Wait - Who's Doing What?

What to do when you get confused

Wait - Who’s Doing What?

Okay, it’s time for a quick confession.

Yesterday’s translation post was short in part because I was really confused.

This happens every once in a while in older Chinese texts, especially the older novels. Actually, it’s even worse when you read the classical histories and the old collections of stories.

The problem is that Chinese is inherently a contextual language. By “contextual,” I mean that a lot of things we would normally spell out in Western languages are simply assumed.

Though there are people who tell me that I must have some sort of interest in linguistics, I actually am not a formal linguistics student. For example, I’ve never heard of the term “pro-drop language,” which Wikipedia tells me describes languages where pronouns are omitted because they are inferred from the context.

If you’re a student of Chinese, or if you’re just interested in the literature, or if you want to know why in the world something so simple has confused me, stop reading the theoretical grammar. I’ll explain it to you so you can understand.

Chapter 10 begins with Jin Rong telling his mother about what happened at school. She tells him to keep his mouth shut and reminds him that they don’t have enough money for him to get a private tutor if he is kicked out of school. She’s clearly very wise.

The story then shifts over to talk about Jin Rong’s aunt - and that’s where this is confusing.

First of all, I should point out that there are a few phrases that are commonly used in these old Chinese novels to mark where one chunk begins and another ends. For example, chapter 10 begins with this sentence:

話說金榮因人多勢眾，又兼賈瑞勒令賠了不是，給秦鍾磕了頭，寶玉方才不吵鬧了。

Jin Rong saw that he was outnumbered. Jia Rui was ordering him to apologize. And so he had no choice but to kowtow to Qin Zhong. Baoyu only quieted down after that.

Now, there’s a part I didn’t translate into English. It’s the word “話說.”

話說 means something like “speaking of that,” or “it is said that.” In modern Chinese, it’s something more like “by the way,” or “oh - that reminds me,” and is basically a throw away phrase.

Of course, in the context of what we’d consider modern literature, it wouldn’t make sense to suddenly say “Oh, by the way” or even “It is said that.” And so I’ve left it out, mostly because we can leave it out.

Rather than thinking of the word 話說 as an interjection with some specific meaning, it’s probably better to think of it as a marker - something that is telling us that a section is going to begin.

The first section of chapter 10 ends with a similar more or less meaningless phrase:

次日，仍舊上學去了。不在話下。

And he went back to school the next day. That’s how this part of the story ends.

This time it’s the phrase “不在話下.” As you can see, I translated it this time around, though there’s really no need to.

不在話下 means something like “there’s no need to go into futher detail,” or “everything else is so insignificant that we don’t need to mention it.” And, again, this is basically an empty phrase that serves mostly as a kind of grammatical bookend, as if the story were a loose collection of pages that you were trying to hold together using sturdy route phrases.

There’s one more, and this phrase begins the next section:

且說他姑媽原給了賈家「玉」字輩的嫡派，名喚賈璜

It turns out that Jin Rong’s aunt had married into the “Yu” generation line of the Jia family. She married a man named Jia Huang.

Here this is “且說,” which is another meaningless phrase meant to move the story along.

且說 means something like “let us turn to” or “let us now speak about.” It’s not any different from 話說. In this case, I decided to translate it - but this was mostly to show what the actual connection is between Jin Rong and the Jia family. It comes through his aunt, a woman who married a man we haven’t met named Jia Huang.

And this is where the confusing part comes in.

The second passage I translated is all about Jia Huang and his wife. It’s pretty short; you can read it here if you like:

The final sentence of that passage reads like this:

這賈璜夫妻，守著些小小的產業，又時常到寧榮二府裡去請安，又會奉承鳳姐兒並尤氏，所以鳳姐兒尤氏也時常資助資助他，方能如此度日。

This Jia Huang and his wife managed to get by on the modest estate they had inherited. They also made sure to regularly pay their respects at the Ningguo and Rongguo mansions. They were particularly good at flattering Wang Xifeng and Lady You. And so Xifeng and Lady You provided them with a little bit of financial support, which is precisely how they could make ends meet.

So, in this case, the subject of this sentence is 這賈璜夫妻, or “This Jia Huang and his wife.”

However, the very next sentence has no subject at all, and seems to only refer to a single person:

今日正遇天氣晴明，又值家中無事，遂帶了一個婆子，坐上車，來家裡走走，瞧瞧嫂子和侄兒。

The weather was very nice this particular day, and there wasn’t anything to do at home. And so [he? she? they? somebody?] went along with an older maid to visit her sister-in-law and nephew.

There’s no indication here of any shift in subject. There aren’t any of those helpful throw-away phrases to let us know that one passage has ended and another has begun.

It took me a lot longer than I want to admit to finally realize that the unnamed subject here is actually Jia Huang’s wife, and that the sister-in-law (嫂子) and nephew (侄兒) she is visiting refers to Jin Rong (the nephew) and his mother (her sister-in-law).

There’s a lot going on here that is hard to grasp if you’re only reading the English text. For example, it’s not entirely clear what the actual relationship is between Jin Rong’s mother and Jia Huang’s wife. We don’t know the surname of either character. I presumed that they were sisters. It turns out that Jia Huang’s wife was actually the sister of Jin Rong’s father, who I think has passed away (David Hawkes refers to her as “Widow Jin” over and over again in The Story of the Stone).

The most confusing part for me was the term 嫂子, which means one’s elder brother’s wife. If the original text said that she was going to visit Jin Rong and his mother, it would be much easier to understand. However, with this 嫂子 and 侄兒 thrown in with no context, I was worried that I had missed a part of the text somehow.

You shoul also know that 今日 (today) is a pretty odd way to start off this short bit of the story, even for an older Chinese text. We went from a vague description of Jin Huang and his wife to suddenly describing a certain day when a certain event took place with absolutely no logical linkage. It almost feels like this part of the story was simply plastered in at this point without any attempt to connect things together.

Anyway, if you’re wondering why some of my translation posts are short, it’s mostly because I’m looking through translations and trying to make sure I’m not missing something.

As I noted yesterday, both David Hawkes and Gladys Yang make sure to specify that Jia Huang’s wife is visiting Jin Rong’s mother. I don’t know this for a fact, but I presume that their insistence on making this specific is because they went through the exact phase of confusion that I did.

Long story short: if you feel confused by this book at some point in time, don’t feel bad. We’re all confused.