Yang Xianyi
Yang Xianyi (January 10, 1915 – November 23, 2009) was a Chinese translator who helped many readers discover both Chinese classics in English and Western works in Chinese. He was born in Tianjin into a wealthy banking family and studied Classics at Merton College, Oxford, starting in 1936, where he married Gladys Tayler. They had three children; their son died by suicide in 1979.
Yang and Gladys returned to China in 1940 and spent decades translating for the English-speaking world. They worked for the government-backed Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and produced high-quality translations of major Chinese works such as A Dream of the Red Mansions, The Scholars, and Lao Can’s Travels, as well as Lu Xun’s stories. Yang was also the first to translate the Odyssey into Chinese prose from the ancient Greek.
In addition to Chinese classics, Yang translated Western works into Chinese, including Aristophanes’s Birds, Virgil’s Georgics, La chanson de Roland, and Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. He was nearly labeled a rightist in 1957–58 for his frank speaking, and during the Cultural Revolution he and Gladys were imprisoned for four years as “class enemies.”
Gladys Yang died in 1999. Yang Xianyi wrote poetry that some called light verse, and his autobiography, White Tiger, appeared in 2003. He died in Beijing in 2009 at the age of 94. After his death, his sister Yang Yi edited a collection of poems translated by the siblings. In 2022, a new edition titled Brother–Sister Translated Poems (or Translated Poems by Yang Xianyi and Yang Yi) was released, featuring more than 100 of their favorite poems.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:39 (CET).