Eulogy for Dr. Maureen Robertson
Dr. Maureen Annette Robertson passed away on July 27 2023 in Stoughton, Wisconsin at the age of 87, in comfort and peace.
Dr. Robertson was a professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa from 1976 to 2017, and was one of the pre-eminent scholars of Chinese medieval women’s writing. She inspired and trained a generation of women scholars in what she entered as an overwhelmingly male discipline, forging ties between literary translation, comparative literature, and feminism. Her pathbreaking analytic work on identifying and magnifying women authors in the Ming and early Qing Dynasties – a period during which women were officially forbidden to be literate – was matched by the precise elegance and clarity of her translations; what one colleague called “her exacting words, a model of intellectual vigor and stylistic beauty.” She poured matchless energy into mentoring, and her advisees recall the tirelessness and generosity of the line-editing and compositional notes she provided, her house always open and her ear always ready. Her work and her advisees stand as a formidable legacy, the more so because of the forces arrayed against women of her generation trying to establish a space and a voice in academia. Being a scholar, a mentor, and a writer was her passion and her deepest calling.
She earned her MA from Indiana University in 1960 and her PhD from the University of Washington in 1970 as a student of Dr. Hellmut Wilhelm. Her dissertation was on the male T’ang poet Lǐ Hè (李贺), but during a year doing research in Taiwan in 1965 she was already laying the foundations for a life of work on women’s writing. This was, her advisors assured her, empty and meaningless work, because it was well known that women didn’t write in medieval China. Knowing this to be false, she nonetheless, in her own initial notes towards the very idea of exploring a literary thematics of gender, tentatively asked “of what interest is this topic?”. Unsure and finding no external validation, she made her own. By 1990, she was a senior figure in a small but prolific group of women researching the lives and writing of medieval women in China, who met that year at UCLA in the Colloquium on Poetry and Women’s Culture in Late Imperial China, and included Kang-i Sun Chang, Ellen Widmer, Dorothy Ko, and Susan Mann. Over her long career, she directly advised nearly 50 graduate degrees and sat on over 150 graduate committees.
Maureen was born June 15, 1936 to Pat and Peg (Ebel) Lahey in LaPorte, Indiana, and grew up in the industrial town of Marion. By her own account, she found life in small-town northern Indiana limited and somewhat stifling. She dreamed of things forbidden or inaccessible to women in such places: travel, languages, scholarship, mountains, the sea. She began to learn Chinese at Indiana University as an undergraduate and, after her MA there, was admitted to the Comparative Literature program at Stanford University. Forced by fortune to move to the University of Washington’s program in 1961, she nonetheless flourished in the Pacific Northwest, which remained foreverafter in her heart as a landscape of almost impossible natural beauty and inspiration. She threw herself into the intellectual bohemian life of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, married twice, and there her two children were born; Shannon in 1961 and Morgan in 1971. In the course of training both in Comparative Literature and Chinese, she achieved a level of fluency not only in Chinese, but also in Spanish, Farsi, French, Japanese and Korean.
After she completed her dissertation, the family moved to Rochester NY with her first academic appointment in 1973. Maureen was then hired at the University of Iowa by Gayatri Spivak in 1976, herself well on her way to becoming the transformational literary theorist and working on her monumental translation of Derrida’s De la grammatologie. Spivak’s vision was nothing less than subverting the male and Eurocentric tradition of comparative literature by hiring scholars who worked outside of Europe and who represented voices and approaches that counteracted the received purpose of comparison and translation: making the world legible to Europe. Maureen was part of this tectonic shift in how the world of writing ceased to orbit Europe and, furthermore, in how the act of translation itself was recognized as a literary art rather than a technical exercise. When Danny Weissbort retired from leading the Literary Translation program at the University of Iowa, and with the program itself under threat of termination, Maureen volunteered to lead the MFA program and find a new Director. What was supposed to be a temporary, uncompensated burden in fact lasted from 2001 to 2014, when she finally delivered the program safely into the hands of a permanent director. The book she researched and outlined but never found time to write, Colors of the Brush: Women as Writers in Late Imperial China, was lost to this commitment. But Iowa’s program is now the largest in the country, and the future of literary translation as an art and discipline is indebted to Maureen’s work.
Maureen’s physical strength and grace was not only an integration and extension of her intellectual strength, but part of what gave her the poise and discipline to navigate her career. A student of ballet from a very young age, she taught ballet to children in high school, and expanded her repertoire to modern dance in college and graduate school. Her training lapsed during her early career, but in 1981 she found and fell in love with the martial art of aikido. Aikido was, to her, a form of dance, of gracefully redirecting the aggressive energy of others, of conserving one’s center, and of avoiding conflict while remaining in control. She became a master, earning a 2nd-dan rank from the Hombu dojo in Tokyo under sensei Yasuo Kobayashi, himself uchideshi to the founder of aikido. The invitation to receive a 3rd-dan rank was issued but due to her health she was unable to accept. She especially loved using and teaching weapons, and in her 80s was exploring the art of kendo, a sword discipline. Security in her own strength was accompanied by a deeply mischievous and lighthearted private personality, and those who knew her well marveled at the impassive deadpan with which she could utter the highest of absurdities. A life in academia taught her the importance of observing, undermining, and finding the humor in pomposities of all kinds.
She loved the mountains and the sea. She loved graceful and powerful movement. But most of all she loved being a scholar. She is survived by her brother, David, of Cincinnati OH, her daughter, Shannon, of Mission KS, and her son, Morgan, of Madison WI, as well as by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
The epigram of one of her papers captures something she relished above all else: the baffled consternation of a man, sure of the order of things, finding that women have ignored an injunction and proceeded to find fulfillment on their own terms.
“Granted that pen and ink are definitely not the business of women, what are we to make of it when they do employ them?” —Xin Wenfang, Biographies of Literary Geniuses of the Tang, 1304.
What indeed shall we make? While the author saw only a barrier to be reinforced, an incoherence to be dismissed, Maureen saw a door she could hold open, joyfully.
Please pass this on to anyone you feel would want to know. Donations in her memory can be made to the Maureen Robertson Fund at the University of Iowa, which will support graduate-student focused activities in the MFA in Literary Translation to be announced formally soon. In the meantime you can find the Fund here by entering her name in the search bar.
Morgan Robertson mmrobertson1@gmail.com