David Tod Roy

David Roy described himself as developing an interest in traditional Chinese fiction. "I found out that the Chin P'ing Mei had a reputation for pornography because it contained many vivid descriptions of sexual activity - although they were no more detailed than its descriptions of eating, costumes, political corruption, funerals, and so on," he wrote.

He said "the book gives by far the most detailed description of everyday life in Chinese society that had appeared before that time. But I was a teenager so I was excited by the prospect of trying to read something pornographic."

In 1950, he found an unexpurgated version of the novel in a secondhand bookstore in the Confucian Temple area in Nanjing.

"From 1950 on, I continued to be a student of the Chin P'ing Mei. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I majored in history and studied languages and literature. I wanted to become a China specialist," he wrote.

He was then drafted into the Army while in college during the Korean War, and sent to Japan and Taiwan, where he spent a year listening to military broadcasts and reading handwritten Chinese transcripts. He left the Army in 1956 to be readmitted to Harvard and did his graduate work there.

David Roy then taught Chinese literature in translation at Harvard and later at Princeton. When he joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1967, one of the seminar classes he taught was about Chin P'ing Mei.

He started translating the book in 1982, and after 30 years, finished it in 2012. But he said he mostly had only the summers to work on it. And in 1999, he retired at age 65 so he could work full time on the translation.

When asked how it felt to finish after 30 years, David Roy said, "It felt great, mainly because I could thumb my nose at the people who said I would never finish (laughs)."

Contact the writer at chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com