As a translator, Feng Zikai has translated more than 30 works in the fields of literature, art, music, etc. from Russian, English, Japanese and other languages to Chinese. His translation can be generally divided into three stages:
The first stage: from the 1920s to the 1930s, before the Chinese War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Feng Zikai has translated 11 works, including two literary works translated from English (First Love written by Turgenev of Russia and translated by Garnett into English and The Suicide Club by Stevenson of Britain) and nine theoretical books on art and music in Japanese, including Symbols of Depression by Hakuson Kuriyagawa, Children’s Music by Tanabe Hisao, and Ways of Listening to Music by Naoe Monma. The First love published by Shanghai Kaiming Publishing House in 1934 is the first translation work of Feng Zikai, which is also his “first love” in his translation career.
The second stage: the 1950s. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Feng Zikai, at the age of 52, began to translate Russian documents after studying Russian for about two years. At first, he translated about ten Soviet books that refer to teaching methods of music and drawing, such as Drawing Education in Schools, Education of Listening and Singing and Singing and Music. Then he translated Turgenev’s prose works Sportsman’s Sketches, Korolenko’s novel The History of My Contemporary (Volume 1 to 4) (co-translated with his daughter Feng Yiyin), as well as Natsume Soseki Selection (Volume 2), Ishikawa Takuboku Novel Collection, Tokutomi Roka’s The Cuckoo, Shigeharu Nakano’s In the Depths of the Heart (unpublished) and other literary works of the former Soviet Union and Japan.
The third stage: in the 1960s and 1970s, when Feng Zikai engaged in the translation of Japanese literature. From August 1,1961 to September 29,1965, Feng Zikai translated one of the world’s earliest novels and the masterpiece of classic literature, The Tale of Genji (Volume 1, 2, 3), written by Japanese female writer Murasaki Shikibu. After the work was translated, it was at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China. Therefore, its translated manuscript was stored in the publishing house and its issue continued to be put off. Not until the 1980s was the work published by the People’s Literature Publishing House in December 1980, June 1982 and October 1983 respectively. In the early 1970s, he translated three Japanese folk literature works, namely, Ochikubo-monogatari, Taketori Monogatari and Ise Monogatari, which were published by the People’s Literature Publishing House in 1984.
