RIJS People
Faculty
Edwin Cranston
cranston@fas.harvard.edu
Professor of Japanese Literature
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ealc
He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on October 18, 1932; lived on a farm until the age of ten; went West to Arizona with his parents; attended school and the University of Arizona in Tucson; and received his B.A. in English there in 1954. He then served four years in the Navy before beginning graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley in 1958. He transferred to Stanford University in 1962 and earned a Ph.D. in Japanese literature in 1966. His Harvard career began in 1965. His main interest has been poetry, which he translates and writes. His revised dissertation was published in the Harvard-Yenching Monograph Series in 1969 under the title, The Izumi Shikibu Diary: A Romance of the Heian Court. In 1993, Stanford University Press brought out a compendium of his translations of Japanese poetry as A Waka Anthology, Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup, which received the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Prize. At present he is translating the work of poet Mizuno Ruriko, and his A Waka Anthology, Volume Two: Grasses of Remembrance is in the editorial process at Stanford University Press.
