Jia Baoyu's Attraction To Lin Daiyu
A master class in poetic characterization
Jia Baoyu's Attraction To Lin Daiyu
This is going to be another short segment. Jia Baoyu gets his first good look at Lin Daiyu, and is clearly smitten with her. However, he’s not amazed just because of her beauty. Rather, he’s fascinated with her because of her 情 (emotions, feeling, passion, etc), which is the cosmic tie that binds them together. In a short poetic sequence, Cao Xueqin gives us a masterclass in subtle character development, and makes some pretty profound allusions to the purpose of the novel.
My Translation
Grandmother Jia saw him enter. “I see you changed clothes before greeting our guest,” she said with a smile. “Hurry and greet your cousin.”
Baoyu had already seen the slender, graceful young girl, and figured that she must be the daughter of his Aunt Lin. He stepped forward to greet her.
Once he was seated, he took a closer look at her. He saw that she was really unlike anyone he had ever seen.
Her eyebrows were like a faint mist, neither knit nor smooth.
Her eyes had a dreamy sweetness, neither glad nor sad.
Her delicate face seemed touched with melancholy.
Her fragile frame seemed to be wrapped in illness.
There were glistening teardrops on her eyelashes.
Soft sighs faintly escaped her lips.
In stillness, she looked like a flower mirrored in water;
In motion, she was like a willow swaying in the wind.
She was more perceptive than Bi Gan,
And she was three times as sickly as Xi Shi.
Translation Critique
Hawkes
David Hawkes translates 含情目 as “passionate eyes.” In fact, through the first 3 ½ chapters, Hawkes has translated 情 as some form of “passion” time and time again. It’s about more than just “passion,” however. Lin Daiyu’s eyes, and her whole person, is filled with overwhelming emotions of all kind, not just love. “Passionate” here strikes me as somewhat misleading.
Hawkes then translates 態生兩靨之愁，嬌襲一身之病 as:
Habit had given a melancholy cast to her tender face;
Nature had bestowed a sickly constitution on her delicate frame.
Both translations are misleading. “Habit” implies that Lin Daiyu’s upset appearance was because of some choice she was making to be miserable. Or, in other words, she had simply grown accustomed to looking fretted and worried all the time. However, 態生 indicates that her look of worry is a natural part of her complexion; see the translation note below.
The second line is way off. It’s not that nature made her sick. Rather, it’s that her feminine charm (嬌) and her sickly nature (一身之病) are hopelessly intertwined (襲).
Aside from this, Hawkes’ translation is mostly fine. However, when he writes “and suffered a tithe more pain in it than the beautiful Xi Shi,” the phrase a tithe literally means “a tenth.” It has religious connotations in English that don’t appear in the Chinese original. I’m not sure why Hawkes decided to use this particular phrase here; it’s confusing at best.
Yang
As usual, the Yangs translate what they want to translate and kind of ignore or gloss over the rest.
After translating the first two lines of the poetic description of Lin Daiyu, they translate 態生兩靨之愁，嬌襲一身之病 as “her very frailty had charm.” Not only is that not an adequate translation of the phrase but it doesn’t even come close to describing the way that Lin Daiyu’s melancholy was an inseparable part of her person, nor does it describe how her illness was hopelessly entwined with her feminine charm. It feels like a cliff notes version of the book.
They translate 心較比干多一竅 as “she looked more sensitive than Pi Kan,” which is a translation I can’t figure out. They then translate 病如西子勝三分 as “more delicate than Hsi Shih,” which completely misses the Zhuangzi reference and the philosophic connotations.
Chinese Text
卻說賈母見他進來，笑道：「外客沒見就脫了衣裳了？還不去見你妹妹呢。」寶玉早已看見了一個嫋嫋婷婷的女兒，便料定是林姑媽之女，忙來見禮。歸了座，細看時，真是與眾各別。只見：
兩彎似蹙非蹙籠煙眉，一雙似喜非喜含情目。態生兩靨之愁，嬌襲一身之病。淚光點點，嬌喘微微。閒靜似嬌花照水，行動如弱柳扶風。心較比干多一竅，病如西子勝三分。
Translation Notes
蹙 means to knit one’s brows, as if thinking deeply about something, feeling worried, or feeling angry. 似蹙非蹙 means that her eyebrows had a natural arch to them, making it look like Lin Daiyu was frowning when she really wasn’t.
