Yampolsky was born in
New York City on October 20, 1920, and was one of a pair of identical twins (his brother, Robert, died in 1987). His grandfather
Franz Boas was an
anthropologist who founded Columbia's Department of Anthropology. Yampolsky took his secondary education at the
Horace Mann School and graduated with his undergraduate degree in 1942 from
Columbia College. He joined the
United States Navy that year in the midst of
World War II, which the United States had entered following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Yampolsky studied
Japanese, training as a translator in an elite group at the in
Boulder, Colorado. He rose to the rank of lieutenant and fought in the
Battle of Iwo Jima. He served under the Navy's Joint Intelligence Center. Yampolsky was awarded the
Bronze Star, being cited for his "meritorious service as a translator". In the late 1940s on invitation from the Library of Congress, he joined Columbia Librarian Miwa Kai to help catalogue seized Japanese books acquired by the library from the Washington Document Center. In 1954 he was awarded a
Fulbright scholarship to work on his dissertation on
Huineng in
Kyoto,
Japan, where he lived for the following eight years. The Fulbright scholarship supported him for two years; then, after a year on his own, he was employed by
Ruth Fuller Sasaki as an active member of a group of scholars and writers who studied Zen, including scholar
Burton Watson, poet
Gary Snyder and Japanese academics
Seizan Yanagida and
Yoshitaka Iriya. They worked on influential texts such as
The Record of Lin-Chi and
Zen Dust, which helped to popularise Zen in the English speaking world. In the summer of 1957, through his friendship with Snyder, he met
Kyoto Women's University student Yuiko Takeda, who became Yampolsky's wife the following year. Yampolsky returned to the United States in 1962 to pursue further study at Columbia. He joined the staff of the East Asian Library and completed his Ph.D. in 1965. In 1968, Yampolsky was appointed to the post of librarian of Columbia's East Asian Library, which was known as the C. V. Starr East Asian Library. It is one of the major such collections in the United States, with more than 600,000 items in
Japanese,
Chinese,
Korean, among others. Yampolsky remained in this position until 1981. Yampolsky was promoted to a full professorship of Japanese in 1981. He retired in 1990 but continued as a special lecturer until 1994. ==Translations==