Burton Watson is not the poet-translator largely ignorant of Chinese as Pound or Rexroth were. Since the 1970s, he has lived mostly in Japan; nearing ninety, he still spends hours each morning and evening on translation work. Born in 1925, he was first exposed to Asian languages growing up in New Rochelle, New York, when workers at the laundry his father went to gave him lychee nuts, jasmine tea, and illustrated Chinese magazines; later a high school drop-out in the Navy stationed in the South Pacific, he picked up some Japanese to help him on shore leave. After being discharged, he studied at Columbia University, both as an undergrad and for his PhD (completed in 1956), under L. Carrington Goodrich and Chi-chen Wang, and was later a colleague of C. T. Hsia there.
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His translations aim at readers looking for an introduction to Chinese literature rather than at specialists who want to test a fellow academic’s mettle via footnotes and bibliographies. Yet even as the scholar in him acknowledges that he can offer nothing but “one of a variety of tentative interpretations,” the translator in him nevertheless finds ways to make us, in Eliot’s words, “believe that through this translation we really at last get the original.”