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65 may - june 2006 | Literature
Liu Meizhu

Interviews with Yang Jiang

Ce document sera publié en ligne en texte intégral le 1 juin 2009.

Résumé

Yang Jiang was born, under her real name of Yang Jikang, in 1911. She is the author of a novel, several plays, and a large number of sanwen. Her first writing dates back to 1933, and her latest work, Women sa (We Three), in which she recalls family memories, appeared in July 2003, and has been highly successful, with 180,000 copies sold within two months. However, for thirty years, from 1949 to 1981, for obvious reasons, Yang Jiang preferred to devote herself entirely to teaching, research—she is also an expert on Chinese and foreign literature—, and translation: she is the translator, most notably, of the Chinese version of Don Quixote. She is now devoting herself to the publication of the work of her husband, the scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998). In France she is best known for her narratives of the Cultural Revolution, published by Christian Bourgois.

The two interviews that follow were carried out in 2005. Yang Jiang gave written answers to the questions I had sent her, which explains the slightly abrupt nature of our exchanges, given that it was not possible for me, by the nature of the interviews, to respond spontaneously to her words. If we seem to jump from one subject to another, it is because I had asked her to clarify certain details that I planned to use in my research into her work (« La Figure de l’intellectuel chez Yang Jiang » [“The Intellectual in The Work of Yang Jiang”], which became my doctoral thesis in Chinese Studies, under the direction of Isabelle Rabut, Inalco, Paris, December 2005, 404 pp.). Yet, to me, these words of Yang Jiang are of interest just as they are, since she uses words so sparingly and generally refuses to do interviews. In any case, and I am grateful to her for this, she only allowed these words to be published precisely because she had written them herself.

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Référence électronique

Liu Meizhu, « Interviews with Yang Jiang », China perspectives, n°65, 2006, [En ligne], mis en ligne le 1 juin 2009. URL : http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/document636.html. Consulté le 24 juillet 2008.

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