Dreamer who turned into a blessed fool

How la belle France won over a Chinese man of letters

One of the people Chinese President Xi Jinping is due to meet when he is in the French city of Lyon is the writer and translator Li Tche-Houa.

Li, 99, who with his wife translated into French The Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China's greatest classical novels, attended the Sino-French Institute in Lyon after leaving his home in Beijing and boarding a ship to France in 1937.

Xi will meet him and other representatives of the institute when he goes to Lyon at the start of his state visit.

Li is in good health, even if he has a mild hearing problem and moves with difficulty. He can still vividly recall his first trip to Lyon as a young student.

"I left home when I was 22," he says in his apartment in Lyon. "The ship took more than a month to get here. I graduated with the highest exam scores so I was the only person in my class who got the offer to go to France."

Born in an academic family in Beijing, he developed a keen interest in literature at a very early age. He began to learn French in middle school and was later admitted to the Sino-French Institute in Beijing.

Li's eldest son, Jacques, says: "My father was a dreamer. He always wanted to be a poet so was really into literature. He fell in love with France because he read Rousseau in China when he was in college."

After arriving in Lyon he stayed in the student residence of the Sino-French Institute and was enrolled at the University of Lyon to study French literature.

There he met his future wife, Jacqueline Alezais, who would later work with him on translating works of modern Chinese literature into French.

Unlike most of his classmates who returned to China after graduating, Li decided to stay after gaining his master's degree in French literature in 1942.

"It was because I love my wife so much," Li says. The following year they married.

The couple shared a love for literature, and one of their most outstanding achievements was translating into French The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.

Jacques says: "My father wrote the first draft and then my mother worked with him to improve the draft and to ensure it was understandable to French readers."

French sinologist Andre d'Hormon, a mentor of Li, helped by proofreading and making improvements to their translation.

The translation was tough work as the novel features more than 400 characters in a multilayered story. In addition, the couple could only do the work part time as they were both schoolteachers.

Eventually it took the couple 27 years to finish the translation, and the book was published in 1981.

In 2002, Li was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, one of the highest awards in France for arts and literature, for his significant contribution to enriching France's cultural inheritance.

Jacques says that when his father received the medal he realized his parents' commitment and devotion to literature and translation were something "quite extraordinary".

In addition to The Dream of the Red Chamber, Li translated into French the works of many well-known modern Chinese writers including Lu Xun, Lao She, Ba Jin and Ai Qing.

In his memoir published in 2005, he recalled his translation career and wrote: "Perhaps only a fool would spend more than 20 years of his spare time to translate a book. But the fool was blessed because in the entire process I felt enriched, delighted and happy. Isn't it the greatest consolation of life?"