Yang Jiang

Yang Jiang (; 17 July 1911 – 25 May 2016) was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.

Biography She was born in Beijing as Yang Jikang, and grew up in the Jiangnan region. After graduating from Soochow University in 1932, Yang Jiang enrolled in the graduate school of Tsinghua University. There she met Qian Zhongshu. They married in 1935. During 1935–1938, they went abroad to England for further study at Oxford University. In England, Yang gave birth to their daughter Qian Yuan in 1937. They later studied at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

They returned to China in 1938.

Yang also translated into Chinese three major European works of picaresque fiction: Lazarillo de Tormes (1951), Gil Blas (1956) and Don Quixote (1978). Her Chinese translation of Don Quixote is, as of 2016, still considered the definitive version.

She was also awarded the Civil Order of Alfonso X, the Wise for this by King Juan Carlos in October 1986. Her sister Yang Bi (1922–1968) was also a translator.

Her experience doing "reform through labor" in a "cadre school" in Henan from 1969 to 1972, where she was "sent down" with her husband during the Cultural Revolution, inspired her to write Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder''' (1981). This is the book that made her name as a writer in the post-Mao period. In connection with this memoir, she also wrote Soon to Have Tea (aka Toward Oblivion), which was published in 1983.

In 1988, she published her only novel Baptism , which was always connected with Fortress Besieged , a masterpiece of her husband. Her 2003 memoir We Three , recalled memories of her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan, who died of cancer one year before her father's death in 1998. At the age of 96, she published Reaching the Brink of Life , a philosophic work whose title in Chinese clearly alludes to her late husband's collection of essays Marginalia to Life . The novella After the Baptism , a coda to Baptism, appeared in 2014. On 25 May 2016, Yang died at the age of 104 at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing. The opening line for We three is:"This is a long dream of ten thousand miles. The scene was so real that it felt like a dream after waking up. But a dream being a dream, is nothing but a dream.""There is no absolute happiness in human life. Happiness always comes with worry and anxiety," Reaching the Brink of Life (2007) At the age of 96, Yang surprised the world with Reaching the Brink of Life, a philosophic work whose title alludes to her husband's collection of essays Marginalia to Life. Reaching the Brink of Life is a self-reckoning that may well be Yang's most personal book. The first half of the book is structured as a self-dialogue about life, death, and the afterlife; the second part contains an assortment of family anecdotes and reading notes—the fragments of a life. What emerges from its pages is not merely the predictable inward turn toward self-consolation of a learned person facing death; in Yang's declaration of faith and her insistence that the afterlife be 'fair' is an affirmation of personal metaphysics in a nation that has long promoted collectivism while discouraging religion and 'superstition'. "Body and soul is a twisted. Together with good evil."

Translation work Gil Blas Don Quixote Lazarillo de Tormes Phaedo''