Yang Jiang Dies at 104; Revered Writer Witnessed China’s Cultural Revolution

BEIJING — Yang Jiang, a Chinese author, playwright and translator whose stoically restrained memoir of the Cultural Revolution remains one of the most revered works about that period, died on Wednesday in Beijing. She was 104.

Her death was announced by state-run news media, including People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, a sign of the esteem with which Ms. Yang was held.

She and her husband, Qian Zhongshu, the author of the novel “Fortress Besieged,” were already acclaimed writers when Mao Zedong inaugurated the Cultural Revolution to root out ideological foes in 1966. At the time, Ms. Yang was working on a translation of “Don Quixote,” a formidable undertaking.

After deeming several English and French translations unsuitable, she taught herself Spanish.

“If I wanted to be faithful to the original, I had to translate directly from the original,” she wrote in 2002.

Ms. Yang had completed almost seven out of eight volumes of the translation when Red Guard student militants confiscated the manuscript from her home in Beijing. Like other foreign-trained academics and artists, Ms. Yang and Mr. Qian, both nearly 60 years old at the time, were consigned to “reform through labor” and sent to the countryside in Henan Province, in central China, where they remained for several years.

“I worked with every ounce of energy I could muster, gouging at the earth with a spade, but the only result was a solitary scratch on the surface,” Ms. Yang wrote. “The youngsters around me had quite a laugh over that.”

As the Cultural Revolution subsided, Ms. Yang returned to Beijing to work on “Don Quixote.” The nearly completed draft that had been confiscated by Red Guards is said to have been discovered in a pile of scrap paper and returned to Ms. Yang. Published in 1978, it remains widely regarded as the definitive translation of “Don Quixote” in China.

Ms. Yang’s other famous work is her memoir, “Six Chapters From My Life ‘Downunder,’” published in 1981, which powerfully recalls her years in Henan. Avoiding the melodramatic tone of many other memoirs of the turbulent Cultural Revolution, she relied on understated, sometimes wry prose to recount everyday life at the “cadre school” for purged officials and scholars: digging a well, tending to her vegetable plot, befriending a puppy. Her tone turned stoic, however, in recalling the suicide of her son-in-law, who had been subjected to constant criticism from his peers for showing reactionary tendencies.