David Tod Roy (1933–2016) was professor emeritus of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago. His monumental five-volume translation of the Chin P'ing Mei was completed in 2013.
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994"
"[A] book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late
Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers."---Amy Tan, New
York Times Book Review
"[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, in Mr. Roy's words, 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, 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."---Jonathan
Spence, New York Review of Books
"David Tod Roy enters with zest into the spirit and the letter of
the original, quite surpassing ... other earlier versions."---Paul
St. John Mackintosh, Literary Review
"Reading Roy's translation is a remarkable experience."---Robert
Chatain, Chicago Tribune Review of Books
"What Roy has already accomplished [in this volume] is enough to
establish his translation as definitive. . . . A tremendous
achievement."---Charles Horner, Commentary
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