This passage... the allusions to all these characters that I've never heard about made it confusing to follow what's even going on. But they're listing items in the room that allude to all these different people. I'm not sure I would have even been able to pick out all the names from the german translation I'm reading since all the names are either mangled or literal. Makes it doubly confusing haha.
I just read on the wikipedia page for Romance of the Western Chamber that it's actually the "naughty" book that Jia Baoyu is reading in chapter 23.
This is one of those really odd passages, since the characters listed here haven't really been introduced yet.
Qingren comes up in one of the first poems when we get to that part, which makes it even more bizarre. If you were reading this book with no commentary in Chinese (i.e. the way it was intended), you'd be absolutely baffled by this predictive poem about a character you know absolutely nothing about.
Cao Xueqin was certainly unconventional. He breaks just about every literary rule you can think of.
This passage... the allusions to all these characters that I've never heard about made it confusing to follow what's even going on. But they're listing items in the room that allude to all these different people. I'm not sure I would have even been able to pick out all the names from the german translation I'm reading since all the names are either mangled or literal. Makes it doubly confusing haha.
I just read on the wikipedia page for Romance of the Western Chamber that it's actually the "naughty" book that Jia Baoyu is reading in chapter 23.
This is one of those really odd passages, since the characters listed here haven't really been introduced yet.
Qingren comes up in one of the first poems when we get to that part, which makes it even more bizarre. If you were reading this book with no commentary in Chinese (i.e. the way it was intended), you'd be absolutely baffled by this predictive poem about a character you know absolutely nothing about.
Cao Xueqin was certainly unconventional. He breaks just about every literary rule you can think of.