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Burton Watson

Burton Watson
Born (1925-06-13) June 13, 1925 (age 91)
New Rochelle, New York, United States
Occupation Scholar, translator
Nationality American
Education Columbia University
Period 1962–present
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 華滋生
Simplified Chinese 华滋生
Alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 伯頓 沃森
Simplified Chinese 伯顿 沃森
Japanese name
Kana バートン ワトソン

Burton DeWitt Watson (born June 13, 1925) is an American scholar and translator of both Chinese and Japanese literature. He has received 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 Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o. He also received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 2015.

Burton Watson was born on June 13, 1925, in New Rochelle, New York. In 1943, at age 17, Watson dropped out of high school to join the U.S. Navy, and was stationed on repair vessels in the South Pacific. His ship was in the Marshall Islands when World War II ended in August 1945, and on September 20, 1945, sailed to Japan to anchor at the Yokosuka Naval Base, where Watson had his first direct experiences with Japan and East Asia. As he recounts in Rainbow World, on his first shore leave, he and his shipmates encountered a stone in Tokyo with musical notation on it; they sang the melody, as best they could. Some months later, Watson realized that he had been in Hibiya Park and that the song was Kimigayo.

Watson left Japan on February 6, 1946, was discharged from the Navy, and 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 Chinese scholar Wang Chi-chen (王際真; 1899–2001). At that time, most of the Chinese curriculum focused on learning to read Chinese characters, as it was assumed that any "serious students" could later learn to 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.


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