Don Quixote dreaming
0 
Despite his notable career, 73-year-old Professor Dong is still working as a teacher of Spanish at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). Nowadays, he is also preoccupied with the compilation of a chronicles project, World Literature: Major Schools of the Last 20 Years in the 20th Century, focusing on Spanish poetry.
He is also the translator of El Señor Presidente (The Mister President) by Nobel Prize-winning writer Miguel Ángel Asturias and several other Cervantes novels, including Poesia y Teatro (Poetry and Theater).
Since the 1990s, Dong has turned to translating several contemporary Chinese literature works, including Mo Yan's Hong Gaoliang (Red Sorghum) and Lu Wenfu's Meishijia (Gourmet), into Spanish.
Born in Beijing in 1937, Dong was admitted to the Spanish department at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute in 1956. In Dong's memory, there was only one clumsy wire recorder in the whole department, which needed two young men to lift. His textbooks were mimeographed leaflets, only available two hours before the class.
"The text was chosen from the Spanish textbook in the Soviet Union. From 1958 we began to study Chinese leader's speeches and editorials from the local media in Spanish, to prevent the influence of Soviet revisionism. So some foreigners mocked that we were not learning Spanish, but Beijingish," he recalled. "Fortunately, under the insistence of some sensible teachers, we got to read quite a few classical literature works in Spanish later on."
While originally planning to go into diplomatic service, on graduation Dong began teaching Spanish, as China had just joined the United Nations at the time and the demand for Spanish speakers was rising. Faced with the lack of teaching material, Dong started his engagement in the compilation of textbooks.
"When it came to the 1980s, the texts were still quite revolutionary, featuring topics like the Long March and were considered as textbooks from the dinosaur age by young people. In 1999 we launched a new set of books, Contemporary Spanish," he said.
"When I began to study Spanish in the 1950s, only three or four Chinese universities had Spanish majors. Since 2000, you can find Spanish being taught at almost every comprehensive university in provincial capital cities across China," Dong explained.
He added that the reasons behind the increased demand for Spanish range from employment and migration, to business, study and trade. "The working opportunities for Spanish majors are excellent as well," he said.
Besides teaching and editorial work, Dong said that if he has time in the future, he would like to introduce more classical Chinese literature to the Spanish-speaking world, which he holds very dear to his heart.
Go to Forum >>0 Comments