(1) [The late] Donald Keene’s approach to teaching and writing bears the imprint of his freshman Humanities instructor, Mark Van Doren ’21 GSAS. “He was a scholar and poet and above all someone who understood literature and could make us understand it with him,” Keene writes in Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. “Van Doren had little use for commentaries or specialized literary criticism. Rather, the essential thing, he taught us, was to read the texts, think about them, and discover for ourselves why they were ranked as classics.”
The experience of taking the College’s general education courses was “incredible,” Keene says, and he fondly remembers the great teachers he encountered as an undergraduate. Among them were the “learned and gentle” classicist, Moses Hadas ’30 GSAS; Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38 GSAS and Jacques Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS, who led Keene’s Senior Colloquium; and Pierre Clamens, a French instructor “who was very stern, but gave everything to his students,” Keene says.
His chief mentor, however, was cultural historian Ryusaku Tsunoda, a pioneer of Japanese studies at Columbia whom Keene often refers to, simply, as Sensei. “He was a man I admired completely,” Keene says, “a man who had more influence on me than anyone else I can think of.”
As a senior, Keene enrolled in Tsunoda’s course in the history of Japanese thought. Fifty years later, in a CCT interview (Winter 1991) with David Lehman ’70, ’78 GSAS, Keene remembered: “The first class, it turned out I was the only student — in 1941 there was not much pro-Japanese feeling. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of your time to give a class for one student?’ He said, ‘One is enough.’ >>> — Jamie Katz
(2) Donald Keene ’42, a distinguished professor of Japanese at Columbia, was awarded the Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation — a career achievement award — by PEN, a fellowship of writers, at the PEN Literary Awards at Lincoln Center on May 20. David Lehman ’70, an accomplished poet, author and contributor to CCT, was asked to compose the citation, which was engraved on the back of the medal. Lehman said, “Eschewing a conventional prose testimonial, I decided to use a Japanese verse form that I learned about from Professor Keene. These are linked ‘tankas,’ a form combining a haiku stanza with a two-line stanza, with strict syllabic requirements.”
To Donald Keene we
owe much of what we know of
Japan’s verse and prose.
In shadow of rising sun
stood the tree unobserved.
Then Keene could be heard:
in accents lucid and keen
he rendered the scene.
And the bare branch of winter
burst into cherry blossom
from Columbia College Today:(July 2003)