Thanks for the awesome translation, and also for sharing your insights into the original text and other translations.
On the title, I think your translation of 風塵 as "in the world" is clear and nicely contrasts "in a dream". (I also appreciated Hawkes’ "poverty" for capturing one of its meanings well.)
One question, if I may: Did you consider translating names beyond pinyin (e.g., for Jia Yucun)? I understand your commentary clarifies names (and other important details I'd otherwise miss), but I wonder if you’re concerned that a line like "This is why I use names such as Jia Yucun" might confuse English readers without it. To be fair, I don’t know a better solution than commentary.
I've been opting to transliterate the names using Pinyin instead of translating them. I know that this creates issues, since there are at least two characters that have names with the same Pinyin transliteration, yet different characters. My plan has been to use textual notes to explain this, though I might have to insert notes in the text itself to make it clear.
The hard part about translating names is the fact that many of the poems later in the book refer directly to certain characters because of poetic allusions to names. For example, the first prophetic poem we see in Chapter 5 (which I'm translating right now) starts "霽月難逢，彩雲易散," or "Clear moons are rarely met, bright clouds soon scatter." In Chinese, this is an oblique and hard to grasp reference to the maid named 晴雯 (Qingwen): 晴 means "cloudless sky," which is alluded to by 霽月 (a cloudless sky and bright moon after the rain), and 雯 means "colorful clouds," alluded to by 彩雲 (colorful clouds).
David Hawkes translates that poem as "Seldom the moon shines in a cloudless sky, and days of brightness all too soon pass by." The first line is just fine, but the second line changes the meaning of the poem completely. However, Hawkes is forced to translate the second line this way to fit with the name Skybright that he gave to 晴雯.
This is further complicated by Hawkes' insistence on giving the poems rhyming schemes. Sometimes his work is brilliant, but it often means he has to change the basic meaning of the text - which, of course, can be really confusing for anybody who wants to seriously study the book.
Anyway, no matter what we do with the names in English we're going to run into this problem. There's no perfect solution, and so I think the best way is to create a lot of textual notes and commentary posts to explain what is going on.
The more you dig into this book, the more fascinating it is.
"I find the “slips of girls” statement, along with the “which is all they were then” invention, to be both distasteful and inappropriate." I do not understand why this expression is "distasteful and inappropriate". All Hawkes is writing is that though these were just young girls, they were marvellous. I am wondering if the expression "slips of girls" is unfamiliar to you, as it is absolutely not distasteful or inappropriate. It may be that it's been added by Hawkes, but for me it works well. I looked at it again because you made remarks in today's podcast about Hawkes' upbringing, as if he were despicable to you, but what you meant exactly and where you got this from I have no idea. I would also like to add that it is weird of you to say "Naturally, most readers will" (skip the preface). Why would a person not read the introduction? And thirdly, what is wrong with Hawkes writing British English - what do you expect?
The "slips of girls" statement is an incorrect translation, for one. I find it inappropriate because it completely changes the author's original meaning.
Second - this isn't the only place where Hawkes has said things that are dismissive or utterly sexist. It's one of the major shortcomings of his translation.
And, finally, the biggest issue with "The Story of the Stone" is not just the stilted and dry British English. It's the archaic word use combined with extensive run-on sentences, unnecessary foreign words, and mistranslations.
You might be like me; perhaps you tend to read the introduction. Most people I've spoken with (including my wife) always skip the introduction. It's extremely frustrating when a translator elects not to include a pivotal part of the original text where it belongs, and instead hides it in the middle of the introduction for no apparent reason.
So, yeah, I'd say I have a bone to pick with him. And I've got a platform to do it as well.
Sorry if I came over as too direct. It's just that ever since I started following your extremely interesting translation I keep intending to unsubscribe because you are so concerned to run British things down and make nasty remarks about Hawkes. I understand that you are writing for Americans, but I am British.
Back to "slips of girls" - it is not dismissive or sexist. That is not a matter of opinion. As I wrote in my comment, I am prepared to concede that it is not in the original but added by Hawkes, but I don't find it distasteful or inappropriate. I can quote the Oxford English Dictionary for a number of historical uses, including "slips of boys", so I kept wondering what you have against the expression (except, of course, that it was added by Hawkes).
I would like to see, and will watch out for, other examples that you refer to of sexism because I would normally notice that kind of thing.
We will have to disagree on the dry British English. I find it reads smoothly and well, and it doesn't worry me that the sentences are longer than the Chinese ones. True, Hawkes aims for a slightly old-fashioned style, as translators sometimes do with older texts. I wouldn't call it archaic, but then I'm not American.
