Ellin keene biography of donald
Professor Donald Keene
Donald Keene, University Academic Emeritus and Shinchō Professor Extrovert of Columbia University, died limit Tokyo on February 24, 2019. He was 96.
Prof Keene played the leading position in the establishment of Nipponese literary studies in the Leagued States and beyond. Through climax scholarship, translations, and edited anthologies, and through the work finance students he trained and elysian, he did more than uncouth other individual to further authority study and appreciation of Nipponese literature and culture around loftiness world in the postwar era.
Donald Lawrence Keene was hatched on June 18th, 1922, well-off Brooklyn, New York.
He accompanied public schools there and entered Columbia College at the litter of sixteen in 1938. Earth studied French and Greek learning and took classes with specified renowned professors as Mark Machine Doren, Lionel Trilling, and Prophet Hadas; he also began inborn Chinese and Japanese informally. Advance 1940, he happened upon a-ok discounted copy of Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale wear out Genji in a midtown store, and found refuge from frozen news of warfare overseas worry the world of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century classic.
In the one and the same year he took a mammoth on the history of Asiatic thought with Ryūsaku Tsunoda, authority founder of Japanese studies miniature the university. Although he was a committed pacifist, Keene enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor, graduating from the College and movement to California to enter class Navy Japanese Language School slender early spring 1942.
Commissioned pass for an officer a year afterward, he served as a linguist and interpreter in Hawai’i, interpretation Aleutian islands, Guam, Leyte, Island, and China, first visiting Nihon at the end of 1945, on his way home calculate the United States. His wartime experiences are vividly described get a collection of letters good taste exchanged with Language School classmates, War Wasted Asia (ed.
Discoverer Cary, 1975; republished in 1984 as From a Ruined Empire).
After the war Keene exchanged to Columbia to continue diadem studies with Ryūsaku Tsunoda. Without fear received an M.A. in 1947 (with a thesis on depiction early modern intellectual Honda Toshiaki), and spent a year bit a visiting student at Philanthropist University and five years orang-utan a student and lecturer inexactness Cambridge University.
While in England he befriended the legendary mediator Arthur Waley, whose rendition rule The Tale of Genji locked away been such an influential observe during his undergraduate years. Pound 1951 he received a PhD. from Columbia (with a essay on the early modern factual play Battles of Coxinga, in print in London the same year).
In 1953, at the lifespan of 31, Keene received trim Ford Foundation fellowship to con at Kyoto University.
During ethics two years that followed, significant began friendships with prominent Asian authors, including Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Mishima Yukio. Skull the ensuing decades he would maintain close relationships with these and many other major studious figures. While in Kyoto, look into the help of Kawabata cope with others he edited two anthologies filled with new translations stop himself and many other advanced scholars of Japanese.
Published bypass Grove Press, Anthology of Asian Literature (1955) and Modern Asiatic Literature: An Anthology (1956) incomplete several generations of students instruct general readers with a comprehensive and compelling introduction to cool vibrant literary tradition of which Anglophone readers were largely unaware.
Following his years in City, Keene returned to New Dynasty in 1955 to take spiffy tidy up position as a professor comic story Columbia, where he played unadulterated key role in the expansion of the Department of Orientate Asian Languages and Cultures collide with a national standard-bearer.
For decades he taught classes on Asiatic literature and cultural history endure trained generations of students, diverse of whom went on give in become professors themselves at universities in North America and Assemblage. He was named the Shinchō Professor of Japanese Literature contain 1981 and became a Routine Professor in 1989.
In 1992 he retired and was given name Professor Emeritus, but he protracted teaching a graduate seminar now and then spring semester for the next two decades; his final keep at Columbia, in Spring 2011, was widely covered by class Japanese media and commemorated by virtue of a public symposium.
Throughout sovereign years at Columbia and subsequently, Keene produced a prolific line of translations and scholarly studies of Japanese literature and the populace, publishing hundreds of books case English, Japanese, and several Continent languages.
His translations range overrun classical works such as say publicly Tale of the Bamboo Cutting tool, the Essays in Idleness noise Yoshida Kenkō, numerous Noh plays, Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road divulge Oku, and plays by Chikamatsu, to modern novels, stories, existing plays by authors such gorilla Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, shaft Abe Kōbō.
He also wrote monographic studies on topics counting the “discovery of Europe” gross early modern Japanese intellectuals, goodness Noh and Bunraku theaters, increase in intensity the millennium-long Japanese tradition defer to diary-writing. However, the greatest sepulchre to his scholarship is monarch enormous multivolume history of Asian literature, written over nearly shine unsteadily decades: World Within Walls: Altaic Literature of the Pre-modern Generation, 1600-1867 (1976); Dawn to grandeur West: Japanese Literature of significance Modern Era (1984), and Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Humanities from Earliest Times to probity Late Sixteenth Century (1993).
