Achilles Fang

Achilles Chih-t'ung Fang (; August 20, 1910 – November 22, 1995) was a Chinese scholar, translator, and educator, best known for his contributions to Chinese literature and comparative literature. Fang was born in Chōsen (Japanese-occupied Korea), but attended university in mainland China. After completing his undergraduate degree, Fang worked for Monumenta Serica, a prominent scholarly journal of Chinese topics. He then moved to the United States, where he took up residency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying and teaching courses at Harvard University.

Fang was widely learned, and specialized in comparative literature, particularly in the studies of Chinese and German literature. His correspondence with Ezra Pound significantly influenced Pound's understanding of Chinese subjects, and his doctoral dissertation on Pound, an attempt to compile all the classical allusions in The Cantos, remains an important source for Pound scholars.

Life and career Youth Achilles Fang was born Fang Chih-t'ung (Fang Zhitong ) into a Chinese family living in Japanese-occupied Korea on August 20, 1910. He eventually left, with the help of a missionary, to attend high school at the American Baptist College in Shanghai. He subsequently majored in philosophy and classical studies at Tsinghua University, After graduating in 1932, Fang spent two more years at Tsinghua as a graduate student, and then, within a period of four years spent in Nanjing and Beijing, was married, had a child, and suffered the death of his wife.

Monumenta Serica From 1940 to 1947, Fang worked for the East Asian studies journal Monumenta Serica in Beijing, first as editorial secretary and then as associate editor (the latter position he maintained for two years after leaving Beijing in 1947). He was dismissed for constant use of quotations from Finnegans Wake in his entries, and subsequently enrolled in Harvard's comparative literature PhD program, from which he graduated in 1958 (in Burton Pike's graduating class ) with a dissertation on Ezra Pound's The Cantos.

Fang stayed on at Harvard teaching courses in classical Chinese, Chinese literary theory, and art criticism until he retired in 1977, having spent thirty years there in one capacity or another. He died of cancer in 1995, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. In 1997, through a gift of "the students and friends of Achilles Fang," Harvard established a prize in his honor, "awarded occasionally to a doctoral dissertation on the traditional Chinese humanities or related cultural developments throughout East Asia that continues the tradition, which Achilles Fang exemplified, of rigorous textual research."

Publications It was said of Fang that "he knew everything, but published little." Aside from his dissertation, his most significant publication may have been his heavily annotated translation of ten chapters from Sima Guang's Zizhi Tongjian, published as The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms in Harvard-Yenching Institute Studies VI (1952). His translation and annotation of the Wen fu of Lu Ji is also widely cited.