红楼梦 - English translations

[ZhangKaiRong]

Hello everybody,

I read three of the four famous Chinese novels' (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber), but in my native language, which uses a non-pinyin romanization. I would like to buy an English translation to reread these books, and my favourite one was the 红楼梦, I would like to start with this one. My problem is that I don't really know which translation is the best. In the Wangfujing book store I saw that Tuttle Publishing issued a nice version of the Dream of the Red Chamber: http://www.tuttlepublishing.com/authors/xueqin-cao/the-dream-of-the-red-chamber

Is this version a complete edition? How about the translation? Is there a better alternative to buy? I'm afraid to buy it in Chinese, since I have some problems even with the modern novels, they're not fun to read because I have to use a dictionary to get the meaning of the sentences. I can imagine how hard could this classic novel be to read...

Thank you very much for any kind of response!

[fanglu]

That is a very old (19th century) and not complete translation. I think the best translation is generally considered to be the five volume Hawkes/Minford translation. Volume 1 is here - http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0140442936

[Kev]

The Hawkes/Minford translation is often said to be the best and is also available in good libraries and often comes up second-hand. The Bowra translation was interesting. Another is the China Foreign Language Press version made in the late 1970s by Chinese translators Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys which has some good translating in it.

I think it's time for a new translation but dunno who would want to do it these days. I translated chapter one into Australian once for fun - it didn't really work.

I personally feel that the Hawkes/Minford translation is too beautiful. I found the original to be much more gritty, earthy and rude.

[ZhangKaiRong]

Thank you very much, guys, I've just ordered the Hawkes/Minford set, I hope it will arrive soon, can't wait to re-read this novel!

[Lu]

The Hawkes/Minford translation is great. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang did a lot of work translating huge amounts of Chinese literature into English and they should be commended for that, but their translations are usually (as far as I have read) rather stilted. If you have any other options, for any work you want to read, I would not recommend them.