The Chinese Language in Dream of the Red Chamber
Or — why I don't offer a complete glossary in pinyin
The Chinese Language in Dream of the Red Chamber
A reader asked me the other day why I don’t provide complete transcriptions of the poems of Dream of the Red Chamber in pinyin (the commonly used Chinese romanization system).
The short answer is that it would take way too much time, and wouldn’t be all that helpful to understanding what the poems mean. I want to stay away from the technical aspects of the book and focus more on its meaning.
The long answer is a bit more complicated, and has to do with the composition of the text itself.
Cao Xueqin’s Language Register
If you grew up in the United States like I did, you probably aren’t aware that languages have different “registers.”
It’s not an extremely difficult concept to understand, though it tends to be lost in the informal society that makes up the modern United States. Basically, in different languages you tend to use different words (and sometimes even different grammar) depending on the context.
Modern Chinese still has a bit of a language register issue, though it’s not quite as obvious as it was during Cao Xueqin’s day. While you can use a word like 您 (nín) instead of the more natural 你 (nǐ), the truth is that extremely formal Chinese is not quite as prominent these days as it once was.
It’s a different story in other East Asian languages, of course. Honorifics are extremely important in languages like Korean, where correctly using the language means knowing the difference between 친구는 미용실에 갔어? (Did your friend go to the beauty salon?), a sentence with a low level of respect, and 어머님은 미용실에 가셨습니까? (Did your mother go to the beauty salon?), a sentence with a high level of respect. Japanese poses similar challenges — and believe it or not, many European languages also traditionally have complex honorific systems that may or may not still be occasionally used.
One of the hardest things about translating Dream of the Red Chamber into English is demonstrating how the language register changes depending on the character, his or her personality, and the situation.
Jia Yucun is an excellent example of this. His spoken language is almost always overly polite and deferential. Take this exchange from his poetic meeting with Zhen Shiyin:
既蒙謬愛，何敢拂此盛情？
Since you have shown me such undeserved kindness, how can I presume to reject your generous invitation?
And, in his most recent exchange with Lin Ruhai, Jia Yucun says things like this:
只怕晚生草率，不敢進謁。
I’m only worried that a latecomer like me would be presumptuous, and I don’t want to visit him without paying the proper respects.
Both of these are examples of extremely formal and deferential Chinese. You wouldn’t hear anybody in China say anything even close to this these days.
Now, the real interesting thing about Jia Yucun as a character is that his language register apparently also includes pseudo-philosophic statements. Statements like this apparently come during the course of normal conversation in a pub with an old friend:
若大仁者，則應運而生；大惡者，則應劫而生。運生世治，劫生世危。
The extremely virtuous are born in auspicious times; the extremely wicked are born in times of calamity. Auspicious times bring the world to order, while inauspicious times bring chaos.
The hilarious thing about this quotation is that it’s unlikely that anybody in the history of China has ever spoken like this. The sentence structure here is unmistakable, and mimics the terse and compact grammar and careful language choice of the Confucian Analects and other ancient philosophic texts.
Long story short: Cao Xueqin’s characters use different types of words for different occasions.
And, interestingly enough, this also applies to poetry.
Classical Chinese Poem Composition
I’ll make this as simple as I can. Classical Chinese poems did not use a rhyme scheme the way we’d recognize it today.
The classical rhyming system was based largely on tones. It used two general categories of tones: 平 (píng), or “level” tones, and 仄 (zè), or “oblique” tones. These come from the four tones of Middle Chinese, which are extremely different from today’s four tone system. You can read a bit more of the details on this page.
Generally, there were different rules regarding the way the 平 and 仄 structure worked in poems. One pattern involved having the opposite type of character in each successive line: in other words, if the first line used a 平, the corresponding character in the next line would use a 仄.
For example, take the poem that Jia Yucun saw on the outside of the 智通寺 (The Temple of Wisdom Attained) during this somewhat obscure short scene:
身後有餘忘縮手，眼前無路想回頭。
Even with abundance after death, we long to obtain more;
Only when the road ends do we think to turn back.
