Lucy Chao

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Lucy Chao (Zhao Luorui) was a Chinese poet and translator born on May 9, 1912, in Xinshi, Zhejiang. She married anthropologist Chen Mengjia in 1932. In 1944, they received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study at the University of Chicago, and Chao earned a PhD there in 1948 with a dissertation on Henry James. She then taught English and North American literature at Yenching University in Beijing.

Her husband Chen opposed efforts to simplify Chinese writing and was labeled a Rightist. He was sent to a labor camp in 1957, later banned from publishing after his return, and he committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. After his death, Chao faced mental illness.

Despite these hardships, Chao made important contributions as a translator. She produced the first complete Chinese translation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published in 1991. She also translated T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, and she co-edited the first Chinese-language History of European Literature (1979). In 1991, she received the University of Chicago’s Professional Achievement Award. Lucy Chao died on January 1, 1998.