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 2 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.
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 2 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.
“…the normal way the wives of lower ranking members of the household were usually buried.”
While sacrificial burial (人殉) had a long history in ancient China, it was less common during Qing dynasty. According to《東華全錄》, it became illegal among Manchuans in 1673, (「康熙十二年...命禁止八旗包衣佐領下奴僕隨主殉葬」(see page 13: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/CNTS-00047975849_18_%E6%9D%B1%E8%8F%AF%E5%85%A8%E9%8C%84.pdf)). Although I don’t know if House Jia was already a 包衣(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booi_Aha) class, it’s noteworthy that the ancestor of Cao Xueqin, became a 包衣 (「曹錫遠…正白旗包衣…其子曹振彥…孫曹璽…曾孫曹寅…元孫曹顒…曹頫」), according to《八旗滿洲氏族通譜》(see page 25: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/NLC512-023041105010197-2862_%E5%85%AB%E6%97%97%E6%BB%BF%E6%B4%B2%E6%B0%8F%E6%97%8F%E9%80%9A%E8%AD%9C_%E7%AC%AC23%E5%86%8A.pdf). And we all know the fate of House Jia was loosely based on Cao’s family, making DRM a semi-autobiographical novel.