Gladys Yang (19 January 1919 – 18 November 1999) was a British translator of Chinese literature and the wife of another noted literary translator, Yang Xianyi.

Biography

She was born Gladys Margaret Tayler at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing, China, where her father, John Bernard Tayler, was a Congregationalist missionary and a member of the London Missionary Society and where from childhood she became intrigued by Chinese culture. She returned to England as a child and from 1927 to 1937 boarded at Walthamstow Hall in Sevenoaks, Kent. She then became Oxford University's first graduate in Chinese language in 1940, following studies there under Ernest Richard Hughes. It was at Oxford that she met Yang. After their marriage, the couple were based in Beijing as prominent translators of Chinese literature into English in the latter half of the 20th century, working for the Foreign Languages Press. Their four-volume Selected Works of Lu Xun (1956–1957) made the major work of China's greatest 20th-century writer available in English for the first time. In 1957 their translation of the Qing dynasty novel The Scholars appeared. The couple were imprisoned as "class enemies" from 1968 to 1972 during the Cultural Revolution. Their work on The Dream of Red Mansions, an 18th-century novel still read by almost all educated Chinese, was interrupted by their imprisonment, but their faithful, readable three-volume translation appeared in 1978. During the 1980s, Gladys Yang translated the works of other Chinese authors for the British publishing house, Virago Press, which specialized in women's writing and books on feminist topics. Later in life, the couple spoke out against the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and their unpublished memoirs were officially banned in China as a result.

Personal life

Gladys Yang died in Beijing in 1999, aged 80, after a decade of declining health. She was survived by her husband, two daughters and four grandchildren. Their only son had committed suicide in London in 1979. When the couple were identified as class enemies and kept in separate prisons from 1968 for four years, their children were sent to remote factory farms to work. Their son became mentally ill there and never recovered.

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