I started dreaming of what it might be like to study traditional Chinese literature at the University of Chicago, where Dr. Roy still worked tirelessly on his translation. My advisor patiently helped me with reading through some of the novel in Chinese, one chapter per week for two semesters. It was the first Chinese literature that captured my attention so deeply that I found myself caring about the characters. Laughing at their jokes. Feeling sad at their deaths.
美國著名漢學家、芝加哥大學聲譽退休傳授芮效衛(David Tod Roy)20160530日於芝城過世，1933年在南京出生的他，於1982到2016年間，投注30年心力，完成中國四大奇書之一「金瓶梅」(The Plum in the Golden Vase)全五冊英文翻譯翻譯
Praise for Volume 1: "[I]t is time to remind ourselves that The Plum in the Golden Vase is not just about sex, whether the numerous descriptions of sexual acts throughout the novel be viewed as titillating, harshly realistic, or翻譯社 in Mr. Roy's words翻譯社 intended 'to express in the most powerful metaphor available to him the author's contempt for the sort of persons who indulge in them.' The novel is a sprawling panorama of life and times in urban China, allegedly set safely in the Sung dynasty, but transparently contemporary to the author's late sixteenth-century world翻譯社 as scores of internal references demonstrate. The eight hundred or so men, women, and children who appear in the book cover a breath-taking variety of human types, and encompass pretty much every imaginable mood and genre--from sadism to tenderness, from light humor to philosophical musings, from acute social commentary to outrageous satire."
One of the Chin P’ing Mei’s many wonders is how it immerses its readers into a complex, dizzying world of 16th century Chinese color, food翻譯社 smell, sound, song翻譯社 poem, and even a couple baojuan. In order to understand that world and faithfully render it into English, Dr. Roy had to first understand all the pieces that fed into the novel’s plot. As such, his office is packed, floor to ceiling, with thousands of books gathered in the years since his teenage shopping expeditions in Nanjing. Even a few from then.
美國漢學家芮效衛(David Tod Roy)於5月30日在芝加哥歸天，享年83歲。芮效衛是芝加哥大學聲譽退休教授，他曾用30年時間將《金瓶梅》譯成英文出書。
他是當代少數西方的“中國通”（old China Hand），“起首必須得老翻譯”然後正色道：“中國通”自認為是中國問題專家要很謹嚴，他們的一大特點是，對自己有多瞭解中國方面浮現謙虛，他們寧願不息地學習和瞭解中國，而不是以專家自居。
Sixty-three years ago, David Tod Roy was, as the New York Times puts it翻譯社 “a 16-year-old American missionary kid looking for a dirty book” at a used book store in Nanjing, China. The book? The Chin P’ing Mei (金瓶梅), a 100-chapter vernacular novel from 16th century China. It relates the intricate details of daily life a fictional polygynous family, including graphic descriptions of sex. The novel follows the main character, Ximen Qing翻譯社 from the time he acquires extreme wealth翻譯社 five wives, fame and sexual stamina to the tragic and graphic dissipation of his estate, family翻譯社 and life.A mere nine years ago, on 12/21/2004, I submitted the final paper in my first ever Chinese literature class. The paper was on my understanding of how Confucianism figured into the moral framework of that very novel Dr. Roy went looking for, all those years ago.
Crowning nearly 50 years of scholarship翻譯社 David Tod Roy翻譯社 professor emeritus in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, has published the fifth and final volume of his translation of The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei. The late sixteenth-century novel, written anonymously, is considered a masterpiece of Ming-era Chinese literature.
Since Princeton University Press released Roy’s first volume of the translation in 1993翻譯社 scholars have praised his masterful translation and painstaking research. Along with extensive annotations, Roy has provided the first complete European-language version of the intricate novel, which chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt middle-class merchant翻譯社 his six wives翻譯社 and his concubines.
This past spring and summer, Roy, 80, spoke about his lifelong affair with the Chin P’ing Mei in interviews and at a series of workshops with graduate students. His reflections—taken from those conversations—are excerpted here.
