Lost In The Details
Wading through a book rich with information
Lost In The Details
It’s really easy to get lost in Dream of the Red Chamber.
In some ways, the book is designed to get you lost. There’s simply too much detail to take in. You can find yourself obsessing over the architecture, the tapestry, the clothing, or even something as simple as the complicated way in which the characters are all related to each other.
It’s important to take a step back and think about things.
That’s actually why I decided to create these commentary posts in the first place. You see, one of the problem with the major English translations of Dream of the Red Chamber is that neither book takes a step back and thinks about what just happened. And, honestly, the book can be overwhelming if you don’t take a step back from time to time to figure out what is going on.
This isn’t a problem unique to Dream of the Red Chamber, by the way. In fact, I think all literature suffers from this issue.
I’m not sure about how you feel, but I know I’ve been guilty of “reading” books in the past for the sake of being able to say that I’ve read them. I’ve glossed over difficult and complicated sections of books from time to time, ignoring the voice in my head telling me that I should ask what is going on and why and simply choosing to be a passive observer.
And, honestly, you can get by doing that with some books. But not with certain books — and Dream of the Red Chamber is unfortunately one of those books that you can’t just be passive about.
That’s the reason why I’m going so slowly through the book. Instead of rushing through important passages and missing out on details I might not think are important, I’m forcing myself to slow down and ask why certain details are included. Why, for example, did Lady Wang require her niece, Lin Daiyu, to leave a nicely decorated room and come into a less formal room to meet with her? Perhaps Cao Xueqin is saying something here about the attitude Lady Wang takes towards propriety — or, perhaps Lin Daiyu is being put to the test. And maybe the answer is designed to be ambiguous.
Now, one of the difficulties I’ve run into as I’ve pieced this project together has been determining my target audience. Everybody says that you need to know your target audience to have a successful project. In my case, though, there are actually a few audiences I think fit the bill:
People interested in classic literature in general
People with a specific interest in Dream of the Red Chamber who cannot read it in Chinese
People who have a beginning or intermediate knowledge of Chinese and who want the challenge
People who are advanced learners of Chinese and are as confused by Dream of the Red Chamber as I am
Native speakers of Chinese who are also confused by Dream of the Red Chamber and who might benefit from the perspective of an outsider
The truth is that I would like to attract all these audiences — though, of course, I’m not presumptuous enough to think that native speakers would want to consult this work. The difficulty, however, is in figuring out the right way to make the passages as accessible and interesting as possible to a wide ranging audience.
That’s why I include so many extra details in my translation posts.
The translation parts themselves are pretty self-explanatory, of course.
However, I decided to include translation critiques of the two major English translations of the book (The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and John Minford, and A Dream of Red Mansions by Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-Yi) in hopes of creating a meaningful study guide to other native English speakers who struggle through this book. Both translations have a number of issues, and most of the study helps that exist aren’t really all that helpful.
In fact, the Hawkes translation is notorious for being difficult, given his love of using foreign loan words, Sanskrit words and phrases, and his frustrating habit of sometimes deliberately not translating things for whatever reason. In fact, there’s an entire section of the book that he translated into Latin, mostly for comic effect — but the overall effect sadly winds up losing a lot of the meaning of the original.
As far as the Yangs are concerned — their translation is actually more a paraphrasing of the original than a proper translation. It’s far too common for them to skip a sentence or two in the interest of making things sound better in English, and they change the order of sentences so frequently that it gives me a headache. And we’re not even through the third chapter yet!
Anyway — my hope is that the translation critique section can serve as a sort of study guide to those who decide to use those other translations. It wouldn’t make much sense to create a project devoted solely to creating critical notes for somebody else’s translation — but, at the same time, the lack of a good study guide makes the book much harder to read than it should be. This is particularly true of the Hawkes translation, which can be a real pain to work through.
I also prefer including the original Chinese text, both for potential SEO purposes and to show the base text from which my translation comes. This is also done with an eye on both the Hawkes and Yang translation projects. Neither of those English versions use a single manuscript. Both are the product of some sort of textual wizardry that happened behind the scenes, and, unfortunately, we mere students weren’t given a backstage pass.
It’s important to me that translations be as transparent as possible, and that’s precisely what I aim to continue doing. In fact, I provide images of the original text from a scanned 1792 second edition (程乙本) version of the book as proof. There are also some cool aspects about that original text that I’ll mention in a future geeky post.
And last we come to the translation notes, which is probably the most frustrating part if you’re not familiar with the Chinese language.
I really want to include these, and will keep them in. It’s my way of trying to explain the beauty of the original language. In fact, when we get to the poetry (and we’ll get to the poetry before you know it), those translation notes will help me explain exactly what is going on without turning the poor translation into an absolute mess of words and footnotes.
However, I really should clear something up. Those translation notes aren’t really intended to help you learn Chinese.
I’ll define some words that are less common and will try to make connections between things mentioned in the novel and things you can find elsewhere on the internet. However, I’m not going to be able to turn the project into some sort of “learn Chinese through a classic novel” class.
This is the reason why I usually don’t provide pinyin to go along with the Chinese text. I’ve had several people request that I do this, and I feel your pain. I was once in your shoes.
The problem is that there’s really not time to provide pinyin for every single word or phrase that needs a translation commentary — and, even if I were to provide pinyin, it wouldn’t help in all cases.
Classical Chinese poetry, for example, followed different structural and rhyming conventions than the poetry we are familiar with in the West. I could append traditional Chinese rhyming patterns to every single poem if I wanted to, sure. But that kind of distracts from the actual purpose and meaning of those poems — sort of like what would happen if we spent all of our time talking about the architecture of the Rongguo Mansion without stopping to talk about what the characters are actually doing.
You can think of the “translation notes” section as a sort of appendix or glossary for more advanced readers. And, believe it or not, we really need something like this in English for Dream of the Red Chamber studies. We really don’t have any good resource for most of these words and phrases, and the truth is that nobody who touches this work really dives in to find all the hidden connections, name puns, and other games that Cao Xueqin invented for us.
Anyway, there’s a good chance that I’m trying to kill too many birds with this stone. However, this project is my big chance to go as deep as I possibly can into this classic work. I want to make sure the translation is accurate — but I also want to make sure I leave as many breadcrumbs as possible for anybody who might follow me down.