Kyoko Iriye Selden

Kyoko Iriye Selden, scholar and translator, died in Ithaca, NY on January 20. She had an eye for beauty and depth, and approached language and learning simultaneously with rigor and humor and in a spirit of collaboration.

She was born in Tokyo on October 2, 1936, to a journalist father who reported from Paris and Shanghai, and a mother who briefly taught English at Toyo Eiwa, a Catholic girls' school. Kyoko studied with the calligrapher Kamijo Shinzan, attended Seikei High School and wrote a thesis on Wordsworth at Tokyo University. 1959 she crossed the Pacific by boat, and then the U.S. by train, and arrived at Yale to study English Literature on a Fulbright. During her years at home with children she grew tomatoes and peas, cut out a shadow puppet theater, painted a watercolor dragon on an upstairs wall, sewed for her daughters matching coats lined in crimson velvet, translated the works of music educator Shin'ichi Suzuki late into the night, and sight-read concerto transcriptions to accompany her children; on car trips she diagrammed light refracting. Then as throughout her life, she practiced calligraphy, painting, and music, wrote poetry and journals. At Cornell University she prepared new material every semester over twenty-five years of teaching, and retired only when her panoramic office view of Lake Cayuga was blocked by a new building. She selected works to translate that were linguistically rich and touched upon major historical and social issues. She wrote a comic sestina for her New York grandson, and taught her Portland grandchildren to sprout avocado pits. She broiled whole salmon to perfection for her friends and students, and her aspidistra always bloomed. At home she and her husband Mark Selden sat at desks placed by adjacent picture windows; sometimes they exchanged handwritten or e-notes, and then each would laugh quietly. They worked together over decades, especially closely in the last years.

Besides Mark she leaves behind her children, Lili, Ken, and Yumi Selden, and her grandchildren, Tetsu and Asuka Lakner and Kaia and Mathis Selden, as well as her brother Akira Iriye.