When you say that it's wrong for Hawkes to be regarded as a base text, I see your point, but it is natural, as I don't think there's an alternative translation. Yours does read very well, but it isn't "out there" yet.
Today in the podcast you used the term "Britishisms" to refer to Hawkes's attitude to family life or women or some such - I would be interested to know what you meant, but at all events if I found Hawkes unacceptable in that way, I would say he had outdated attitudes. Obviously I wouldn't describe it as British, because I don't think it is specifically British.
Regarding the Britishisms - it's possible that it's more a generational thing than anything specific to Great Britain.
Before I started this project, I read a book by Fan Shengyu called "The Translator's Mirror for the Romantic" that goes into great detail about the Hawkes translation. I'll spare you the details - but I do want to note that the first chapter is a hagiography of Hawkes that describes how he is the only one who possibly could translate the book into English because of his aristocratic upbringing. You could probably say that my feelings on Hawkes were influenced by that $190 book.
But, like I said, the biggest issue with the translation is not the use of English words. It's the constant use of foreign words, including in places where using foreign terms is neither appropriate nor accurate.
Hawkes was commissioned by Penguin to create a translation for the masses. Instead, he created a translation for other literary scholars. He's received praise for five decades now, despite the fact that most modern readers struggle through his translation.
I know - I was one of them. And I was reading the Chinese at the same time.
Another issue with both Hawkes and the Yangs is that they take liberties with the original text. Hawkes edited the original text for the sake of his translation without alerting the reader to what he was doing. Fan Shengyu goes into great detail about this in his introduction to the bilingual version that was published in Shanghai about 20 years ago. The Yangs, meanwhile, undertranslate huge sections of the text for no apparent reason. Their version feels like a generic summary at times instead of a proper translation.
The biggest issue I have with both English translations, though, is that the authors seem to have been completely unaware of the history of Chinese romantic fiction that served as the basis point of this novel. And that's one of the points I tried to make clear in my rambling podcast yesterday.
Thanks again for sharing your opinion! We might differ, but that's perfectly fine.
Yes, I would think it is generational (good word).
I have heard of Fan Shengyu and will look at it one day but it does sound a bit odd. I don't know a library from which I could borrow it. I actually have too many other things to read at the moment. I know nothing about Hawkes' upbringing but would be curious to look at that book. What was Fan Shengyu's upbringing, I wonder?
I think the use of foreign words is familiar to me from Victorian novels, old translations from the Russian and so on. I don't personally have a problem with it but I suppose I have read a lot. I have a Ph.D. in German literature, but not all the reading was in German. I wasn't aware that most readers struggle with the English, but then I probably don't know that many readers. My Chinese teacher in Nuremberg was thrilled when she heard I'd read the Dream of the Red Chamber (in the Hawkes version of course). I had not realized quite how iconic the book was till then.
It is indeed very interesting what you write about the history of Chinese romantic fiction. It is an area where my lack of Chinese (at more than an elementary level) if a real problem.
I'm glad I have written because you can have no idea how irritated I have been by some of your posts! But as you say, we can agree to differ.
It took me some time to start to understand the homophonic games Cao Xueqin is playing here: by naming two characters and using homophones of those names in the same paragraph, he's immediately telling us to look out for more hidden meanings in names. And as for the names themselves, am I right in my understanding that through using "rustic" language to describe truths hidden by dreams, we're meant to remember the inherent worldliness of the story? That this book, despite being something like a dream, isn't divorced from the society it was written in?
I think that's a good point, actually - that the "rustic" language is supposed to remind us that the book is more realistic than we might think at first glance.
The interesting thing about Dream of the Red Chamber, and the hardest thing to translate, is how the language register in the book changes from colloquial Chinese to more formal Chinese.
I'm currently working my way through chapter 8, and noticed that Lin Daiyu says to Jia Baoyu "咱們來了這一日，也該回去了," or "We've been together here for this whole day; it's time for us to go back." It's all pretty basic Chinese, and is pretty much the way you'd say it today. But this is the same Lin Daiyu who writes intricate and amazing poetry that is subtle and hard to understand.
The coolest part of all is that the author somehow has been able to give each character a unique voice. In fact, even their poetry is unique. Jia Yucun's silly romantic poetry in the first chapter is completely different from the style that Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai use to compose their poems, and those styles are different from the dire predictive poems in chapter 5.
