This saddens me a great deal. I saw him speak years ago when only one volume of his Jin Ping Mei translation was out, and I wondered if he would finish. He did of course, and my attitude was a pretty obnoxious one for a reader of an author or translator to have, but also a pretty common one. As you can tell from this interview. it really was his life’s work, not an academic move forward in your career thing, and I am glad that he got to finish it and hear the entirely justified plaudits he got for it.
P.S. If you are interested, the whole thing is available as an e-book, if like me you increasingly tend to read novels as e-books.
