Wong Kwok-pun

Who is Wong Kwok-pun?

Wong Kwok Pun is a Hong Kong scholar, poet and translator. He is most famous for rendering Dante's La Divina Commedia into Chinese while preserving the terza rima rhyming scheme, an approach no Chinese translator has ever tried to take.

He was born in Hong Kong in 1946 and grew up there, his original hometown being Guangzhou. He received his BA and MPhil from The University of Hong Kong and his PhD from the University of Toronto. He taught in the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature at The University of Hong Kong from 1982 to 1986 and in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University in Canada from 1987 to 1992. After being the Professor of the Department of Translation at Lingnan University, he is now teaching in the Chinese University of Hong Kong as Research Professor.

He is familiar with Classical Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, as well as Chinese and English. He studied for some time in Florence in order to better understand Dante.

One of his poems, Listening to Louis Chen's Zither, was selected into the Chinese textbooks for secondary school students in Hong Kong.