2 Ba Jin as Translator

For more than half a century, Ba Jin devoted himself to translating: his beginning in the field goes back to 1922, and he persevered in this activity until the end of the 1970s, the greater part of this task having been achieved nevertheless before 1949. While he dealt with a work of fiction to start with, which he himself ended up forgetting about, he concentrated for a long time simply on the political domain. Ba Jin spent an important part of his energy in translating. While his complete works, Ba Jin quanji 巴金全集 form twenty-six volumes, his complete translated works, Ba Jin yiwen quanji 巴金譯文全集, total no less than ten (Ba 1997). Ba Jin was a scrupulous translator: when he had recourse to several translations of the same work, it was indeed to make up for his eventual linguistic lacunae. Keywords: Ba Jin; Ba Jin quanji ; modern China; translator