Zheng Kelu, a famous French literature translator, professor and PhD advisor of Shanghai Normal University, a modern Chinese thinker, also great-grandson of Zheng Guanying, a scholar of the past, passed away in Shanghai at 22:20 on September 20. Zhongshan netizens who once had an acquaintance with Zheng Kelu expressed their condolence of him in different ways.
Zheng Kelu, whose ancestral home was Zhongshan, was born in 1939 in Macao. His great grandfather was Zheng Guanying, a modern Chinese bourgeois reformer and thinker, patriotic national industrialist, businessman, and author of the famous Words of Warning in Times of Prosperity.
As the official translator of Les Misérables, La Traviata, Count of Monte Cristo, Notre Dame de Paris and others, his 17 million words of translation works were well received by many literature lovers and he was praised as "the deliverer of over half of the French literature works to China".
In 1987, Zheng Kelu was awarded the "l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques", a renown academic honor in France, by the French government in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the promotion of the cultural exchange between France and China.