Chinese mourn death of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Chinese writers and citizens mourned the death of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer most famous for his work "One Hundred Years of Solitude," on Friday.

Garcia Marquez passed away Thursday in his home in Mexico City at the age of 87. He checked into a hospital on April 3 due to "dehydration and bronchial and urinary tract infections."

"Although I had some mental preparation, I was still shocked," said Fan Ye, a Chinese translator of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," on China's Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo.

Fan, a teacher at Peking University with a doctorate degree in Spanish literature, translated the masterpiece into Chinese in 2011.

Fan said early Friday that he is in Colombia and that a few hours ago he was staying at the square where Garcia Marquez slept for one night during college. The Chinese translator said he plans to visit his hometown next week.

"The death of Garcia Marquez is a pity, but such a great writer will never leave us," said Sun Ganlu, a Chinese writer and deputy chairman of Shanghai Writers' Association.

Sun said he preferred his works such as "No One Writes to the Colonel," "Autumn of the Patriarch" and "Love in the Time of Cholera," which he read in the 1980s and 1990s.

"His works deserve re-reading and he will not be forgotten by people as time goes on," said Sun. "I shall read Garcia Marquez again, as the best way to remember a writer is to re-read his works."

Chinese literature is so familiar with Garcia Marquez that he does not seem like a foreign writer, said Zhou Limin, a literary critic in Shanghai.

In the late 1980s, the works of Western literary masters such as Garcia Marquez were introduced and imitated in China and they contributed profoundly to the development of Chinese literature, said Zhou.

Mo Yan, the first Chinese national to win the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature, had talked about Garcia Marquez's impact on him.

"When I read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for the first time in 1984, I was surprised that novels could have been written that way," said Mo while lecturing at Zhejiang University in December.

Mo said he had since been "fighting" the influence of Garcia Marquez for many years in order to write works of his own style.

Mo's works merge hallucinatory realism with folk tales, history and the contemporary. He said the "magic realism" of Latin American literature had a great impact on his early works and some of his novels imitated the genre.