Seeing colloquial speech that'd be recognisable today living alongside elaborate literary conventions boggles my mind a little. I watched a video by Simon Roper where he reconstructed 1680s speech from a certain part of England based on a transcription of court proceedings, and it sounded curiously similar to the way English is spoken today. At the same time, though, writers were creating works that to me, read almost like entirely different languages. Do we have anything like that today, I wonder?
I just started the reading project of this classic and was shocked to discover here that such an important first passage was omitted by the translators! I've only just begun, but feel that the references to dreams and illusions, as well as the narrator's stance regarding himself and the women in his life cannot be overstated in their importance. Thank you for your work, I look forward to using your posts and videos as a reading companion.
Thank you for double checking! Please let me know as you find more of these. I try to check, but there are times where I wind up missing relatively simple things like this.
Interestingly enough, the printed version I have (from 三民書局 in Taiwan) uses 敷衍 instead of 敷演. I'm curious about the textual history behind this change, as well as other changes throughout the book. It also makes me happy that we have high quality scanned copies of the original 程乙本 for the sake of comparison...
An interesting side-note: a dictionary of mine (for literary usage) happens to have separate entries for both 敷衍 and 敷演: under 敷演 one definition given is 陳述並發揮, citing this very sentence from the first chapter of 紅樓夢 as an example.
I also have a printed version from the 三民書局 edited by 饒彬 (perhaps it's even the same edition?) which has 敷衍. The edition is based on the 程甲本 from 1791, but as the scans of the 1791 print have 敷演, I think it‘s probably an editorial change by 饒彬.
Another (ebook) edition I have from the 三民書局 which is based mainly on the 庚辰本 from 1760 (which, as far as I know, is the earliest surviving hand copied source that contains almost all of the original 80 chapters) -- while making emendations from other sources -- has 敷演.
Thank you for this. I was one of those that skipped reading the David Hawkes introduction. After reading your translation, it put the whole thing into context that I've read so far (Chapter 16). I was actually thinking of giving up on reading this whole series because I wasn't getting the full picture nor understanding the foreshadowing from the translation. And as we were saying under my YouTube comment today—yes, Hawkes invented a bunch of poetry that wasn't in the original. That part is quite infuriating.
Thanks for the awesome translation, and also for sharing your insights into the original text and other translations.
On the title, I think your translation of 風塵 as "in the world" is clear and nicely contrasts "in a dream". (I also appreciated Hawkes’ "poverty" for capturing one of its meanings well.)
One question, if I may: Did you consider translating names beyond pinyin (e.g., for Jia Yucun)? I understand your commentary clarifies names (and other important details I'd otherwise miss), but I wonder if you’re concerned that a line like "This is why I use names such as Jia Yucun" might confuse English readers without it. To be fair, I don’t know a better solution than commentary.
Thanks again for your excellent work!
Thank you for the note!
I've been opting to transliterate the names using Pinyin instead of translating them. I know that this creates issues, since there are at least two characters that have names with the same Pinyin transliteration, yet different characters. My plan has been to use textual notes to explain this, though I might have to insert notes in the text itself to make it clear.
The hard part about translating names is the fact that many of the poems later in the book refer directly to certain characters because of poetic allusions to names. For example, the first prophetic poem we see in Chapter 5 (which I'm translating right now) starts "霽月難逢，彩雲易散," or "Clear moons are rarely met, bright clouds soon scatter." In Chinese, this is an oblique and hard to grasp reference to the maid named 晴雯 (Qingwen): 晴 means "cloudless sky," which is alluded to by 霽月 (a cloudless sky and bright moon after the rain), and 雯 means "colorful clouds," alluded to by 彩雲 (colorful clouds).
David Hawkes translates that poem as "Seldom the moon shines in a cloudless sky, and days of brightness all too soon pass by." The first line is just fine, but the second line changes the meaning of the poem completely. However, Hawkes is forced to translate the second line this way to fit with the name Skybright that he gave to 晴雯.
This is further complicated by Hawkes' insistence on giving the poems rhyming schemes. Sometimes his work is brilliant, but it often means he has to change the basic meaning of the text - which, of course, can be really confusing for anybody who wants to seriously study the book.
Anyway, no matter what we do with the names in English we're going to run into this problem. There's no perfect solution, and so I think the best way is to create a lot of textual notes and commentary posts to explain what is going on.
The more you dig into this book, the more fascinating it is.
