Yang Xianyi’s English translation of the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber is a monumental work still found in libraries and bookstores around the world. What makes his endeavor more remarkable was that it was completed during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when scholars were targeted for their interest in Chinese tradition and foreign learning. Yang, who died Nov. 23 at 94, spent four years in prison at the height of the upheaval, as did his wife Gladys, whom he met while studying at Oxford in the late 1930s.
The couple were devoted to scholarship, not politics. In the early 1950s, Yang declined a prestigious offer to translate Chairman Mao’s works into English, “much preferring to translate classical Chinese literature instead,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography, White Tiger. Yang translated works including The Odyssey and Pygmalion into Chinese, and he and his wife collaborated on rendering selections from Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian and stories by the 20th century writer Lu Xun into English.
But while Yang distanced himself from China’s power struggles, he couldn’t escape the chaos and cruelty of his era. His son killed himself in 1979 after being sent to work in a factory while his parents were jailed. Yang later denounced the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989. The authorities, perhaps more worried about student activists than septuagenarian scholars, declined to put him back behind bars.
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