Reading the Stone
April 16, 2022 8:00 AM Subscribe
An experiment in a public reading endeavor of Chinese classic 紅樓夢 "Dream of the Red Chamber" where scholars, readers, and translators participate using the hashtag #ReadingtheStone, from Duke professor Eileen Chengyin Chow inspired by a previous public reading experiment on reading War & Peace online during the early days of the pandemic with author YiYun Li with the hashtag #TolstoyTogether.
Follow the @ReadingtheStone account, check out the weekly live chat on TwitterSpaces, grab a copy of copyright free translations.
Follow the @ReadingtheStone account, check out the weekly live chat on TwitterSpaces, grab a copy of copyright free translations.
I was so excited to read this; I was taking a class about major texts from East Asian history when the pandemic started, and Dream of the Red Chamber got taken off the syllabus. But it looks like there are no transcripts for the podcasts.
posted by Soliloquy at 12:00 PM on April 16, 2022
posted by Soliloquy at 12:00 PM on April 16, 2022
Oh hey, cool -- thanks for making this post, toastyk! I've been enjoying Reading the Stone a lot so far -- as someone who's pretty familiar with the book, and who's taught it before, it's been really lovely to see people getting interested and coming to this with all kinds of different backgrounds. Eileen has been doing a great job of keeping things moving quickly and maintaining the discussion at a level that feels welcoming to people who haven't read the book before, while remaining interesting for the nerds in the audience. (I would absolutely love to take the grad seminar version of this with Eileen and Wai-yee Li and Ann Waltner.)
We're still pretty early in the book -- next Saturday's session will cover Chapters 5 and 6, which contain the novel's first climax in more ways than one. If you think you might be interested, come join us!
posted by bokane at 8:09 PM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
We're still pretty early in the book -- next Saturday's session will cover Chapters 5 and 6, which contain the novel's first climax in more ways than one. If you think you might be interested, come join us!
posted by bokane at 8:09 PM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thank you bokane! Do you have a good recommendation for a decent English translation? I just don't have the literacy to do it in Chinese, and would like to follow along a bit better. Or maybe I should find one of the cdramas to watch :P.
posted by toastyk at 8:00 AM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by toastyk at 8:00 AM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]
Very cool!
I got exposed to Dream of the Red Chamber in college, during a Great Books of the Far East seminar. We read the one-volume abridgment, then started the then new (I think?) Penguin full edition. I've always wanted to read the whole thing.
posted by doctornemo at 12:54 PM on April 17, 2022
I got exposed to Dream of the Red Chamber in college, during a Great Books of the Far East seminar. We read the one-volume abridgment, then started the then new (I think?) Penguin full edition. I've always wanted to read the whole thing.
posted by doctornemo at 12:54 PM on April 17, 2022
Translation-wise, the Hawkes-Minford one, The Story of the Stone, really is the way to go -- it's one of the best works of Chinese-English literary translation I can think of, and Hawkes was a formidable Redologist in his own right. (Which isn't to say that it's perfect -- just that it's hard to imagine a better option in this fallen world of ours.)
The only real competition is the translation from Foreign Languages Press, A Dream of Red Mansions, which has Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi's names attached to it (if memory serves, it was a bit more of a group effort, and not one they embarked upon under ideal circumstances). That one has moments of felicity, but its major selling point is that it's not particularly creative, and thus is more useful as a guide for someone who's reading the translation alongside the Chinese. I haven't looked in a while, but they probably used the People's Literature edition of Honglou meng (which is very good) as their base text; Hawkes, on the other hand, based his translation on his own study of the manuscript editions of the text (which differ in places, sometimes in ways that make them logically incompatible), and effectively created a new edition of his own.
There are good arguments to be made in favor of either approach -- there's a passage at the start of the book where I disagree in a pretty major way with one of Hawkes's choices; elsewhere, he resolves textual difficulties that other approaches can't -- but the upshot is that the Yangs' translation is the one for people who want a guide to a book that they're also reading in Chinese, and Hawkes and Minford's translation is for pretty much everybody else.
