Bulletin Number Three 1984

Mr. Stephen C. SOONG Director, Research Centre for Translation Mr. Stephen C. Soong, Editor of the Chinese University Bulletin from 1969 to 1980, and currently Director of the Research Centre for Translation, is retiring in July 1984. The Chinese University Bulletin owes its present format, which was introduced in 1975, to Mr. Soong. The Bulletin staff would like to take this opportunity to wish him a happy retirement. —Editor Mr. Stephen C. Soong, who is retiring at the end of July this year after eleven years as Director of the Research Centre for Translation, first joined the University administration in 1969. He came here after a distinguished career as editor, translator, critic and writer-producer in the Hong Kong motion picture industry. He was born in 1919 in Shanghai, son of Soong Chun-fang, well-known scholar and Professor of Western Drama at Peking University (immortalized, perhaps a little unkindly, by Somerset Maugham in his sketch 'A Student of the Drama'). Stephen Soong himself graduated from Yenching University in 1940. It is hard to say which of his many literary skills is the principal one, and which has enriched the life of this University the most. He has published many translations and critical studies of translation (two widely read examples are his Chinese version of The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, and his brilliant study of David Hawkes' translation of The Story of the Stone). The great Chinese novel, The Story of the Stone, is closest to his heart of all works of literature, and over the years he has established himself as one of its leading experts. A recent anthology of Stone- essays reprinted in Peking contains no less than six of his writings (some under his pen-name Lin Yi-liang). He is familiar to readers in Hong Kong as a regular contributor to Ming Pao Monthly, and is a leading figure on the Hong Kong literary scene, where his discriminating taste and enlightened views are highly regarded. Many an aspiring young writer and translator has come to him for advice. All of this he has brought to the University, and with it a host of contacts in the literary and art worlds. Renditions, the translation magazine which he and George Kao have developed over the past twelve years, is one of his most enduring (and endearing) achievements. Its unique style has brought a breath of fresh air into the all too fusty closet of Sinological studies. Without Stephen's dedication and enthusiasm and his all-consuming passion for literature (whether creation or translation), Renditions would be a very different thing; without his never-ending quest for the mot juste, his earnest pursuit of some new project, the cloisters of the Institute of Chinese Studies will be less lively, it will be amore ordinary place. —J. Minford Dr. Frederick Hok-Ming Cheung Lecturer, Department of History Dr. Hok-Ming Cheung obtained his BA (1976) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, MA (1977) and PhD (1983) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The title of his doctoral dissertation is: ‘From Military Aristocracy to Royal Bureaucracy —Patterns of Consolidation in Medieval Empires'. For the Winter and Spring Quarters of 1980, Dr. Cheung was Lecturer in the College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, teaching Medieval World History. He joined this University as Temporary Assistant Lecturer in September 1980 and was appointed Lecturer in History in August 1983. Dr. Cheung published his first translated historical work, Professor Hajo Holborn's The Political Collapse of Europe in 1978. He has just completed a translation of Professor C. Warren Hollister's Medieval Europe. Dr. Cheung has started several research projects on the political and institutional history of medieval England, such as, 'The Political Role of Religion in Consolidating Medieval Empires', ‘The Episcopal Curiales of William I, William II, and Henry I', and ‘On King John's Magna Carta'. PROFILES 23