David Tod Roy
David Tod Roy (
Early life
Roy's parents were
After the war, Roy attended the
In the summer of 1950, Roy returned to the United States and lived with his aunt, Jean Roy Robertson, and uncle in Merion, outside Philadelphia. He entered Friends' Central School there, although Derk Bodde, a sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, also accepted him into his graduate seminar in classical Chinese, where Roy was the only student. Bodde recommended that Roy apply to Harvard, one of the few North American universities with a Chinese program. [4] Roy entered but failed German, and did not attend other classes. He was asked to leave, then joined the United States Army during the Korean War.[5] While in the Army he was stationed in Japan and Taiwan, where he improved his Chinese even further by deciphering the handwritten notes of his Chinese colleagues. [4]
He returned to Harvard to finish his undergraduate degree and went on to graduate work in Chinese studies. In 1958 he was made a member of Harvard's prestigious
Translating Jin Ping Mei
Roy's interest in Jin Ping Mei began when he was still in China. He recalled that, as a teenage boy, he was attracted by its reputation of being pornographic, but "when I tried to read it I discovered there was much more to it than that."
Roy's graduate seminar on the novel took two years to read through the entire 3,000 pages of the earliest edition. He and his students saw that the novel contained abundant but unidentified quotations from earlier works. Roy spent several years making an index for every line of poetry, proverb, or drama in the text, filling more than 10,000 three-by-five file cards. He then set out to read all of the works that were in print before the novel was compiled; this index allowed him to identify a great number of the quotations and allusions that earlier scholars had not known.[2]
The translation was warmly greeted upon its publication.
The scholar Perry Link, reviewing the last volume to appear (also in the New York Review of Books), wrote that "Roy can point to a life’s work of enviable concreteness: 3,493 pages, five volumes, and 13.5 pounds, the world’s only translation of 'everything,' as he puts it, in a huge and heterogeneous novel that has crucial importance in Chinese literary tradition."[7]
Link added that Roy may have overestimated the novel. When Roy defends it "by calling it a 'work in progress,' he recalls for me G. K. Chesterton’s insight that 'if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly'. The first airplane didn’t soar, either, but it’s very good that someone got a prototype off the ground.... What does it matter if the author of Chin P’ing Mei might be less than Flaubert? Why should anyone have to feel defensive?"[7]
Personal life
David Roy married Barbara Chew in 1967, while he was teaching at Princeton.[8]
He was diagnosed with
Major publications
- The Plum in the Golden Vase (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993–2013, 5 vols. Vol 2)
- Ancient China: Studies in Early Civilization (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978, with Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, eds.)
- Kuo Mo-Jo: The Early Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Harvard East Asian Series, 55, 1971)
Notes
- ^ a b Spence (1994).
- ^ a b c Rong (2014).
- ^ a b c Station (2013).
- ^ a b c Nappi (2013).
- ^ a b Kahn (2016).
- ^ Luo (2014).
- ^ a b Link (2015).
- ^ "David Tod Roy, 83 Archived 2017-01-09 at the Wayback Machine," Hyde Park Herald June 8, 2016
- ^ Schuessler (2013).
- ^ People's Daily (2016).
- ^ "David Tod Roy, 83 Archived 2017-01-09 at the Wayback Machine," Hyde Park Herald June 8, 2016
References
- "美国汉学家芮效卫辞世 曾用30年时间翻译". People's Daily (in Chinese). June 1, 2016.
- Link, Perry (April 23, 2015). "The Wonderfully Elusive Chinese Novel". The New York Review of Books.
- Luo, Junjie (2014). "Translating Jin Ping Mei: A Preliminary Comparison of the Golden Lotus and the Plum in the Golden Vase". Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. 22 (1): 56–74. S2CID 171066038.
- Kahn, Harold L. (June 12, 2016), "David Tod Roy: An Appreciation", Late Imperial China, archived from the original on September 17, 2016, retrieved August 29, 2016
- Nappi, Carla (December 2013). "(Interview with David Roy)". New Books Network.
- Rong, Xiaoqing (March 30, 2014). "My Life: David Tod Roy". South China Morning Post.
- Schuessler, Jennifer (November 18, 2013). "An Old Chinese Novel Is Racy Reading Still: David Tod Roy Completes His Translation of 'Chin P'ing Mei'". The New York Times.
- Spence, Jonathan (June 23, 1994). "Remembrance of Ming's Past". The New York Review of Books.; online at NYRB China Archive "Remembrance of Ming's Past".
- Station, Elizabeth (2013). "A Lifetime Fascination". Tableau. University of Chicago.
External links
- The David Tod Roy Collection, Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame.
- David Tod Roy, translator of Chinese literary classic, 1933–2016, UChicago News, 8 June 2016.