Xu Yuanchong, China's most famous master translator, died in Beijing at the age of 100 on June 17th, 2021.
Xu Yuanchong was born in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, in 1921. He began to translate some works during his college years. In 1939, as a freshman, he published an English translation of a poem as his earliest work. Since 1978, Xu has published more than 100 translated novels, anthologies (选集), and plays.
Xu worked on translating for more than 70 years. He has tried his best to pass on the beauty of ancient Chinese poetry all his life. In his opinion, a translated work should be as beautiful as the original (原著). Instead of directly translating words from one language to another, he made the translated words clear and enjoyable to readers. In 2014, Xu became the first Asian
winner of the Aurora Borealis Prize for Outstanding Translation of Fiction Literature (北极光杰出文学翻译奖), which is one of the world's highest prizes.
Xu pursued (追求) the beauty of language all his life and his works have served as a cultural bridge linking the East with the West. His translations are so beautiful that English and French-speaking readers are able to better understand Chinese literature (文学). At the same time, Chinese readers can understand foreign works in the same way they would read novels and poems written in their mother tongue (母语).
