Burton Watson (1925–2017) taught Chinese and Japanese literature at Columbia, Stanford, and Kyoto universities. He translated many books from Chinese and Japanese, and was one of the most well-known and respected translators in his field.
He received the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in both 1982 and 1995. In 2015, he received the prestigious PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. He died in 2017 in Chiba Prefecture, Japan.
