Yang Xianyi

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yang

Yang Xianyi (Traditional Chinese:楊憲益), Wade Giles: Yang Hsien-yi), born 1915, is 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 Oxford to study Classics in 1936. There he married Gladys Taylor.

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, a government-funded publisher, husband and wife produced a remarkable number of quality translations. The works translated include classical Chinese poetry; such classic novels as Dream of the Red Chamber, The Scholars , and Mr. Decadent: Notes Taken in an Outing (Traditional Chinese:《老殘遊記》); and some of Lu Xun's stories. His wife died in 1999.

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

He is also noted for writing doggerels. His auto-biography is called White Tiger, and was published in 2003.