Anthony C. Yu (1938−2015)—scholar, translator, teacher—passed away earlier this month, following a brief illness. As the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, Yu fused a knowledge of Eastern and Western approaches in his broadranging humanistic inquiries. Perhaps best known for his translation of The Journey to the West, a sixteenth-century Chinese novel about a Tang Dynasty monk who travels to India to obtain sacred texts, which blends folk and institutionalized national religions with comedy, allegory, and the archetypal pilgrim’s tale. Published in four volumes by the University of Chicago Press, Yu’s pathbreaking translation spans more than 100 chapters; an abridged version of the text appeared in 2006 (The Monkey and the Monk), and just recently, in 2012, Yu published a revised edition.

In addition to JttW, Yu’s scholarship explored Chinese, English, and Greek literature, among other fields, as well as the classic texts of comparative religion. He was a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Academia Sinica, and served as a board member of the Modern Language Association, as well as a Guggenheim and Mellon Fellow.

From the University of Chicago News obituary:

“Professor Anthony C. Yu was an outstanding scholar, whose work was marked by uncommon erudition, range of reference and interpretive sophistication. He embodied the highest virtues of the University of Chicago, his alma mater and his academic home as a professor for 46 years, with an appointment spanning five departments of the University. Tony was also a person of inimitable elegance, dignity, passion and the highest standards for everything he did,” said Margaret M. Mitchell, the Shailer Mathews Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and dean of the Divinity School.

To read more about The Journey to the West, click here.