Achilles Chih-t'ung Fang was a Chinese scholar, translator, and educator, best known for his contributions to Chinese literature and comparative literature.
17 Facts About Achilles Fang
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Achilles Fang then moved to the United States, where he took up residency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying and teaching courses at Harvard University.
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Achilles Fang was widely learned, and specialized in comparative literature, particularly in the studies of Chinese and German literature.
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Achilles Fang was born Fang Chih-t'ung into a Chinese family living in Japanese-occupied Korea on August 20,1910.
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Achilles Fang eventually left, with the help of a missionary, to attend high school at the American Baptist College in Shanghai.
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Achilles Fang subsequently majored in philosophy and classical studies at Tsinghua University, where he was one of the few friends of Qian Zhongshu.
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From 1940 to 1947, Achilles Fang worked for the East Asian studies journal Monumenta Serica in Beijing, first as editorial secretary and then as associate editor.
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The main content of Achilles Fang's work was to proofread translations in submissions to the journal, and he corrected errors with a scholar's meticulous zeal.
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Achilles Fang taught German during this period, both at Fu-Jen University and the Deutschland-Institut.
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In 1947, Achilles Fang moved to Cambridge with his son to work on the Harvard-Yenching Institute Chinese-English dictionary project.
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Achilles Fang 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 with a dissertation on Ezra Pound's The Cantos.
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Achilles Fang became friendly with Pound while writing his dissertation, and decided not to publish it for fear of embarrassing Pound over Pound's many errors in his use of sources.
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Achilles 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.
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Achilles Fang died of cancer in 1995, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
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Indeed, Achilles Fang was not the type to hold back criticism nor to offer undeserved praise.
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Achilles Fang's interests were catholic: Latin and Greek literature, a complete Patrology in Latin, works on philosophy and literature ancient and modern.
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Achilles Fang pursued congenial writers relentlessly: everything by George Saintsbury, all of Virginia Woolf in first editions, everything in print by or about Pound and Joyce.