I immediately consulted the opinion of scholars and came up with several proposals. I chose The Fall of an Angelas I liked its impeccable satirical flavor that the reader experienced while reading and continued to remember afterwards, and its ancient, but also fresh and universal, theme. A friend warned me about the difficulty of this translation, but I was prepared to face the challenge. After the initial translation in eight months, it took several months to resolve doubts in the interpretation of the original work with Portuguese friends, Leonor Seabra, Luís Sá Cunha and P. Rios in Macau and Bigotte Chorão in Lisbon, and technical problems in the passage from Portuguese to Chinese by consulting Chinese friends, Huang Jinyan and Xu Xin, first readers of my version. Exactly two years later, at the VII Camillian Journeys in 1990, I had the book translated and made a communication about the translation. Its publication, proposed by Jorge Morbey, president of the ICM, appeared in the same year and I was very happy to hear some Chinese say that reading the work made them laugh spontaneously.
I still remember clearly the visits we made, during the Camillian days, to the village and farm where Camilo lived, which made me feel closer to him. Standing in front of the stone house, small and rustic, I understood his desire to get out of there and into a bigger world. And looking at his cane in the farmhouse, I felt his despair at the threat of blindness, especially when my husband was facing the same problem.
The translation of Love of Perdition was suggested by Ana Paula Laborinho, president of IPOR, and Yao Jingming, bilingual poet, responsible for the Basic Library of Portuguese Authors, perhaps because I had published Comparative Study on Two Love Tragedies – Dream of the Red Pavilion and Love of Perdition. The work had two Chinese versions on the market, Destroyed Love (1981) e Lost Love (1993). The main translator of Destroyed LoveGu Fengxiang, a Portuguese teacher in Beijing and a friend of ours, offered us a copy explaining that, to attract the public, the publisher had the title changed and some parts cut. Despite this, its merit cannot be forgotten, as it is the first Portuguese novel translated from Portuguese to Chinese in Mainland China and was a huge success. One of our students, when reading the work in Portuguese in class, was so moved that he wanted his mother to read it too, but the 1st edition of Destroyed Love was exhausted. He then asked to borrow our copy from his mother, a factory worker, who commented: “It’s a moving love story, as if it were our own. Red Pavilion Dream.” E Lost Loveby Wang Quanli, I didn’t read at the time. In any case, in my version, I translated the entire book, including dedications and prefaces to reissues. A Chinese boy, from Portuguese secondary school, asked me for the Chinese version to better understand the story in Portuguese, thus fulfilling a task in the Portuguese subject. Two months ago, a Chinese theater director, while leafing through Love of Perdition in Chinese, he asked me if it was possible to take the story to the Chinese stage.
The exhibition The Meeting of Languages - Portuguese Writers Translated into Chinese (2020 version), from Instituto Camões, mentioned more than 70 names. Since then, more authors have been featured in China. Compared to Eça, Fernando Pessoa and Saramago, who are widely translated in China, Camilo only has two books in Chinese. Taking into account the Portuguese taught today in 50 Chinese universities, I call for the training of literary translators between Chinese and Portuguese, hoping that Camilo, as well as other authors, will be more translated and disseminated among the Chinese public.
Chinese Language and Culture Teacher