Ba Jin

Ba Jin (Chinese巴金, Pinyin Bā Jin; born November 25, 1904 in Chengdu, Sichuan, † October 17, 2005 in Shanghai) was a Chinese writer, novelist, essayist, journalist, translator and anarchist.

Life

Ba Jin is considered one of the 20th century the most important and most widely-read Chinese writers. He wrote mainly novels. His real name was Li Yaotang (李尧 棠/李尧 棠, lǐ Yáotáng ) or Li Feigan (李 芾 甘, Liu Fangan ). Ba Jin has all his life fought unsuccessfully against the nowhere documented assertion that his pen name came from the composition of the name of the Russian anarchist Bakunin (巴枯宁) and Kropotkin (克鲁 泡 特 金). He comes from a rich and powerful family of scholars and was active after visiting a foreign language school as a translator of Russian and other foreign-language poet. At times, he studied in Shanghai and in 1926 in France. His literary work began in the 1920s. He was also active as a publisher of literary periodicals and publications and transferred foreign literature with the help of Esperanto translations into Chinese.

During the Sino-Japanese war, he was involved with Mao Dun and Liu Baiyu of anti-Japanese propaganda. After 1949 he was a member of the People's Congress. During the Cultural Revolution, he was regarded as counterrevolutionary and then rehabilitated in 1977.

Ba Jin was an advocate of the planned language Esperanto.

His literary work was the French and Russian novel, especially Chekhov, Turgenev and Émile Zola, affected. His novels express strong emotions, while he has never taken care of by his own admission to the artisanal side of his writing. His early works are characterized by a strong subjectivity and romance, while a critical and realistic train appears in his later works.

From 1980, Ba Jin was chairman of the Chinese PEN. In the 1980s, he was also chairman of the Chinese Esperanto Association ( Esperanto - Ligo Ĉina ). Since the 1990s, he was seriously ill with Parkinson 's disease and cancer.

The official Xinhua news agency praised Ba Jin "one of the greatest cultural masterpiece of modern China ".

An asteroid, the Chinese scientists discovered was named after Ba Jin.

Ba Jin died in 2005 a few weeks before his 101st birthday.

Works (selection)

• "灭亡" ( mièwáng, downfall, 1929)
• "爱情" ( aiqing, Love, trilogy, 1936)

• "激流" ( jīliú, Violent flow trilogy 1940),

• "火" ( huǒ, Fire, 1940-1945 )

Translated into western languages ​​works

• Ward Four: A Novel of Wartime China. ISBN 0-8351-2646-3
• Cold nights. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-518-03329-8
• The family. Oberbaumbrucke Verlag, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-933314-38-0
• Sha thing. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1981, ISBN 3- 518-01725 -X
• Autumn in the spring. Publisher Foreign Languages ​​Press, Beijing, 2005, ISBN 7-119-03625-4
• Ward No. 4 ( Dì - sì bìngshì "第四 病 室"). Publisher Foreign Languages ​​Press, Beijing, 2009, ISBN 978-7-119-06017-0. Translation: Alexander Saechtig.