kindledaa.blogg.se - Dream of the Red Chamber by Tsao Hsueh-Chin

Red Inkstone was the nickname of an anonymous commentator who must have been close to the author. According to the introduction by David Hawkes, the original 80-chapter manuscripts (which literally were manuscripts written by hand, not printed) circulated with the title Red Inkstone’s Reannotated Story of the Stone. Why did Penguin choose to call the work The Story of the Stone, a different title altogether? Certainly it’s not an unprecedented title it may be the one the author originally preferred, and it seems to be the one the work was originally known by. Variations between ‘a’ and ‘the’ at the beginning of the title are due to the lack of any such articles in Chinese. (The academic field of study devoted to examining this particular work of Chinese literature is in fact called ‘redology’.) The ‘lou’ has more than one possible interpretation, though, and Chinese does not explicitly mark nouns as singular or plural the way English does. People usually have no problem translating ‘red’ consistently. The transliteration of the Chinese title of the book is Hung Lou Meng, Heng Lou Meng, or Hong Lou Meng, which maybe literally means something like “red edifice dream”. Those are just different spellings of the names of the authors, “Cao Xueqin and Gao E”. You may see them in the opposite order as well: “Hsueh-chin Tsao and Ngo Kao”.

Sometimes the authors are listed as “Tsao Hsueh-Chin and Kao Ngo”. Scholars believe it is likely that Gao E, who worked on those chapters as editor and publisher, was the one who wrote the last 40 chapters. These are Chinese names with the family name shown first. The author of the first 80 chapters was Cao Xueqin. “Who wrote The Dream of the Red Chamber?” 1986 – David Hawkes & Jon Minford (complete).

1980 – Gladys and Hsien-Yi Yang (complete).

These translations are all in print, but only two of them are complete. (If what you want is a short version, check out the illustrated Real Reads version or the Wang abridgment.)Ī complete translation was not available until the mid-1980s, but now you have two to choose from: the Hawkes & Minford translation published by Penguin and the Yang & Yang translation published by Foreign Languages Press. So you want to read the most modern of China’s Four Great Classical Novels, also known as The Story of the Stone and A Dream of Red Mansions, and you don’t read Chinese.īeware! The old and widely available Joly translation doesn’t contain all the chapters of the original, even though it’s almost 1000 pages long! “I want to read the best English translation of the Dream of the Red Chamber!”