Lucy Zhao (1912-1998)
Lucy Zhao was born in 1912 in Suzhou. In 1928, at the age of sixteen, she entered Yenching University to read Chinese and began to study English Literature two years later. In 1932, she continued her study at Tsinghua University. Between 1944 and 1948, she studied for her Master's degree at the University of Chicago. Upon graduation, she returned to China and taught at Yenching University and then at the Department of Foreign Languages & Literature of Peking University. She visited the Research Centre for Translation, CUHK as Honorary Renditions Fellow in 1993.
Lucy Zhao was a prolific translator who made her mark in her twenties with her rendition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. She is also the translator of such important American poets as Emily Dickinson, H.W. Longfellow and Walt Whitman. During the Anti-Japanese War, she wrote a number of prose pieces and poems. She has conducted research on influential 19th—and 20th—century writers including Byron, Shelley, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Hardy. From 1978 onwards she focussed her research on American literature. She taught at the English Department of Peking University until her death in 1998.
Included in the exhibits is a revised edition of Lucy Zhao's translation of The Waste Land published in 1995. This is the only existing manuscript of her work on T.S. Eliot.