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 May 25, the New York Times reported. She was 104. Howard Goldblatt, the English translator of Six Chapters From My Life "Downunder", described the memoir as "deeply personal and broadly representative of the 'mundane' lives of intellectuals during that time."
During the mid-1960s, Yang was translating Don Quixote and "had completed almost seven out of eight volumes of the translation when Red Guard student militants confiscated the manuscript from her home in Beijing," the Times wrote. She and her husband were consigned to "reform through labor" and sent to the countryside in Henan Province, in central China. As the Cultural Revolution subsided, she returned to Beijing to work on Don Quixote. The Times noted that 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."