XuYuanchong was born on April 18, 1921 in Jiangxi, China. He is best known fortranslating Chinese ancient poems into English and French. Xu took foreignlanguage studies at Tsinghua University after he studied abroad. And afterthat, he became a professor in English and French. Since 1983, he has been aprofessor at Peking University.
Xu'smother was well educated and good at painting. She had great influence on Xu inhis literature. His uncle Xiong Shiyi was a translator, who translated the playWang Baochuan into English, which was a hit in the UK. Xiong's achievement gaveXu a strong interest in learning English. In 1939, he translated his firstwork, Lin Huiyin's poem Do not throw away into English, which was published inthe Literary Translation News.
His30 poems were selected (选) asteaching materials by foreign universities. In 1994, British publishing companyPenguin published Xu Yuanchong's 300 China's immortal poems (《中国不朽诗三百首》). That was the first time that the publishing company had publisheda Chinese translation. Apart from (除……之外) translatingthe classical Chinese poetry into foreign languages, Xu Yuanchong alsotranslated many of the British and French classics into Chinese. Xu was awardedthe "Lifetime achievements in translation" from the Translators Association ofChina (TAC) in 2010.
Now,at the age of 97, Xu is still working hard at translating. He said, "I start mywork at 3：30 in the morning because Ilike doing what I like."
