John Minford | |
|---|---|
| Born | 22 June 1946  |
John Minford (born 22 June 1946) is a British sinologist[1] and literary translator. He is primarily known for his translation of Chinese classics such as 40 chapters of The Story of the Stone, The Art of War, the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching. He has also translated Louis Cha's wuxia novel The Deer and the Cauldron (highly abridged in 28 chapters) and a selection of Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.
John Minford was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1946. The son of a career diplomat, Leslie Mackay Minford, he grew up in Venezuela, Argentina and Egypt, before attending Horris Hill School, Newbury, Berkshire, and then Winchester College (1958–1963), where he studied Ancient Greek and Latin literature. He is the younger brother of prominent economist Patrick Minford. At Winchester he took piano lessons with Christopher Cowan. In 1963-4, he continued his piano studies with Walter Kamper in Vienna, and from 1964 to 1966 with David Parkhouse in London. He entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1964 on a classical scholarship and obtained first class honours in Chinese Literature in 1968. He completed his PhD at the Australian National University in 1980, under the supervision of Dr Pierre Ryckmans and Professor Liu Ts'un-yan.[2]
He has held a number of teaching posts in mainland China, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. In 1982, he joined the staff of the Research Centre for Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, working closely with Stephen Soong, 宋淇, and eventually taking over from him as editor of the journal Renditions. His later positions included that of Chair Professor of Chinese at the University of Auckland (1986–1991)[3] and at the Australian National University (2006–2016), Chair Professor of Translation at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (1994–1999) and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011–2013). In 2006, during his tenure as Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at the Open University of Hong Kong, he was one of the founding members of the Civic Party of Hong Kong. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Chinese at The Australian National University, and Sin Wai Kin Distinguished Professor of Chinese Culture and Translation at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. In November 2016 he was awarded the inaugural Medal for Excellence in Translation by the Australian Academy of Humanities, for his I Ching. He now divides his time between Featherston, New Zealand, and Fontmarty his old home near Tuchan, in the Corbières hills of the Languedoc.
In 2020-1 he finished editing a series of six titles from Hong Kong Literature for publication by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. This series consisted of Liu Yichang's stream-of-consciousness novel The Drunkard, two volumes of selected poetry and fiction by P. K. Leung (Lotus Leaves and Dragons), Xi Xi's contemporary book of biji sketches The Teddy Bear Chronicles, the personal memoir Ordinary Days by Leo Ou-fan Lee and Esther Lee, and a compendium of Hong Kong essays from 1840 to the present, The Best China.
Minford was married in 1969 to Nickie Curteis, and they had two children, Emma and Luke. Nickie died in 1973. In 1977 he married Rachel May, the daughter of the noted sinologist David Hawkes. They had two children, Daniel and Laura. Rachel died in January 2015. Hawkes was also Minford's teacher at Oxford University. Together, the two translated Cao Xueqin's The Story of the Stone, with Hawkes translating the first eighty chapters (Volumes 1–3) and Minford the last forty (Volumes 4–5).
