Name Jonathan Chaves | ||
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Window to china xinyu one on one with professor jonathan chaves
Jonathan Chaves (born June 8, 1943), B.A. Brooklyn College, 1965; M.A. Columbia University, 1966; PhD Columbia University, 1971, is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is a translator of classic Chinese poetry.
Contents
Translations
He published the first books in English or any Western language on such masters as Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣 (1002–60); Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127-1206); Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568-1610); the painter Wu Li 吳歷(1632-1718; as a poet); and Zhang Ji 張籍 (c.766-c.830). Eliot Weinberger, in his book 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, cites Chaves among the 4 best scholar-translators of Chinese poetry in English, placing him with translators Burton Watson, A.C. Graham and Arthur Waley.
Awards
He is the 2014 recipient of the American Literary Translators Association’s Lucien Stryk Prize for his book Every Rock a Universe: The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing. His book Pilgrim of the Clouds: Poems and Essays from Ming China by Yuan Hung-tao and His Brothers was a finalist for the National Book Award in the translation category. He and co-author J. Thomas Rimer won the 1998 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature for their Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing: The Wakan Rōei Shū ( http://www.keenecenter.org/translation_prize.html )
Research
Chaves’ research has emphasized the relationship between poetry and painting in China, encompassing comparisons with Japanese and Western poetry and painting. He was invited to curate an exhibition on the interrelationships between painting, poetry and calligraphy at The China Institute in America (New York), which took place in 2000, and produced a catalog from that exhibit called The Chinese Painter as Poet.
Chaves also has published on Chinese-language poetry Kanshi in Japan. In 1997, he and J. Thomas Rimer published the first translation and study in any Western language of the bilingual (Japanese and Chinese) anthology of the early 11th century, "Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing: The Wakan Rōei Shū" (Columbia University Press). This won the 1998 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature ( http://www.keenecenter.org/translation_prize.html ).
He has also published original poetry, both in modernist style and in neo-formalist metrical forms with rhyme, in such literary magazines as IRONWOOD, 19 (1982, pp. 134–135), THE GREENFIELD REVIEW (Vol. 11, 1 & 2 double issue, 1983, pp. 145–146), and CHRONICLES: A Magazine of American Culture (May, 2009, pp. 12, 26-27; September, 2015, p. 17; and October, 2016, pp. 15 and 41).