WATANABE KAZUO

(1901–1975)

   Watanabe Kazuo was a Tokyoborn scholar and well-known translator. He started learning French in middle school and graduated from Tokyo University in French literature in 1925. Thereafter, he taught high school in Tokyo and then was employed at the Ministry of Education as a researcher, which took him to France from 1931 to 1933. In 1940, he was hired at Tokyo University, and during World War II he spent his time translating works by Rabelais and Thomas Mann. He received the Yomiuri Prize in 1964 for his translation of Rabelais’s The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (which was said to be untranslatable), and the Asahi Cultural Prize in 1971.