Author Archives: corff

Obituary: Igor de Rachewiltz (1929–2016)

Igor de Rachewiltz, April 11, 1929 – July 30, 2016, of Italy, born in Rome to a family with Longobard and Tatar ancestry, started his academic career with law, yet soon switched to Oriental studies (Naples, Italy) and earned his PhD in Australia (Australian National University, Canberra) in 1961. His subject at that time nominally was Chinese history, but his perception of the subject was much broader and shifted to Mongolia. If, in any conceivable case, there were an idea of something like a last word in science, then his acclaimed translation of “The Secret History of the Mongols” (published over 14 years from 1971 to 1985, and finally published in one piece 2004) deserves this merit.

Being an occasional contributor to the PIAC, he enjoyed the command of a renaissance mind enlightened and honed by a unique combination of Western and Oriental civilizations; thus he was able to combine fields seemingly widely apart into one treatise, like the title of his paper of 1985 “Dante’s Aleppe: A Tartar Word in Tartarus?” demonstrates. He was awarded the Indiana University Prize for Altaic Studies in 2004.

Those who had the priviledge to meet him praise his charming and warm-hearted personality. He never really could hide his youthful curiosity and humour, making conversations with him a lasting memory.

 

Oliver Corff, August 19th, 2016.

Obituary: Charles Roskelly Bawden (1924–2016)

Charles Roskelly Bawden FBA (22 April 1924 – 11 August 2016), Emeritus Professor of Mongolian, University of London, died after short illness, aged 92. He was an outstanding scholar whose research on Mongolia encompassed a broad range of subjects from medieval history to contemporary affairs, both religious and worldly, like “The modern history of Mongolia” (1968, 2nd rev. ed. 1989). He edited and published numerous classical Mongolian texts, like Lomi’s “Mongġol borǰigid oboġ-un teüke” of 1732 (with Walther Heissig, published 1957) and also wrote about philological issues, e.g. “Mongolian in Tibetan Script” (1960). Perhaps his most famous, and most read, yet probably not necessarily most frequently quoted work is the “Mongolian-English Dictionary” (published 1997). Besides these works, he also compiled an anthology of Mongolian traditional literature (2003) and continued to publish until just a few years ago.

A graduate student of Denis Sinor in Cambridge and a personal friend of Walther Heissig, he was an active participant in the early years of the PIAC who participated in virtually every meeting between 1958 and 1966. He was awarded the Indiana University Prize for Altaic Studies in 2012, a late acknowledgement of his lifelong contributions to the broader field of Mongolian and Inner Asian studies.

 

Oliver Corff, August 19th, 2016.

The Collected Works of Hidehiro Okada, Vol. VIII

Dear Reader,

It is the editor’s distinguished pleasure to announce that the VIIIth volume of The Collected Works by Prof. Hidehiro Okada is now available. Published by Fujiwara-shoten (ISBN: 978-4-86578-076-5)  in Japan, this volume is in great part dedicated to the PIAC. Its title reads (in Japanese and English): Sixty Years in Eurasian Studies of the World. The title illustration shows the original PIAC medal (Indiana University Prize for Altaic Studies) which Prof. Okada was awarded in 1999. Prof. Okada was also the President of the 38th Annual Meeting held in Kawasaki, Japan, in 1995.

This volume deserves a dedicated announcement as Prof. Okada participated in his first annual meeting of the PIAC more than 50 years ago, as early as 1964 at the age of 33. The first part of this volume, approx. 200 pages, contains 16 detailed reports of PIAC meetings between 1964 and 1998 he participated in. It should be mentioned that Prof. Okada continued to participate in PIAC meetings even after 1998.

One further information is worth sharing here. The book couldn’t be more up to date as even the 59th Meeting which took place in Turkey in June/July 2016 is mentioned in the introduction.

Oliver Corff.

Previous Meetings: 29th Meeting Tashkent, 1986

Dear Reader,

While the list of abstracts of Soviet contributions to this Meeting has been available for a while, there is now also a table of contents of Turkish contributions: those which appeared in Turkey, and a selection of those which were also translated into Russian and appeared in Sovyetskaya Türkologiya.

That meeting was a very special one, not only for the complex political environment of Western-Soviet relations of the time, but also for its sheer size: a total of 270 participants is reported. For the record, I decided to reproduce the keynote by Denis Sinor as well as the opening remarks on behalf of the delegation from Turkey by Zeynep Korkmaz.

Oliver Corff.