David Hawkes

Born in 1923, David Hawkes studied Chinese at Oxford University between 1945 and 1947 and was a research student at the National Peking University from 1948 to 1951. He was Professor of Chinese at Oxford from 1959 until 1971. From 1973 to 1983, he was a Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is currently an Emeritus Fellow of the college. He and his wife spent several years in retirement in Wales and now live in Oxford.

The Hawkes Collection, his personal library of about 4,500 volumes, was donated to the National Library of Wales in the 1980s. It comprises works in Chinese, Japanese and English, including Chinese language and literature, history, philosophy, religion and drama.

A renowned sinologist, David Hawkes translated the poetry anthology The Songs of the South when he was still a young man. His A Little Primer of Tu Fu is an authoritative study and translation of the best-known works of the great Tang poet. His signal achievement as a translator, however, is no doubt The Story of the Stone. In order to devote himself full time to this translation project, he resigned from the Oxford Chair of Chinese in 1971. The manuscripts of all three volumes of Hawkes' The Story of the Stone is in the RCT collection.

Major Publications:

  • The Story of the Stone: a Translator's Notebooks. Hong Kong: Lingnan University, 2000.
  • Classical, Modern and Humane: Essays in Chinese Literature. Hong Kong: Chinese
       University Press, 1989.
  • The Story of the Stone: a Chinese Novel in Five Volumes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
       1973-1986; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979-1987.
  • A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1967; Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks,
       1987.
  • Chinese: Classical, Modern, and Humane. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
  • Ch'u Tz'u: the Songs of the South, an Ancient Chinese Anthology. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
       1959; Harmondsworth, England & New York, U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1985.

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