Background
Hans H. Frankel was born on 19 December 1916 in Berlin, Germany. His father, Hermann Fränkel, was a renowned scholar of Classical Latin and Greek.
Hans H. Frankel was born on 19 December 1916 in Berlin, Germany. His father, Hermann Fränkel, was a renowned scholar of Classical Latin and Greek.
Hans attended Stanford as an undergraduate, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1937.
Because of the family"s Jewish ancestry, the Fränkels fled to the United States during the Nazi Party"s rise to power in the early 1930s. They settled in Palo Alto, California, where Hermann Fränkel became a professor of Classics at Stanford University. He then attended the University of California, Berkeley as a graduate student, earning an Master of Arts in Spanish in 1938 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Romance literature in 1942.
During World World War II, Frankel worked for the United States military as a translator of German, Spanish, and Italian.
Military commanders recognized his linguistic talents, and he was encouraged to begin studying Chinese. After the war ended, Frankel moved to China, teaching Western languages at Peking University from 1947 to 1949.
While at Peking University, Frankel met Chang Ch"ung-ho, a well-known poet, calligrapher and kunqu opera singer. He became an assistant professor of Chinese at Stanford in 1959, then went to Yale University in 1961, where he taught until his retirement in 1987.
He published a large number of books and articles on Chinese poetry and literature, and his translation of the Ballad of Mulan was the used in Disney"s 1998 animated film.