A photo of Yang Jiang taken in 2009 Photo: CFP

Yang Jiang, a well-known Chinese writer, translator and scholar of foreign literature, passed away at 1:10 am on Wednesday at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, the China Academy of Social Sciences confirmed to the Xinhua News Agency. July 17 would have marked Yang's 105 birthday.

A life well lived

Proficient in English, French and Spanish, Yang made a name for herself in the field of translation. She was the first Chinese to translate Don Quixote into Chinese in full from its original Spanish. She also translated Lazarillo del Tormes from Spanish and Alain-René Lesage's Gil Blas from its original French. Her translation of Don Quixote has been generally accepted as the best version to date and has sold more than 700,000 copies.

As a writer, the collection of her works We Three and her novel Baptism have been translated into numerous languages and sold around the world.

Yang enrolled in Tsinghua University to study foreign literature in 1932 where she met her future husband Qian Zhongshu (1910-98). Later famous for his novel Fortress Besieged (1947), Qian is considered one of China's greatest writers and used to refer to Yang as the "greatest wife and smartest woman" in his articles.

After their marriage in 1935, the couple went overseas to study at the University of Oxford and the University of Paris, during which time they had a daughter Qian Yuan.

After returning to China in 1938, she worked as a Spanish professor at Tsinghua University. In 1953, she was appointed as a research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In 1983 she published a memoir Six Chapters from My Life "Downunder" which recorded her family's life working on farms during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

After both her husband's and daughter's deaths in the late 1990s, Yang disappeared from public life to concentrate on her writing. In 2004 she published another memoir at age 92, We Three, which recalled her life with her husband and daughter, who had passed away from cancer a year before Qian.

At 96, she published a new work Reaching the Brink of Life (2008).

In addition to her writing, Yang also spent years organizing massive quantities of Qian's manuscripts, which were published in a 20-volume collection in 2011.

She was also heavily involved in charity. In 2001, she donated millions of yuan earned from her and her husband's writings to fund a scholarship at Tsinghua University to help underprivileged students finish their studies.

Controversy

Although Yang is seen as one of China's greatest translators, she has also faced criticism concerning her approach to translation.

Dong Yansheng, a professor of Spanish at the Beijing Foreign Studies University who produced his own translation of Don Quixote 14 years after Yang's translation, slammed Yang's approach.

Dong even used Yang's version of Don Quixote as teaching material in his classes to show students what not to do by pointing out what he felt were incorrect or inappropriate translations.

With his translation weighing in around 839,000 characters versus Yang's roughly 720,000, Dong believed Yang inappropriately deleted too much of the original.

Who will take the baton?

Recent years have been tough on translation as Yang's passing is merely the field's most recent loss.

Cao Ying, who translated a collection of the works of Tolstoy and was the first Chinese to translate Sholokhov's works, passed away in October at the age of 93.

Ji Xianlin, a world famous litterateur, linguist, translator and historian who was proficient in 11 languages, passed away in 2009 at the age of 98.

With the passing of these great masters, the question of finding qualified successors has become important. While translators of modern works are somewhat plentiful, who will carry the baton for older, classical literature?  



Yang thoroughly understood life and death... Now she has left the chaos of the world, all we can do is keep reading Yang and Qian's works and be inspired.

Zhang Yiwu, professor at Peking University

Her reserved and frank attitude was based on a confidence that said, "my husband and I are awesome. We don't need to brag about it, but we don't need to be self-deprecating either."

Zhang Jiawei, writer