Jin Di, the translator of James Joyce's "Ulysses" into Chinese, will lecture on "Joyce in China: Tale of Two Encounters" on Wednesday, March 31, at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.
The talk will be given in the Hellems Arts and Sciences Building, room 267, at 4 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
Professor Jin is a visiting fellow at the University of Washington and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia.
Jin's talk will focus on the political, cultural and linguistic complications involved in bringing James Joyce, a complex literary icon of Western modernism, to a Chinese audience.
At the end of World War II in 1945-46, Jin was a translator for the U.S. Information Service. He later began graduate studies at the University of Beijing where he studied the novel "Ulysses" under the tutelage of literary scholar Sir William Empson.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, he served as a translator for the People's Liberation Army until he returned to academic duties as lecturer at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. He next became a professor of English and translation at the Tianjin Foreign Languages Institute.
Jin's appointments in Britain and the United States include fellowships and teaching at All Souls College, Oxford University, Drexel University, Notre Dame, the National Humanities Center, Yale, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington.
In addition to his translation of Ulysses, published from 1993 to 1996 in both Beijing and Taiwan, he has written numerous articles on the subjects of translation and James Joyce, and has spoken at gatherings throughout the world.
The Graduate Committee on Arts and Humanities and the departments of English and East Asian languages and civilizations are sponsoring the lecture.