Beautiful Chinese Prose
If you read things that people say about Dream of the Red Chamber, you’ll read a lot of generic language about how beautifully the book was written.
What we saw in yesterday’s translation post is our first evidence of just how good Cao Xueqin’s prose really is.
It’s not just that he uses attractive language here, of course. He also gets the timing down just right. The entire segment we saw yesterday, from Wang Xifeng waking up early in the morning to prepare to her explosion of emotion on her sitting chair, is timed in a way that rivals the best of Hollywood.
Let’s take a closer look.
