At 4:35 p.m. Beijing time on February 7, 2022, Polish translator Yi Lijun died in Beijing due to illness at the age of 87.
Yi Lijun. (Photo source Weibo @ Embassy of Poland in China)
Written by | Miyako
In 2019, polish writer Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and as a result, her translator Yi Lijun gained more popularity among domestic literature lovers. As the Chinese translator of Tokarczuk's novel, Yi Lijun and her husband Yuan Hanrong (who is also a physicist) translated "Taikoo and Other Times" and "The House of day, the house of night", which was first published in 1998, and discovered the literary value of the Nobel Prize writer in advance when no readers paid attention to Tokarczuk.
"House by Day, House at Night", [Polish] Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Yi Lijun and Yuan Hanrong, Houlang Sichuan People's Publishing House, December 2017.
Yi Lijun was born on December 4, 1934 in Huanggang, Hubei Province, and was selected by Wuhan University in 1954 to study Polish language and literature at the University of Warsaw, Poland. While studying at the University of Warsaw in Poland, she met Yuan Hanrong in the Department of Physics, and later married lianli. It was also during her study abroad that she met many others such as Lin Hongliang and Zhang Zhenhui, who later became important Polish translators in China, and founded a journal, on which several people tried to translate some Polish novels and poems. After returning home, she worked for a while as a radio reporter, interviewing Eastern Europeans. In 1962, he began to work in the Department of Eastern European Languages (now the Department of European Languages) of the Beijing Institute of Foreign Studies and Chinese. In 2000, Yi Lijun began to recruit doctoral students, and was the first and only Polish doctoral supervisor in China. In the training of polish literature, many of the now well-known Polish translators are her students.
Yi Lijun was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Republic of Poland. (Source: Beijing University of Foreign Chinese News)
In addition to the well-known Tokarczuk novels, Yi Lijun also translated the Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz's "Ancestor Sacrifice", "Mr. Tadusch", "The Crusader Knight", "Fire and Sword" and so on, and has a monograph "Polish Literature" and "Polish Post-War Literary History", which has systematically studied Polish literature.
When Tokarczuk's novel was republished in 2017, Yi Lijun was already in poor health, and the editor of the publishing house was hesitant to complete a long interview when she contacted the media for an interview. At that time, she was 84 years old, but out of love for Polish literature and enthusiasm for promoting translation, Yi Lijun still did not put down the translation pen in her hand. In the same year, she also translated the short story collection "Elephant" by the Polish writer Mrowzek with her student Mao Yinhui, once again bringing an important Polish writer who was ignored by the public to the reader's vision.
The death of Yi Lijun is undoubtedly a huge loss for Polish literary translators. In 2012, she won the "Transatlantic" Translation Award, the highest award for translation of Polish literature, and in 2018, she was awarded the "Lifetime Achievement Award in Translation Culture" by the China Translation Association. After Tokarczuk's award, she also met with the writer himself, and during the chat, Tokarczuk found himself the same age as Yi Lijun's daughter, plus his work was translated by Yi Lijun, and Tokarczuk said, "I am also your daughter".