There are two obituaries about the passing of translators in today’s Beijing News. One is Chen Bingyi 陈冰夷, who was a translator of Russian, and a founder of “World Literature” 世界文学 along with Mao Dun, and the other is Cai Hui 蔡慧, whose obituary I have translated here:

Translator Cai Hui Dies

Did not get to see his beloved new translation of The Gadfly published

(Cao Xueping reporting) Cai Hui, whose translations include Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead passed away in Shanghai from liver cancer on February 10th at the age of 77. Regrettably, he did not get to see his beloved translation of The Gadfly published, as this novel still has three years before it enters the public domain.

Rong Rude, co-translator with Cai Hui of Gone With the Wind said, “In this day and age, there are not many true translators of literature, and even fewer who make their living off translation—Cai Hui was one of them.” Before the Cultural Revolution, there was an editing house in Shanghai whose employees all engaged in translating foreign literature, and who all made a living on their translation fees. In the 90s, the translator Cao Ying suggested that such translators go to work in the Shanghai Cultural History Museum, so they would have a steady income. To them, translation was something that gave them pleasure.

Those who often worked with Cai Hui knew that he did not take directions from publishing houses on what to translate—if he liked a work, he would put all his heart into making a good translation, then send it to a publisher. Before he passed away, his thoughts were often on The Gadfly. He began a new translation of The Gadfly that corrected many mistakes of the old version. After he gave it to the publisher, he found that the Chinese copyright for this work had been taken out by Lijiang Publishing, and after negotiations agreed to stop publishing it after 100,000 volumes of its translation have been sold. This was a great blow to Cai Hui, as he would have to wait until 2011, when the work enters the public domain, for his new The Gadfly to reach readers. Before passing, he entrusted Rong Rude with this matter.

On Cai Hui’s translating style, many of his colleagues said it was “finely crafted through painstaking labor” (慢功出细活), which is precisely a quality young translators are lacking nowadays. Unfortunately, the reaction within China to his representative translation The Naked and the Dead does not live up to the hard work that was put into it. Zhang Jianping, the chief editor of the Shanghai Translation Publishing Company’s Literature department said that Cai Hui’s translation saved the editors a lot of work, because he is known for using authentic Chinese—often the original would be ambiguous in places, and Cai Hui would digest the meaning for a while, and come up with a clear, unambiguous translation. Zhang Jianping also said that the unmarried Cai Hui lived a low-key life, and during the 14 months that he was in the hospital, his colleagues wanted to go see him, but he turned them away, not wanting to waste their time.