籠煙眉 is also extremely descriptive, and really not easy to translate. 眉 means eyebrows. 煙 means smoke. 籠 means to shroud or envelop. Lin Daiyu’s eyebrows are somewhat misty and mysterious, naturally furrowed. It’s actually an amazing description, since Daiyu’s natural worries and melancholy comes out even when she has a resting expression.
似喜非喜 means seeming happy but not happy, and is a poetic parallel to 似蹙非蹙. 目 means eyes. 含情 is extremely important here; remember that we saw way back in the first chapter that Cao Xueqin sees 情 as a concept of extreme importance. Her eyes are filled with this 情 – whether you call it “emotion” or “passion” or “feeling” – and it’s this 情 that binds her with Jia Baoyu. She seems to be happy when you look at her eyes, but the feeling is more complex than just happiness. That’s my understanding of 似喜非喜. When you combine 似蹙非蹙 and 似喜非喜, you get a female character that is unusual even in the fiction of our day. She’s neither angel Chinese Textnor devil, neither happy nor sad, and is certainly no stereotype. She’s an actual person, not just a caricature.
靨 means a dimple (i.e. on the face). 態生兩靨之愁 literally means “her demeanor is born from the sorrow in her two dimples.” This is another indication that Daiyu’s sorrow is not just a feeling, but is rather a physical trait – something that emanates and radiates from her facial features. Notice, of course, that dimples are usually associated with smiling; here they are associated with sorrow.
嬌襲一身之病 is kind of hard to understand. 襲 can mean “to inherit,” as it did in chapter 2 when there was all the talk of hereditary titles. Here, however, it means something like “to overlap” or “to envelop.” In this case, Lin Daiyu’s delicate charm (嬌) is intertwined (襲) with her sickness (病). In other words, her frailty is an inseparable part of her beauty, and even her entire identity.
喘 (chuǎn) means to breathe. Here you can think of them as sighs that faintly come out (微微) in a delicate and charming manner (嬌).
比干 (Bi Gan) was a legendary figure during the Shang dynasty, and was traditionally seen to be the exemplar of the loyal advisor who is willing to lose his life for giving truthful advice. Read more about him here.
Legend has it that Bi Gan had seven orifices, or openings, in his heart (七竅). This is a symbol of his extraordinary wisdom, insight, and ability to perceive. This sentence literally says that Lin Daiyu had one more orifice than him (多一竅), and refers to Lin Daiyu’s extraordinary ability to perceive and draw insight.
西子 refers to Xi Shi (西施), one of the legendary four beauties of ancient China. The phrase 病如西子勝三分 is really interesting, since most sources on Xi Shi won’t tell you that she was sick (this one, for example). This is actually a reference to Zhuangzi (莊子), who wrote:
故西施病心而矉其里，其里之醜人見之而美之，歸亦捧心而矉其里。其里之富人見之，堅閉門而不出；貧人見之，挈妻子而去走。彼知矉美而不知矉之所以美。
Thus, when Xi Shi suffered from heartache and frowned in her village, an ugly woman from the village saw it and thought it was beautiful. She went home and likewise clutched her chest and frowned at her neighbors. When they saw her, the rich men of the village locked their doors and refused to come out, while the poor gathered their families and left. She knew the frown was beautiful, but not why it was beautiful.
This passage is commonly associated with the idiom 東施效顰 (dōngshīxiàopín), which means to imitate others only to make a fool of yourself. 東施 (Dong Shi) is the name of the “ugly woman” (醜人) Zhuangzi is talking about.
Now, what does this have to do with Lin Daiyu? As we’ll soon see, her always emotional expression is a natural comparison to Xi Shi from this story. However, unlike Dong Shi, Lin Daiyu isn’t trying to imitate anybody. She cannot stop herself from frowning. And, unlike Xi Shi, who suffered only from “heartache” (病心), Lin Daiyu’s illness (病) has multiple layers. She is sick — physically sick, that is, and we see her suffering because of it. She’s also got a love sickness, connected with the concept of 情 (emotions, love, etc) that keeps coming up. And she’s also got her cosmic destiny, which is to replay Jia Baoyu (the premortal stone) with her tears. The price that the “Crimson Pearl Fairy Plant” (絳珠仙草) paid for following the stone to earth is manifest in her illness (病).