A classical soul

Bulgarian Sinologist Petko Todorov Hinov, 49, translator of ancient Chinese classics and contemporary literature works by important authors, including Nobel laureate Mo Yan, died of COVID-19 on Jan 3, leaving behind his Chinese wife and four children, the youngest of which was born in June.

Hinov's most devoted translation work, the four-volume A Dream of Red Mansions, is the first Bulgarian version of the masterpiece directly translated from Chinese. He originally planned to include an extra volume of interpretation and discussions about the novel.

The first volume, published in April 2015, won the translator that year's Hristo G. Danov Award. Presented by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, it is an annual national honor for the most influential contributors to literature.

In 2017, Hinov was also given the youth achievement award of the Special Book Award of China, the nation's highest accolade for foreigners in publishing.

Decades of preparation

A Dream of Red Mansions, written by Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) author Cao Xueqin in the 18th century, is a full-length novel recounting the ups and downs of four noble families which are highly interdependent upon each other. The work especially pays attention to the destinies of the large number of female characters－rich and poor, noble and humble－in a feudal society.

For many Chinese readers, the masterpiece enjoys a similar, or even higher, prestige in the literary realm as Latin American writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude－they share a spiritual core.

Hinov wrote in the preface: "If there was such a book in medieval Bulgaria, we would have a comprehensive knowledge about people's lifestyle, culture and art, and language habits of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396), and it would have become a simple but rich encyclopedia of life at that time."

Hinov was born in Plovdiv in 1972.Like many, he encountered Chinese culture－the language, music, martial arts and beautiful women－from kung fu movies. In his case, the 1982 movie, The Shaolin Temple, gave him a first impression of the sounds and tones of Chinese language in the late 1980s.

Before long, he had grown keen on transcribing characters from a Chinese-Russian dictionary, initially one of the few materials he could get to teach himself Chinese.

Chinese characters are pictographic and ideographic. They usually consist of an indexing component indicating the meaning and a phonetic component prompting the pronunciation.

A young Hinov would copy all the characters with those indexing components he liked the most, for example, the ones related to water, bamboo, heart and mind, and the sun. He also liked to search for rarely used or archaic characters.

Hinov once said in an interview that his passion for Chinese largely grew from the desire to decode information embedded in characters and the cultural stories behind them, which imply how the ancient creators of the characters viewed the world.

He also managed to borrow an anthology of poems by Tang Dynasty (618-907) writers and transcribed these poems one by one as duplicating was expensive then.

In 1992, during his first year at Sofia University in the nation's capital, as one of the first students majoring in Chinese, he had expressed an ambition to translate A Dream of Red Mansions into Bulgarian.

It took 20 years of learning and preparation before he finally undertook the project in 2011.Instead of going to work, he stayed in a monastery for 15 years after graduation, where he kept reading and writing.

There he had learned ancient Bulgarian languages, sometimes translating ancient Chinese into ancient Bulgarian. Compared to its modern counterpart, ancient Chinese is terse and condensed, but more rhythmic.

In 2010, he went to Foshan, South China's Guangdong province, and worked as an English teacher in a junior high school for around three years.

Some of his former students were surprised to learn about his death on the internet and were astonished to discover his achievements.

He was kind and got on well with his students. He impressed them with his oral Chinese and neat handwriting, and even learned the Cantonese dialect.

He was gifted enough to master at least eight languages, such as Chinese, English, Russian, several Eastern European languages and Old Church Slavonic, an ancient religious written language.

Art of interpretation

Despite the several classic works in ancient Chinese that he had translated, A Dream of Red Mansions was always on his mind. He identified with the male protagonist, Jia Baoyu.

"Jia does things from the heart, sometimes behaving childishly. He's so incompatible with his society that others view him like an eccentric, but I would say he was just born in the wrong time," Hinov once said.

Although Jia, the family favorite, has many expectations upon him, he has no interest in pursuing success, but likes to stay with his sisters, female cousins and cousins-in-law, viewing girls as pure and beautiful. He's considerate with the housemaids, too.

