Yang Jiang
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- This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yang.
Yang Jiang (simplified Chinese: 杨绛; traditional Chinese: 楊絳; pinyin: Yáng Jiàng), bornYang Jikang (simplified Chinese: 杨季康; traditional Chinese: 楊季康; pinyin: Yáng Jìkāng) (born 17 July 1911), is a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She has written several successful comedies, and was the first person to produce a complete Chinese version of Don Quixote from the Spanish original.
Widow of the scholar-novelist Qian Zhongshu, she has written a memoir called We Three (我們仨), recalling her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan (錢瑗) (1937 – 1997), who died of cancer one year before her father's death. Another memoir penned by her is Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder' (干校六记), a lyrical and humorous record of the difficult times faced by Yang and her husband when they were sent to work on farms in the late 60s and early 70s during the Cultural Revolution. In connection with this memoir, she also wrote 將飲茶 (Soon to Have Tea), which was published in 1983, and, at the age of 96, she surprised the world with her latest work 走到人生邊上 (Reaching the Brink of Life), a philosophic work whose title in Chinese clearly alludes to her late husband's collection of essays 寫在人生邊上 (Marginalia to Life). She is one of the most famous Chinese writers and she is now 97.
Sharing her husband's sense of humor, Yang has also rendered the picaresque novels Lazarillo de Tormes and Alain-René Lesage's Gil Blas into Chinese.
Her sister Yang Bi (楊必) (1922 – 1968) was also a noted translator, largely remembered today for her version of Thackeray's Vanity Fair.
[edit] External links
- Some of her works on-line (Chinese)