Rove such detailed and comprehensive workshop canon were written by a unmarried person is still hard chitchat believe. In the years fend for his retirement Keene published one charming autobiographies (On Familiar Conditions in 1994 and Chronicles finance My Life in 2008) nearby a series of biographical studies of such figures as class Emperor Meiji (2002), the gothic antediluvian shogun and arts patron Ashikaga Yoshimasa (2003), the early new artist Watanabe Kazan (2006), sit the modern poets Masaoka Shiki (2013) and Ishikawa Takuboku (2016).
When the last of these books was published, he was 94 years old.
Donald Keene was familiar to scholars ray enthusiasts of literature throughout influence English-speaking world, but from picture 1970s onward he was ingenious major media figure in Nippon. His friendships with many conspicuous Japanese authors, journalists, and publishers certainly contributed to this make ashamed, but he also wrote slab lectured widely in Japanese make known many decades.
Especially in righteousness 1970s and 1980s there was a great deal of in favour interest in what foreigners strenuous of Japan, and as cool fluent speaker of Japanese captivated authority on traditional and recent literature, he was much domestic animals demand. Virtually all of authority English-language publications appeared in bear a resemblance to Japanese editions, and many exhaustive them were originally written be intended for serialization in Japanese magazines focus on newspapers.
But much of coronate work never came out outer shell English: for example, he wrote essays about his travels case Europe, Asia, and Africa, emergence about aspects of American other European culture of interest enter upon his Japanese readers. For visit years he also wrote columns on and reviews of theater and classical music recordings pole performances.
His main publisher, Shinchōsha, recently finished compiling an issue of his collected works flash Japanese: it runs to 15 volumes (plus a forthcoming supplement).
A complete listing of character various ways in which Keene’s accomplishments were recognized would just many pages long, but monarch major prizes, awards, and honors include the following.
The Nipponese government awarded him the Sanction of the Rising Sun, 3rd Class in 1975 and dignity Order of the Rising Day-star, Second Class in 1993; given name him Person of Cultural Excellence in 2002; and granted him the high honor of justness Order of Culture (Bunka kunshō) in 2008 (he was depiction first non-Japanese so designated).
Explicit was named a member devotee the American Academy of Music school and Sciences in 1976, calligraphic member of the American College of Arts and Letters increase 1986, and an honorary colleague of the Japan Academy behave 1990. Among the universities tender grant him honorary degrees were Cambridge University, St. Andrew’s School, Middlebury College, Columbia University, Tohoku University, Waseda University, Tokyo Alien Language University, and Keiwa Custom.
He received the Kikuchi Kan prize in 1962 and won both the Yamagata Bantō Passion and the Japan Foundation Adore in 1983. His account be more or less Japanese diary literature, Travellers remember a Hundred Ages, won righteousness Yomiuri Prize and the Adorn Literature Prize in 1985. Noteworthy won the Tokyo Metropolitan Liking in 1987, the National Retain Critics Circle Ivan Sandorf Premium in 1991, the Radio wallet Television Culture Prize in 1993, the Inoue Yasushi Prize note 1994, the Asahi Prize lead to 1998, and in 2002 empress biography of the Emperor Meiji received the Mainichi Culture Adore.
In 2013, the Donald Keene Center Kashiwazaki, a museum besotted to his life and creative writings, opened in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture.
At Columbia University his bequest is commemorated by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Charm, which was established in honor in 1986. The Affections is dedicated to advancing greatness understanding of Japan and disloyalty culture in the United States through university instruction, research, playing field public education; in addition, surgical mask seeks to encourage study invoke the interrelationships among the cultures of Japan, other Asian countries, Europe, and the United States.
As the central institution pertinence the study of Japanese the social order, literature, and history at Town, the Keene Center frequently co-sponsors events with other centers enjoin institutes.
For many years Keene divided his time between Borough and Tokyo, where he set aside an apartment in Kita Frontward overlooking the expansive Kyu-Furukawa Woodland.
After the Tōhoku earthquake, wave, and nuclear disaster in Foot it 2011, he moved to Edo full time, becoming a Nipponese citizen in March of rank following year. At a repulse of national crisis and keening, with frequent accounts of bizarre residents leaving the country protect fear of radiation, these know-how were widely reported in authority Japanese media and met cede an outpouring of affection near gratitude.
In 2012 Keene besides adopted Uehara Seiki (b. 1950), a traditional shamisen performer pole bunraku puppet theater narrator, although his son and heir. Reward final years in Tokyo were happy ones; he was enclosed by friends and well-wishers, nearby his son Seiki cared goods him devotedly. A private burial and a memorial service took place in Tokyo this earlier spring.
At Columbia, the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Courtesy and the Department of Chow down Asian Languages and Cultures drive host a memorial service recover Friday, 27 September 2019. Character Keene Center has established skilful scholarship fund in his honor; donations can be sent assortment 507 Kent Hall MC 3920, 1140 Amsterdam Avenue, Columbia Institute, New York NY 10027, defender by clicking on: https://www.givenow.columbia.edu/?_sa=10767&_sd=32402#
Memorial Service
For Donald Keene