Once an intelligence instructor, teaching intelligence operatives and code-breakers how to interpret Japanese battle reports, David Hawkes spent his later life with translating The Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦) into a less academic English version than the existing one, thus making it “enjoyable for the English reader”. From Wales, he continued translating Chinese literature. He died on July 31, and The Guardian published an obituary on Tuesday.
Tags: academic, Britain, China, education, expertise, history, international, language, literature, teaching, West, world
August 27, 2009 at 9:26 am
China Heritage Quarterly has published Hawkes’s inaugural lecture, which he delivered at Oxford in 1961. It clearly demonstrated the breadth and depth of his training, not just as an academian, but also as a scholar who had a profound understanding of what was truly beautiful of Chinese culture and tradition. I particularly admire him for his courage to live up to the promise he made at the conclusion of his inaugural speech:
“To conclude, then, our task is not the training of interpreters, nor the indulgence of exotic tastes, nor the revelation of some arcane Truth which the Orient possesses but we do not, nor the mastery of a sterile Asiatic scholasticism, but literature.
If universities ate (sic) not to teach language by means of literature—by means of books which are intrinsically worth-while reading, I for one do not want to be a university teacher.”
He shocked the academia when he resigned from his Oxford chair in 1971 to devote himself full-time to the studying and translating of Chinese literature.
This is the link to Hawkes’s inaugural lecture:
http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=012_chineseCMH.inc&issue=012
August 27, 2009 at 9:35 am
P.S. Published together with the inaugural lecture are a few interesting old photos, as well as copies of old manuscripts. One, in particularly, is of great interest to me. It was a photo shot of a calligraphy piece from the late Professor Liu Ts’un-yan 柳存仁 to Hawkes. Professor Liu, another great figure in Chinese studies, died 2 weeks ago (on 13 August) in Canberra.
August 27, 2009 at 11:20 am
[...] lost two of the best sinologists within a short space of less than three weeks. Shortly after the death of Professor David Hawkes on 31 July, one of his best friends Professor Liu Ts’un-yan was admitted to hospital in Canberra [...]
August 27, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Thanks for the link!