5 Translation Problems in Dream of the Red Chamber
There are a lot of issues with translating Dream of the Red Chamber into English. And a lot of these come because of the nature of the book itself.
You see, Dream of the Red Chamber isn’t a normal love story or romance novel or anything like that. Actually, it’s a psychological story wrapped in the clothing of a romance novel.
This is what I mean when I say that Dream of the Red Chamber is a “subversive” novel. It’s subversive in the sense that it completely defies the expectations of its readers, and because it does so deliberately. When the characters in this book do something that strikes you as strange, you really should stop and ask yourself what is going on.
Anyway, here are the 5 major general translation problems I’ve seen so far in this project.
Character Names. The names of characters in this novel are naturally going to be difficult if you’re not a native speaker of Chinese, or if you don’t have at least some familiarity with Chinese names.
However, in Dream of the Red Chamber, the names of certain characters actually have additional meaning attached to them. And this can be pretty difficult to figure out unless somebody tells you about it.
That’s why I’ve written posts like this one:
However, it’s not always easy to understand this stuff at first glance. And there’s a lot of hidden and cryptic stuff in this novel.
Cultural differences. Naturally, cultural differences are going to play a major role when you’re dealing with a novel set in imperial China.
However, things like the ostentatious funeral arranged for Qin Keqing might not strike you as unusual unless you know the normal way the wives of lower ranking members of the household were usually buried.
All the characters. There are well over 400 supporting characters in this book, not to mention the 40+ main characters that keep showing up.
It’s actually not all that difficult to tell them apart, however. The thing about Cao Xueqin’s composition style is that he only introduces and uses characters when they serve a specific purpose. Or, in other words, you really don’t need to remember all 400+ characters that are introduced in this novel.
Poetry. Yeah, there’s a lot of poetry here, though we haven’t encountered as much as I expected in the first 13 chapters.
The thing is, though, that the poetry in Dream of the Red Chamber actually means something. You can’t skip it without losing the whole point of the book. And you also can’t just briefly gloss over the meaning. You’ve got to actually translate the poems and interpret them, and that’s where it takes time and effort.
Emotion. The hardest part about this book is the character 情 (qing), which comes up over and over again in all sorts of different places and with all sorts of connotations.
Again, the hardest thing about Dream of the Red Chamber is the fact that it’s really not a love story. Not only is this book not the Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet, but it really isn’t actually a book about a love triangle. There’s a love triangle there, sure - but this is more a book about characters fighting against the society that keeps trying to drag them down than a book about people falling in love with each other.
Anyway, hopefully this helps give you an idea of just how deep and intricate this novel really is. There’s a reason some scholars have devoted a lifetime to studying it.
The intertextual quality of the novel also poses challenges. The Chinese reader of the time would no doubt catch the references to The Peony Pavilion, The Western Chamber, or the great Tang Dynasty poets. But this largely lost on a modern Western audience. Which is why I truly appreciate your detailed annotations that explain all these references when they come up in the text! Hawkes writes in his introduction to Volume 1 that reading a novel with too many footnotes is akin to "playing tennis in chains". Which I sorta get but the fact that his translation has no footnotes means the reader is missing out on so much! I'm rambling at this point but one wild thing that Hawkes does to recreate the intertextual pleasures of the novel for the Western reader is to insert his own references to the Western canon. At one point, he throws in a Proust reference which really stretches the limits of creative license in translation.