Yang Xianyi

Who was Yang Xianyi?

Yang Xianyi was a Chinese translator, known for rendering many ancient and a few modern Chinese classics into English, including Dream of the Red Chamber.

Born into a wealthy banker family, he was sent to Merton College, Oxford to study Classics in 1936. There he married Gladys Taylor. He had two daughters, and a son.

Yang and his wife returned to China in 1940, and began their decades long co-operation of introducing Chinese classics to the English-speaking world. Working for Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, a government-funded publisher, the husband and wife team produced a number of quality translations. The works translated include classical Chinese poetry; such classic works as Dream of the Red Chamber, The Scholars, Liu E's Mr. Decadent: Notes Taken in an Outing, also known as The Travels of Lao Can, and some of Lu Xun's stories. His wife, Gladys Yang, died in 1999.

Yang was also the first one to render Odysseía into Chinese from the ancient Greek original. He also translated Aristophanes's Ornites, Virgil's Georgics, La chanson de Roland and Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion into Chinese.