Hamlet in Rhyme - A Modern English Verse Adaptation

赵锦文，1948年生。1977年冬参加高考恢复后的首次考试，次年春入浙江大学土木系，1982年1月毕业，获工学士学位。曾任浙江省住房和城乡建设厅正处级调研员，2008年退休；曾为中国译协专家会员、第五届理事、浙江翻译协会前副秘书长。

Born in 1948, Zhao Jinwen passed the first national college entrance examination held in the winter of 1977, after the exam system was restored, and entered the Department of Civil Engineering at Zhejiang University in the spring of 1978. He graduated in January 1982 with a Bachelor of Engineering degree. He served as a division-level research official at the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and retired in 2008. He was a specialist member and a fifth-term council member of the Translators Association of China, and a former deputy secretary-general of the Zhejiang Translators Association.

他的职业生涯与我国改革开放及世界银行融资项目紧密相连。1989年起，专职从事世行贷款项目管理近二十年，并兼任英语译员。三十余年间（包括退休后），长期为世界银行集团、亚洲开发银行、新开发银行等国际金融组织融资的工程提供英汉双向翻译，包括工程可研报告、招投标书及涉外法律文件等大量项目文件和法律文件，如世界银行与借款方之间的法律协议。这种长期的涉外项目管理与官方文书翻译经验，锤炼出他“对原文忠实、措辞简练、直译优先”的极致文本精准度与克制的行文审美。

His career was closely intertwined with China's reform and opening-up and with World Bank-financed projects. From 1989 onward, he worked full-time for nearly twenty years in the management of urban development and environment projects, while also serving as an English translator. Over more than three decades, including after his retirement, he provided long-term two-way English-Chinese translation for projects financed by international financial institutions such as the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank, and the New Development Bank, covering a large volume of project and legal documents, including engineering feasibility study reports, bidding documents, foreign-related legal documents, and legal agreements between the World Bank and borrowers. This long experience in foreign-related project management and official document translation honed his exceptional textual precision—"faithful to the source, concise in wording, and literal translation as the priority"—and his restrained stylistic sensibility.

即便退休后，他依然笔耕不辍。已出版的汉译英作品包括《绍兴文物精华》（上下册）、《为了一江清水——世行贷款项目的实践和启迪》以及《〈唐诗排行榜〉最佳百首＋英语韵译及名家译品选评》，以及汉译英《异质新译•白话韵体诗剧 哈姆立特》等。

Even after retirement, he has continued to write and translate without pause. His published Chinese-to-English translations include *The Cream of Cultural Relics in Shaoxing* (two volumes), *For the Lucid Water of the River*, *Rhymed Translation of 100+ Tang Poems with Comments on Selected Versions of Renowned Translators*, and *A New and Distinctive Translation of Hamlet.

不盲从权威、秉持思辨能力，是他性格的底色，也印证了母校“求是创新”的校训。近二十年的项目管理、逾三十年的工程和公文翻译，原本并非为翻译和改写莎翁剧作刻意规划，却在决定翻译时，积累自然就位。这部《Hamlet in Rhyme》韵体诗剧改写版和他的汉译《异质新译·韵体诗剧 哈姆立特》，正如他所言，是中国对外开放与世行合作进程中自然诞生的时代副产品，最终在合适的时机开花结果。

A refusal to follow authority blindly and a commitment to independent, critical thinking form the underlying texture of his character, and they echo his alma mater's motto of "seeking truth and innovating." Nearly twenty years of project management and more than thirty years of engineering and official document translation were never deliberately planned as preparation for translating and adapting Shakespeare's plays, yet when he resolved to undertake the translation, all that experience stood ready. *Hamlet in Rhyme*, his rhymed-verse adaptation, and his Chinese translation *A New and Distinctive Translation of Hamlet*, are, as he himself puts it, natural by-products of the era—born out of China's opening-up and its cooperation with the World Bank—and they have finally come to fruition at the right moment.