CHARLES L. DUNLOP

DUNLOP--Charles Lane ("Lane"), an award winning translator of French poetry and of classic Japanese literature, died on August 31 in New York at the age of 76. He translated A Late Chrysanthemum that won the Japan-United States Friendship Award for Literary Translation. In 1997 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters recognizing him for the "assertive mastery that is evident not only in his fluent translations but also in his choices of texts." He graduated from Yale in 1957 and began a career as a translator first of French works and then pre 1960's Japanese literature. His first translation was Soap, by Francis Ponge. Ezra Pound had the translation read aloud to him by his wife and praised it as 'a flash of light among the shades'. Lane then studied Japanese and earned a scholarship to study under Ivan Morris and Donald Keene at Columbia University. His translations include The Paper Door and Other Stories, Palm of the Hand Stories, Autumn Wind, the novellas During the Rains and Flowers in the Shade, and the novel Floating Clouds. According to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mr. Dunlop's anthologies "introduce(s) the reader to a number of authors of great subtlety and power one realizes the richness of this fresco of Japanese life over the last century; and in conveying that wealth of observation, Dunlop never makes a misstep." His work has been translated into Arabic and Urdu.