New Translation of 紅樓夢 Hong Lou Meng

[Benjamin Smith]

Hello, my name is Benjamin Smith and I'm just trying to gauge the level of public interest in a new English language translation of 紅樓夢 Hong Lou Meng. As I'm sure any of you who have read or tried reading the book in English (Either H. Bencraft Joly's incomplete version from the 19th century, the Hawkes/Minford version from the 70s, or the Yang version from the 80s) probably know, the currently available options aren't really a good representation of the original novel. At best they're bland and pedantic, and I'm convinced the book could be better rendered into English.

As a proof of concept, I've translated the first five chapters, and I want to know what others think. You can check it out through Amazon's Kindle service here, or you can just check out the first chapter here. If anyone has any questions or comments I would love to hear them.

Thanks, and have a great day.

[陳德聰]

I have never read the other English translations. I am curious to know what you identify as the elements that you bring that previous translations don't?

[giokve]

What I would love to see is a parallel text of it.

 

Bencraft Joly's translation looks at times more difficult than the original, but English is not my mother tongue. I have skimmed thorough your first chapter and it looks great.

[Zeppa]

What's wrong with The Story of the Stone, translated by Hawkes and Minford? I've read it three times and it is very good. It says itself there are parts other translators might disagree with, but I'm surprised you don't mention it - it's surely the standard modern translation.

[Zeppa]

I've had a quick look at your translation and it does look very good, but for me no better than the Hawkes/Minford one. Perhaps you should turn your energies to another book. Sorry, I overlooked your mention  of Hawkes and Minford. But when I compare your translation with theirs, I don't see an improvement or a great change in style. They are both a bit formal, but I think they have to be. I would need to hear your arguments about why their translation is bad.

 

For example, is there more information on the last 40 chapters - can you get a more authentic version now? I don't know if there are newer Chinese versions (by redologists). Or do you do something about the use of 'red' which Hawkes refers to in the introduction? He says re replaced many red references with green and gold!

[Benjamin Smith]

The Hawkes/Minford translation is certainly the best of the currently available translations, but to me it still very much reads first and foremost like a translation. When one reads novels translated into English from Russian, German, even Japanese or Arabic or modern Chinese, a good translation doesn't hide what it is, but it doesn't use the fact that it's a translation to justify unnatural syntax and word-choice. In short, it is dry and overly formal. The Hawkes/Minford translation has been around for nearly 50 years (A half century in which interest in China and Chinese culture has risen spectacularly no less) and yet has never been able to break into the public consciousness; even several of the sinologists I know have tried reading it only to give up. You love that translation, and that's fine; some people swear by the Constance Garnett translation of War & Peace.

Basically, in the first chapter of the book Cao Xueqin describes what he's writing as a piece of easy-reading that also has deeper implications; because of that, I attempted a translation that would be more informal, more stylistically similar to a novel in the western sense of the word, and basically just more pleasant and readable for an educated English speaker in the twenty-first century. I may not have achieved that distinction as clearly as I had hoped, but I still feel it's a worthy objective. 

[Shelley]

Can you give us your qualifications? Just wondered why you think you are in a better position than others to attempt such a feat.

 

What are you using as your source material?

 

I have read and enjoyed the Yang version A Dream of Red Mansions (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, three volumes, 1978–1980)., all 120 chapters.

 

As this was the first and only version I have read, for me this is the definitive version.

 

 

[陳德聰]

I don't know, reading the original makes me feel like in order to translate it in a captivating way, you'd either have to translate and abridge, or adapt the story somehow. Because honestly, the original is not really very riveting. It is rich and full of story and character, but I never found it particularly engrossing.

[Zeppa]

Well, I don't think I know the Constance Garnett translation of War and Peace - I probably read the Maude one. But I know that kind of 19th-century translation, for instance of The Count of Monte Cristo, and I do feel you make a little mental leap and don't notice the old-fashioned style after a while. That was what I felt when I looked at the Yang translation - it's OK. In fact, I ought to read it because it uses the colour red instead of green as a motif!

 

Of course, when you translate an older work of literature, it's always the question whether you write in a slightly archaic way. You could write a modern colloquial version, but it might seem wrong.

