Stephen Addiss is Tucker-Boatwright Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Art at the University of Richmond. His many books include The Art of Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Monks 1600-1925and How to Look at Japanese Art.Jonathan Chaves is professor and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. He is the editor and translator of many works, including The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry,and is the coauthor, with J. Thomas Rimer, of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing(Columbia 1998).J. Thomas Rimer is chairman of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His many… works include Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction,and he is the coauthor, with Jonathan Chaves, of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing(Columbia 1998).
Stanley Lombardo is Professor of Classics, University of Kansas.
Burton Watson, award-winning translator of Chinese and Japanese literature and poetry, was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1925. When he was 17 years old, he dropped out of high school and joined the Navy. He experienced Japan through his weekly shore leaves while stationed at Yokosuka Harbor in 1945. Consequently, Watson attended Columbia University and majored in Chinese and Japanese studies. In 1951, he received a Ford Foundation Overseas Fellow and returned to Kyoto. Watson received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1956. He has taught English at Doshisha University in Kyoto, and Chinese at Stanford and Columbia. Columbia University's Translation Center awarded Watson the Gold… Medal Award in 1979. Watson also won the PEN Translation Prize in 1981 for his translation of Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry. He won this award again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o. Watson moved to Japan in 1973, where he currently resides.