The Chinese literary scholar and translator Yang Xianyi has died at the age of 94.
Yang was renowned worldwide for his translations of Chinese literature into English. His best-known translations were of ancient works and classics such as A Dream of Red Mansions and The Scholar. He was also praised for translating the works of 20th-century essayist, poet and short story writer Lu Xun.
With his wife Gladys (née Taylor), who died in 1999, he worked for Beijing Foreign Languages Press. Together they became the first ever to translate Homer's Odyssey into Chinese. They did the same for Pygmalion, the stage play by George Bernard Shaw.
Born to a wealthy family in Tianjin in 1915, Yang studied at Oxford University in England, where he met his future wife. They returned to China in 1940 to begin their lifelong professional collaboration in the country's capital.
In the 1940s, the scholar helped the communist underground, but despite this, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) saw him accused of spying for the British, and he was imprisoned for four years.
He was an outspoken critic of the Chinese Government's bloody massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, leading to his expulsion from the Communist Party.
Yang wrote his autobiography, White Tiger, in 2000, and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Translators Association of China in September this year.
He passed away in hospital, reportedly of cancer, on Monday, November 23rd. He will be remembered by readers and scholars for his uncompromising integrity, and for bridging the worlds of Chinese and English literature.
29 November 2009
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