Burton DeWitt Watson was born on June 13, 1925, and died on April 1, 2017.
He was an American scholar and translator of both Chinese and Japanese literature.
Watson received awards including the Gold Medal Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University in 1979, the PEN Translation Prize in 1982 for his translation with Hiroaki Sato of From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, and again in 1995 for Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o.
Watson also received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 2015.
Burton Watson passed away at 91 years old.