Yang Xianyi, Translator of Chinese Works, Dies at 94

November 28, 2009

Yang Xianyi, Translator of Chinese Works, Dies at 94
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Yang Xianyi, a translator renowned for his skill at rendering both classic and contemporary Chinese literature into English, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 94.

His death was announced by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.

Mr. Yang, who was given a lifetime achievement award in September by the Translators’ Association of China, was widely regarded as the greatest translator of 20th-century China. Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and later for his own company, Panda Books, he translated scores of major Chinese works, written from the 10th century to the present, into English, usually in collaboration with his wife, Gladys, who died in 1999. He also translated works by George Bernard Shaw and other English-language writers into Chinese.

Yang Xianyi was born on Jan. 10, 1915, into a banking family in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. After studying at a missionary school, he enrolled at Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 to study classical languages and literature. Three years later he met Gladys Margaret Taylor, the Beijing-born daughter of a British missionary, who was studying French literature at Oxford and later became the first person to obtain a degree in Chinese literature there.

The couple began working together as translators and, despite opposition from their families, married in China in 1940.

Mr. Yang said he considered his most important accomplishment to be the translation of “A Dream of Red Mansions,” an 18th-century novel viewed by many scholars as the greatest Chinese literary work in history. He and his wife began working on that translation in the early 1960s and finished it in 1974. When asked to help translate the selected works of Mao Zedong, he declined, citing work on “A Dream of Red Mansions” as his priority.

Viewed with some suspicion by the government because of his outspokenness and his family background, Mr. Yang, who belonged to the Communist Party, was imprisoned from 1968 to 1972 on charges of being a British spy. His wife spent those years in a separate prison, denied contact with him. The couple’s only son, Yang Ye, also a victim of political persecution, committed suicide.

The Chinese government eventually apologized for the arrests, and Mr. Yang remained a loyal Communist, although he was expelled from the party in 1989 after criticizing the government’s crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.

His autobiography, “White Tiger,” was published in 2000.

Mr. Yang is survived by two daughters, Yang Ying and Yang Zhi, and four grandchildren.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company