Burton Watson, the foremost translator of Chinese classics and poetry into English and my co-translator of the anthology of Japanese poetry "From the Country of Eight Islands" (1981), died on April 1 in a hospital in Chiba. He was 91 years old.
I knew Watson since the early 1970s, so allow me to call him Burt.
I came to know Burt because the publisher of my "Spring & Asura: Poems of Kenji Miyazawa" turned to him for an introduction. Andrea Miller, of the Asia Society of New York, had sent a batch of my translations of modern Japanese poetry to Chicago Review, and its student editor and poetry editor, Alexander Besher and Curt Matthews, decided to devote one issue to my translations. Then they started a publishing house, calling it Chicago Review Press, with the idea of doing a series of Japanese poets in my translation. "Spring & Asura" was the first.
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