"I find the “slips of girls” statement, along with the “which is all they were then” invention, to be both distasteful and inappropriate." I do not understand why this expression is "distasteful and inappropriate". All Hawkes is writing is that though these were just young girls, they were marvellous. I am wondering if the expression "slips of girls" is unfamiliar to you, as it is absolutely not distasteful or inappropriate. It may be that it's been added by Hawkes, but for me it works well. I looked at it again because you made remarks in today's podcast about Hawkes' upbringing, as if he were despicable to you, but what you meant exactly and where you got this from I have no idea. I would also like to add that it is weird of you to say "Naturally, most readers will" (skip the preface). Why would a person not read the introduction? And thirdly, what is wrong with Hawkes writing British English - what do you expect?
You're certainly entitled to your opinion.
The "slips of girls" statement is an incorrect translation, for one. I find it inappropriate because it completely changes the author's original meaning.
Second - this isn't the only place where Hawkes has said things that are dismissive or utterly sexist. It's one of the major shortcomings of his translation.
And, finally, the biggest issue with "The Story of the Stone" is not just the stilted and dry British English. It's the archaic word use combined with extensive run-on sentences, unnecessary foreign words, and mistranslations.
You might be like me; perhaps you tend to read the introduction. Most people I've spoken with (including my wife) always skip the introduction. It's extremely frustrating when a translator elects not to include a pivotal part of the original text where it belongs, and instead hides it in the middle of the introduction for no apparent reason.
So, yeah, I'd say I have a bone to pick with him. And I've got a platform to do it as well.
Sorry if I came over as too direct. It's just that ever since I started following your extremely interesting translation I keep intending to unsubscribe because you are so concerned to run British things down and make nasty remarks about Hawkes. I understand that you are writing for Americans, but I am British.
Back to "slips of girls" - it is not dismissive or sexist. That is not a matter of opinion. As I wrote in my comment, I am prepared to concede that it is not in the original but added by Hawkes, but I don't find it distasteful or inappropriate. I can quote the Oxford English Dictionary for a number of historical uses, including "slips of boys", so I kept wondering what you have against the expression (except, of course, that it was added by Hawkes).
I would like to see, and will watch out for, other examples that you refer to of sexism because I would normally notice that kind of thing.
We will have to disagree on the dry British English. I find it reads smoothly and well, and it doesn't worry me that the sentences are longer than the Chinese ones. True, Hawkes aims for a slightly old-fashioned style, as translators sometimes do with older texts. I wouldn't call it archaic, but then I'm not American.
When you say that it's wrong for Hawkes to be regarded as a base text, I see your point, but it is natural, as I don't think there's an alternative translation. Yours does read very well, but it isn't "out there" yet.
Today in the podcast you used the term "Britishisms" to refer to Hawkes's attitude to family life or women or some such - I would be interested to know what you meant, but at all events if I found Hawkes unacceptable in that way, I would say he had outdated attitudes. Obviously I wouldn't describe it as British, because I don't think it is specifically British.
Regarding the Britishisms - it's possible that it's more a generational thing than anything specific to Great Britain.
Before I started this project, I read a book by Fan Shengyu called "The Translator's Mirror for the Romantic" that goes into great detail about the Hawkes translation. I'll spare you the details - but I do want to note that the first chapter is a hagiography of Hawkes that describes how he is the only one who possibly could translate the book into English because of his aristocratic upbringing. You could probably say that my feelings on Hawkes were influenced by that $190 book.
But, like I said, the biggest issue with the translation is not the use of English words. It's the constant use of foreign words, including in places where using foreign terms is neither appropriate nor accurate.
Hawkes was commissioned by Penguin to create a translation for the masses. Instead, he created a translation for other literary scholars. He's received praise for five decades now, despite the fact that most modern readers struggle through his translation.
I know - I was one of them. And I was reading the Chinese at the same time.
Another issue with both Hawkes and the Yangs is that they take liberties with the original text. Hawkes edited the original text for the sake of his translation without alerting the reader to what he was doing. Fan Shengyu goes into great detail about this in his introduction to the bilingual version that was published in Shanghai about 20 years ago. The Yangs, meanwhile, undertranslate huge sections of the text for no apparent reason. Their version feels like a generic summary at times instead of a proper translation.
The biggest issue I have with both English translations, though, is that the authors seem to have been completely unaware of the history of Chinese romantic fiction that served as the basis point of this novel. And that's one of the points I tried to make clear in my rambling podcast yesterday.
Thanks again for sharing your opinion! We might differ, but that's perfectly fine.
Yes, I would think it is generational (good word).
I have heard of Fan Shengyu and will look at it one day but it does sound a bit odd. I don't know a library from which I could borrow it. I actually have too many other things to read at the moment. I know nothing about Hawkes' upbringing but would be curious to look at that book. What was Fan Shengyu's upbringing, I wonder?
