Name William Francis | Role Translator | |
Books The Tyranny of History, Memories of Loyang People also search for Delia Davin, Zhang Xinxin, Sang Ye | ||
William (Bill) John Francis Jenner (Chinese: 詹纳尓; born 1940) is an English sinologist, specialising in Chinese history and culture, and translator of Chinese literature.
Biography
From 1958 to 1962 Jenner studied sinology at Oxford and wrote his dissertation about the history of Luoyang in the 5th and 6th century. His first wife was the China scholar Delia Davin.
From 1963 to 1965 he worked as a translator at Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. There he translated i.e. From Emperor to Citizen, an "autobiography" of the last Emperor of China, Puyi, and started translating the novel Journey to the West into English.
Since 1965 he taught at the University of Leeds, Australian National University and University of East Anglia.
From 1979 to 1985 Jenner travelled to China every summer, and worked on the translation of Journey to the West and other works, for example, those by Lu Xun. He has written about the process and politics of translating and publishing Journey to the West in an essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books (3 Feb 2016).
His most recent project is The History of China in two volumes.
Jenner has two daughters and one son.