This poem follows the 平仄 pattern we described above:
身(平) | 後(仄) | 有(仄) | 餘(平) | 忘(平) | 縮(仄) | 手(仄) |
眼(仄) | 前(平) | 無(平) | 路(仄) | 想(仄) | 回(平) | 頭(平) |
Now, when it comes to concepts of “rhyming” that are more familiar to us, this becomes even more difficult. In modern Mandarin Chinese, this poem does not rhyme. It’s close, but it doesn’t.
手 (hand) is pronounced shǒu.
頭 (head) is pronounced tóu.
If you really want to get deep, it’s possible that the words may have rhymed to an extent in Middle Chinese. 手 would have probably been pronounced something like syuwX, and 頭 something like duw.
But the problem we have here is that neither the 平仄 rhyming scheme nor the Middle Chinese pronunciations have anything to do with what the poem actually means. I could go on and on about how the poem fits the old rhyming scheme, but it would be kind of a distraction.
Pronunciation Issues
The other reason to stay away from Pinyin is that it’s a modern invention that simply didn’t exist in Cao Xueqin’s time.
Pinyin was created as a Chinese government project in the 1950s. It’s chiefly based on the northern Chinese dialects. Now, it is true that Cao Xueqin was quite familiar with this kind of pronunciation. He lived in Beijing in the later years of his life, and it’s obvious that he was familiar with northeastern Chinese accents. We’ll see that later when some of his more rural characters are introduced.
This isn’t to say that the Chinese of Cao Xueqin’s day was necessarily different than modern Chinese. My understanding is that a lot was quite similar. However, we have to be careful before we put too much of an emphasis on modern Chinese readings of the words in Dream of the Red Chamber.
The North-South Divide
In a way, you can think of Dream of the Red Chamber as a sort of divide between the overpowering political influence of northern China and the historic literary traditions of southern China.
Beijing became the capital of China starting around 1402 during the reign of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty. From that time to the present day, the influence of northern Chinese culture and language has permeated the entire country.
Traditionally, however, the literary core of China has always been the south. In fact, Suzhou was historically the great literary capital of China. Many of the most famous poems of the Tang and Song dynasties were composed by people from Suzhou.
Lin Daiyu is a fascinating character because she originally comes from Suzhou. In that way, she represents the old and proud literary tradition of southern China.
In fact, we saw a few examples of this in yesterday’s post. The language that Lin Ruhai uses when he speaks to his daughter betrays a hint of highly educated southern Chinese:
汝父年已半百，再無續室之意
Your father is already 50 years old, and has no intention of marrying again.
Here, Lin Ruhai addresses his daughter using 汝, which may have seemed a bit archaic even for the mid-18th century. What we do know about this word, though, is that it has a distinct southern Chinese flavor to it.
As I noted yesterday, 汝 (though usually written as the more conventional 你) is still present in the various Min dialects. In Southern Min (which is common in Taiwan) it is pronounced lí. You can also find it in Cantonese, where it is pronounced jyu5, as well as in Japanese, where it is pronounced as the somewhat vulgar うぬ (unu).
Keep in mind that the dialects of China tend to maintain more conservative versions of words and pronunciations than the “standard” versions of the language. We tend to think of the local colloquialisms as a sort of “slang” variant of the language, especially when we come from far away lands and lack an intimate knowledge of the local culture.
You see this a lot in southern Taiwan, where foreigners find constant intrusions of Taiwanese Hokkien into everyday speech to be cute or somewhat informal. Actually, many of the Hokkien words and speech patterns come straight from much older forms of the Chinese language, and contain tonal and pronunciation elements that almost certain come straight from Middle Chinese. One reason why it’s useful to look at the pronunciation and meaning of various words across dialects (and in Korean, Japanese, and even Vietnamese) is because these other languages often do a better job of preserving the original sound and flavor of the word than modern standard Chinese.
We’re going to finally hear Lin Daiyu speak in a few days, after all this buildup. When we do, let’s pay attention to not only what she says, but how she says it. Her careful choice of words and educated flair says a lot about her upbringing, and occasionally hints of a dialect pop through — even though we’re dealing with written text.