I think the use of foreign words is familiar to me from Victorian novels, old translations from the Russian and so on. I don't personally have a problem with it but I suppose I have read a lot. I have a Ph.D. in German literature, but not all the reading was in German. I wasn't aware that most readers struggle with the English, but then I probably don't know that many readers. My Chinese teacher in Nuremberg was thrilled when she heard I'd read the Dream of the Red Chamber (in the Hawkes version of course). I had not realized quite how iconic the book was till then.
It is indeed very interesting what you write about the history of Chinese romantic fiction. It is an area where my lack of Chinese (at more than an elementary level) if a real problem.
I'm glad I have written because you can have no idea how irritated I have been by some of your posts! But as you say, we can agree to differ.
It took me some time to start to understand the homophonic games Cao Xueqin is playing here: by naming two characters and using homophones of those names in the same paragraph, he's immediately telling us to look out for more hidden meanings in names. And as for the names themselves, am I right in my understanding that through using "rustic" language to describe truths hidden by dreams, we're meant to remember the inherent worldliness of the story? That this book, despite being something like a dream, isn't divorced from the society it was written in?
I think that's a good point, actually - that the "rustic" language is supposed to remind us that the book is more realistic than we might think at first glance.
The interesting thing about Dream of the Red Chamber, and the hardest thing to translate, is how the language register in the book changes from colloquial Chinese to more formal Chinese.
I'm currently working my way through chapter 8, and noticed that Lin Daiyu says to Jia Baoyu "咱們來了這一日，也該回去了," or "We've been together here for this whole day; it's time for us to go back." It's all pretty basic Chinese, and is pretty much the way you'd say it today. But this is the same Lin Daiyu who writes intricate and amazing poetry that is subtle and hard to understand.
The coolest part of all is that the author somehow has been able to give each character a unique voice. In fact, even their poetry is unique. Jia Yucun's silly romantic poetry in the first chapter is completely different from the style that Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai use to compose their poems, and those styles are different from the dire predictive poems in chapter 5.
It's a pretty cool book, all in all.
Seeing colloquial speech that'd be recognisable today living alongside elaborate literary conventions boggles my mind a little. I watched a video by Simon Roper where he reconstructed 1680s speech from a certain part of England based on a transcription of court proceedings, and it sounded curiously similar to the way English is spoken today. At the same time, though, writers were creating works that to me, read almost like entirely different languages. Do we have anything like that today, I wonder?
I just started the reading project of this classic and was shocked to discover here that such an important first passage was omitted by the translators! I've only just begun, but feel that the references to dreams and illusions, as well as the narrator's stance regarding himself and the women in his life cannot be overstated in their importance. Thank you for your work, I look forward to using your posts and videos as a reading companion.
Thank you! Hopefully I don't get too much wrong in my translating and analysis, haha.
One small correction of the transcription: The facsimile actually has ｢敷演｣instead of ｢敷衍｣ (in ｢我雖不學無文，又何妨用假語村言敷演出來⋯⋯」）
Thank you for double checking! Please let me know as you find more of these. I try to check, but there are times where I wind up missing relatively simple things like this.
Interestingly enough, the printed version I have (from 三民書局 in Taiwan) uses 敷衍 instead of 敷演. I'm curious about the textual history behind this change, as well as other changes throughout the book. It also makes me happy that we have high quality scanned copies of the original 程乙本 for the sake of comparison...
An interesting side-note: a dictionary of mine (for literary usage) happens to have separate entries for both 敷衍 and 敷演: under 敷演 one definition given is 陳述並發揮, citing this very sentence from the first chapter of 紅樓夢 as an example.
Yes, the scanned copies are a treasure indeed!
I also have a printed version from the 三民書局 edited by 饒彬 (perhaps it's even the same edition?) which has 敷衍. The edition is based on the 程甲本 from 1791, but as the scans of the 1791 print have 敷演, I think it‘s probably an editorial change by 饒彬.
Another (ebook) edition I have from the 三民書局 which is based mainly on the 庚辰本 from 1760 (which, as far as I know, is the earliest surviving hand copied source that contains almost all of the original 80 chapters) -- while making emendations from other sources -- has 敷演.
Thank you for this. I was one of those that skipped reading the David Hawkes introduction. After reading your translation, it put the whole thing into context that I've read so far (Chapter 16). I was actually thinking of giving up on reading this whole series because I wasn't getting the full picture nor understanding the foreshadowing from the translation. And as we were saying under my YouTube comment today—yes, Hawkes invented a bunch of poetry that wasn't in the original. That part is quite infuriating.