The characters enjoy an abundant, literary and, to some extent, utopian life in the early years, creating a large amount of highly diverse poems.

Therefore, Hinov personally would recognize the author, Cao, as a poet rather than a novelist.

"The art of translation is like crossing a river running between the banks of two different civilizations. When choosing which stones to tread on, the translator is actually defining his own style and methodology," Hinov once said.

A Dream of Red Mansions contains numerous descriptions of costumes, utensils, jewelry, folk conventions, traditional Chinese medicine and architecture.

Its language styles range from formal expressions between officials and aristocrats, to different dialects, slang and profanity, and switch between ancient written prose and vernacular Chinese.

Names of the people often contain homophonic puns, and there are many metaphors concealed between the lines.

No wonder it's the only single piece of Chinese work that has developed a separate school of research, and it's not hard to imagine the workload of its translation. Just for the first volume, Hinov had prepared over 400 annotations, explaining Chinese cultural concepts and historical allusions.

He also resorted to ancient Bulgarian poetry and prose and Slavic words to keep the beauty of Cao's original work.

To help readers understand, he included 60 illustrations from the 1791 and 1792 versions and also a family tree of the main characters, according to Nora Chileva, author of an essay reviewing Hinov's translation.

Hinov once said: "The translator must go through a period when he gradually grasps the style, techniques and way of thinking of the author, and learns to integrate them into his own language."

His taste for literature was rooted in fairy tales read during childhood, usually written in an outdated Bulgarian style that's rarely used in modern society. Therefore, he was more comfortable with ancient works and felt closer to the thinking of ancient people.

"It's rare to see Chinese literary works of cultural importance in my country. For me, to publicize Chinese culture here, I would like to start with books like A Dream of Red Mansions, The Four Books and The Book of Songs that laid the foundation of the culture, otherwise it's not reasonable enough to translate modern works," he said, adding that, in his view, modern literature, more or less influenced by globalization and the internet, is not really able to represent Chinese cultural connotations.

Poetic moments

In a short video of Hinov attending an online seminar, he talks in Chinese in a gentle, leisurely voice, with pauses from time to time, while looking for a literary or philosophical expression. In the video, he describes himself as someone who finds poetic moments in life and cherishes them.

In childhood, Hinov liked to create graphic symbols. He once designed a personal set of patterns of Bulgarian letters, which, in later years he pleasantly discovered, looked like Chinese characters. The kung fu novels he read, praising the chivalry of the swordsmen and their pursuit of justice and concern for all, reminded him of Bulgarian cultural legacy.

My Country and My People, a prose anthology by Lin Yutang (1895-1976), a Nobel nominated Chinese writer, which Hinov translated, introduced Chinese culture and society, especially people's thinking, longing and temperament with humorous writing.

Hinov refused commercial cooperation requests after winning a third prize for singing at a national talent show in his college days, but kept his passion for Chinese songs, especially those borrowing lyrics from poems. He played the guitar, sometimes translating the lyrics and putting them online.

In 2013, he and his family moved to the Bulgarian countryside where he farmed, climbed mountains and strolled after work, living a similar life to one of his favorite poets, Tao Yuanming of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420).

He was also learning traditional Chinese medicine and Chinese musical instruments.

Apart from compiling two Chinese-Bulgarian dictionaries, his original translation plan－lasting a decade into the future－included Tao's anthology, The Four Books, The Book of Songs and the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which apparently resonated with him.

Xu Donghao, from Beijing-based Chinese Culture Translation and Studies Support Network, who got to know Hinov in 2016, says despite getting infected in December, Hinov sent her the translation draft of Ruxue Liujiang ("six talks on Confucianism") by scholar and political visionary Liang Qichao (1873-1929).Sadly, Hinov was put on a mechanical ventilator by Christmas.

"My life is busy but tranquil. I know there are people supporting me and interested in what I'm doing, and feeling it as valuable and meaningful. That's enough for me," he once said.