone posited that the “literary translator is like the musician who catalyzes the otherwise inert score that embodies Mozart’s genius. . . . Fidelity, true fidelity, comes from a musician’s deeper understanding of the music.” The genius of Watson’s translations is that they reconcile the rift between poetry and scholarship.

Click the image above for the full article.

Ocean of Poetry

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