Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1999

Nils Gora n Davi d Malmqvis t Fil. lic., D . L i tt Born in 1924 into an artistic family in Stockholm ， Sweden, Goran Malmqvist grew up with a mother who read poetry and a father who was a painter. A keen interest in poetry and paintin g is a legacy that has sustained him all his life. Their apartment in Stockholm ， in the heart of the old city , commands views of an environment full of intriguing architecture: the classical and heroic bulk of the royal palace but a stone's throw away; the humane urbanity of the Academy buildings almost next door. After his army service, he entered the ancient University of Uppsala to study classics and Roman law, a goo d preparation for a well-paid legal career. Such is the winding pat h of human fate that after two years he abandoned law for anthropology and Chinese. Paradoxically, he found his true way by entering the thickets, with much bewilderment, of Daoist philosophy in translation. Fortunately, he asked the great Swedish sinologist, Karlgren, for help. Karlgren not only lent the young man his personal translation of the Dao De Jing but took him on as a student, an experience that gave him the feeling that he was working a t the forefront of research. After two years he coul d read classical Chinese with, as he says, 'some competence'. He won a Rockefeller scholarship to study in China in 1948. H e lived in a Buddhist monastery at the foot of Mt. Emei, where his love of rambling through the countryside doubtless proved useful for his field work on local dialects. This visit to China produced in hi m a life-long passion for Chinese culture. He also taught English to a very original young woman, the individualistic Ningtsu, later to become his warm and courageous wife. Leaving China in 1950 ， he graduated from Stockholm in Chinese in 1951. His university teaching career started with a lectureship at Uppsala. He was soon invited to join the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London , thus further broadening his knowledge and making new scholarly contacts. He left London, however, for Beijing in 1956, as Swedish cultural attache and interpreter. Althoug h his time at the embassy suggests he contemplated a career as a diplomat, he in fact secured another academic post, in the Australia n National University, Canberra, rapidly gaining the rank of professor. He became head of Chinese and then dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Malmqvist had gained Australian, indeed interaational, academic recognition. After his return to Sweden, he became in 1965 professor Chinese University Bulletin Spring • Summer 1999