芮效衛1933年在南京出身，其父芮陶庵(Andrew Tod Roy) 是美國長老會在中國的傳教士。
數年後他的怙恃也從大陸去了香港翻譯
當朝鮮戰爭爆發後，他同他的弟弟被怙恃送回美國。他目擊了日軍飛機轟炸造成多量平民滅亡的場景。
在太平洋戰爭爆發後，芮效衛同怙恃在川。
An adventurous childhood
David Roy: My parents went to China as Presbyterian missionaries in 1930 and spent their first two years in Beijing attending an intensive Chinese language program. My father was very good at learning languages and eventually lectured in Chinese at the University of Nanjing as a professor in the philosophy department. They moved to Nanjing in 1932 and I was born there in 1933 in the Drum Tower Hospital.
Our family returned to the United States on furlough in 1936. When the Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, the University of Nanjing moved to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. We returned to China in 1938 and stayed in Chengdu until 1945.
I had a very adventurous childhood. In 1938–39 the Japanese bombed Chengdu, sometimes five or six times a week. Fortunately there was a very good air-raid warning system so we would spend the night in a dugout in our yard. Because of this the Canadian School, which I attended翻譯社 closed down and moved to the countryside. My younger brother [J. Stapleton Roy翻譯社 US Ambassador to China, 1991–95] and I were tutored by faculty members from the various universities in the city. We didn’t have any formal schooling between 1939 and 1945.
We returned to the United States while my father got his PhD at Princeton from 1945 to 1948. When we got back to China翻譯社 I went to boarding school at the Shanghai American School for the 1948–49 academic year. The civil war in China was going on and every few weeks the Communist armies got closer to Nanjing and Shanghai. My parents decided that since they had gone to China as missionaries, their purpose was to communicate their faith regardless of the political situation. Instead of fleeing from the Communists, they decided to see if they could stick it out.
The Shanghai American School had about 400 students when the school year started. Every time the Communist army moved closer, a certain number of parents would withdraw their kids and send them back to the United States or wherever they came from. By May 1949, when the Communists took the city, there were only 16 of us left out of the original 400. In fact翻譯社 I took my final exam in tenth-grade geometry the day the Communists marched into Shanghai.
In this second of a planned five-volume series, David Roy provides a complete and annotated translation of the famous Chin P'ing Mei, an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel that focuses on the domestic life of His-men Ch'ing, a corrupt翻譯社 upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. This work, known primarily for its erotic realism翻譯社 is also a landmark in the development of narrative art--not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context.
The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei翻譯社 Volume Two: The Rivals Translated by David Tod Roy.
Without a doubt翻譯社 I would not be where I am without Dr. Roy’s work.Just last month翻譯社 the New York Times published the article I quote from above: David Tod Roy Completes His Translation of ‘Chin P’ing Mei’
他曾經說他第一次接觸16世紀的中國小說《金瓶梅》是在1949-50年和怙恃在南京生活的時刻。
他回憶說，他和他弟弟在中國長大，他們花了兩年時候閱讀過所有3000多頁的初期版《金瓶梅》。
翻譯公司們台灣的佛光大學曾於20151214 舉辦芝加哥大學聲譽退休傳授芮效衛(David Tod Roy)贈書特展會很惋惜因故芮傳授沒法再度蒞臨台灣.芮教授的死使得國際間研究中國文學的人材翻譯社越來越少數,他是真實的中國通,從小在中國社會成長,歷經各種政權,戰爭,時空轉移,他都親自經歷事實,親身體驗到人世間的喜,怒翻譯社哀翻譯社樂,悲,歡,離,合以及販子平民的糊口和社會現實，芮氏的平生的年華是為中國而生而活翻譯社天成翻譯社們落空了這樣子的故交,不勝噓唏,人生少之又少的時期翻譯社在芮氏一生都親臨,希望他的下世投身為中國人好好ˇ的再度咀嚼.
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