The other point in favor of the Hawkes-Minford translation is that a lot of the resources available in English are keyed to that one as their standard translation. Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-yung released A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide last year, and although I don't think I can recommend paying $35 for it, the chapter summaries are very intelligently done, and the authors do a good job of pointing out things and supplying background information that might not otherwise be obvious to modern or non-Chinese readers.
On the other end of the expertise scale, there's a really terrific new edited volume from Tina Lu and Andrew Schonebaum, Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone, which is $6 less and absolutely worth owning. The target audience is teachers (and I found it helpful when I taught the book in freshman surveys and higher-level classes), but there are essays in there on medicine, material culture, gender and sexuality, religion, censorship, literary culture, and all kinds of other things as they relate to the creation and enjoyment of Stone. Neither of these books is necessary to enjoy the novel, of course -- I read and fell in love with it years ago -- but they're great resources, and both use Hawkes-Minford as the standard edition.
posted by bokane at 2:35 PM on April 17, 2022 [6 favorites]
The only real competition is the translation from Foreign Languages Press, A Dream of Red Mansions, which has Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi's names attached to it (if memory serves, it was a bit more of a group effort, and not one they embarked upon under ideal circumstances). That one has moments of felicity, but its major selling point is that it's not particularly creative, and thus is more useful as a guide for someone who's reading the translation alongside the Chinese. I haven't looked in a while, but they probably used the People's Literature edition of Honglou meng (which is very good) as their base text; Hawkes, on the other hand, based his translation on his own study of the manuscript editions of the text (which differ in places, sometimes in ways that make them logically incompatible), and effectively created a new edition of his own.
There are good arguments to be made in favor of either approach -- there's a passage at the start of the book where I disagree in a pretty major way with one of Hawkes's choices; elsewhere, he resolves textual difficulties that other approaches can't -- but the upshot is that the Yangs' translation is the one for people who want a guide to a book that they're also reading in Chinese, and Hawkes and Minford's translation is for pretty much everybody else.
The other point in favor of the Hawkes-Minford translation is that a lot of the resources available in English are keyed to that one as their standard translation. Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-yung released A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide last year, and although I don't think I can recommend paying $35 for it, the chapter summaries are very intelligently done, and the authors do a good job of pointing out things and supplying background information that might not otherwise be obvious to modern or non-Chinese readers.
On the other end of the expertise scale, there's a really terrific new edited volume from Tina Lu and Andrew Schonebaum, Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone, which is $6 less and absolutely worth owning. The target audience is teachers (and I found it helpful when I taught the book in freshman surveys and higher-level classes), but there are essays in there on medicine, material culture, gender and sexuality, religion, censorship, literary culture, and all kinds of other things as they relate to the creation and enjoyment of Stone. Neither of these books is necessary to enjoy the novel, of course -- I read and fell in love with it years ago -- but they're great resources, and both use Hawkes-Minford as the standard edition.
posted by bokane at 2:35 PM on April 17, 2022 [6 favorites]
Funny to read this post right after reading a Chen Chuncheng 陈春成 sci-fi short story based on the idea that in the far distant future, "Dream of the Red Chamber" will be a work only known in fragments, but it is also the sacred text of a religion that believes that the creation of this novel is the sole purpose of the universe.
(As I was reading it, I was thinking that the toughest part of the job of a putative translator for this story would be to convey the significance of "Dream of the Red Chamber" in Chinese culture.)
posted by of strange foe at 7:07 PM on April 18, 2022 [2 favorites]
(As I was reading it, I was thinking that the toughest part of the job of a putative translator for this story would be to convey the significance of "Dream of the Red Chamber" in Chinese culture.)
posted by of strange foe at 7:07 PM on April 18, 2022 [2 favorites]
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Maybe it's thinking about the descriptions of the flowers in the rain (drenched blossoms comes to mind) or the food and flower clubs. Somehow, when Spring arrives, so does The Dream.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 10:45 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]