This talk explores debates over the translation and social meanings of ancient Greek and quantitative meter in two twentieth century Asian contexts: first, the cosmopolitan Indian ashram of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), a Cambridge-educated Classicist who became a revolutionary for Indian self-rule and a modern guru; and second, the writings of Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), Luo Niansheng (1904-1990) and others who pioneered the translation of Greek and Sanskrit poetry directly into modern Chinese.  Approached as part of classical reception history, the politics of quantitative and tonal prosody helps to clarify some of the distinct ways in which ancient Greece, India, and China were reconceived in comparative terms.

Tamara Chin is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her book, Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard, 2014), received the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Book Prize and Honorable Mention for the Association for Asian Studies’ Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize. She received her BA from Harvard College in Classics and Literature and her PhD from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature (classical Chinese, Greek, Latin).