 

As for Hawkes/Minford, it was published well in my own lifetime, so fifty years doesn't seem much to me. I didn't think about the style all the time I was reading it either. What strikes me, though, when comparing the very little of your translation I've read with Hawkes, is that I can't see any difference in style. Here's a of the very beginning from Hawkes:

 

'Long ago, when the goddess Nü-wa was repairing the sky, she melted down a great quantity of rock and, on the Incredible Crags of the Great Fable Mountains, moulded the amalgam into thirty-six thousand, five hundred and one large building blocks, each measuring seventy-two feet by a hundred and forty-four feet square. She used thirty-six thousand five hundred of these blocks in the course of her building operations, leaving a single odd block unused, which lay, all on its own, at the foot of Greensickness Peak iun the aforementioned mountains.'

 

Benjamin Smith:

 

'Long ago, the great pillar that holds up the sky was shattered, and it was the responsibility of the goddess Nüwa, creator of all mankind, to repair it. In order to do so, she climbed the endless cliffs of the Great Barren Mountains and with her own divine hands formed thirty-six thousand five hundred and one blocks from the clay she found there, each block measuring a hundred and twenty feet high and two hundred and forty feet around.

However, when her task had been completed and the blue sky once again rose high over the earth, she found there was still one of these blocks left over. Having no further use for it, she simply cast it aside to lay at the base of Mount Qinggeng.'

 

For all I know your version may be closer to the original, but it doesn't seem a radically different style.

[Benjamin Smith]

Zappa - It's not necessarily a question of being closer to the original for me, but there are certainly stylistic differences that I feel substantially improve the reading experience...For example, in the section you quote  I contextualize a bit more of the mythological background of Nüwa and her role in repairing the heavens (That kind of background information that would have been common knowledge for a Chinese reader in the 18th century; don't any English readers wonder why someone would use rocks to repair the sky?) as well as making use of fewer awkward word choices (Amalgam? Greensickness? Calling the work of a goddess 'building operations'? Does the stone really need to be single, odd, AND all on its own? Can something even be X feet by Y feet square?). A lot of this is barely correct English, and that's just the first couple lines; in my experience, some people do make a mental leap and stop noticing an odd or archaic style, and that's great, but the vast majority of people just put the book down and find something else to read.

There have been at least 8 or 9 translations of Homer's Iliad into English since the year 2000, and three of War and Peace (Plus a revision); its more than high time that a new, more readable translation of 紅樓夢 be produced.

 

陳德聰： I've definitely wondered the same thing myself sometimes, whether book might not be better served by a decent abridgement; not as extreme as what's been done before, but something could be done with a lot of the middle chapters. Or maybe even a more liberal adaptation of some kind...Maybe, but I still think the novel stands well enough on it's own, especially if you look at it less as a monolithic novel and more as a collection of short stories about life in an upper class Chinese household.

 

Shelley: For the time being I'd like to leave my qualifications out of it and allow my work to speak for itself; I don't want my identity to colour people's perceptions of my work; I wouldn't necessarily say that there's no one in the world in a better position to attempt this than others, but I'm also not stopping anyone else from trying. As for my subject material, I'm using a copy of the Chengjia edition with some reference to the Red Inkstone commentaries as necessary.

[gato]

The Hawkes version seems more concise, looking at that paragraph.

[陳德聰]

I wondered about the difference in numbers there so I decided to give it a closer look. You seem to have taken a lot of liberties with your translation, I think if you are going to be doing that throughout, you could call it an adaptation and leave it at that. I like what you're doing, I do think there is a difference in style, but it also comes from just your way of altering the original meaning by leaving out things you feel are not as important and adding things (when did the two monks ever get described as distractingly handsome??). I don't know that you would make much money off of such a project, but I do think that learners would be willing to read a version that dispenses with some of the more boring details and is more just a reflection of the plot. I do wonder though if this way of translating will get you into trouble with the latter chapters as there is so much foreshadowing.

[skylee]

Distractingly handsome monks are so distracting.

“骨格不凡， 丰神迥異”？

[imron]

The Hawkes version seems more concise, looking at that paragraph.

On the flipside, the Hawkes version also seems to have super long sentences full of commas that makes it a touch difficult to follow.  If we are comparing those two fragments, I find the OPs reads much more smoothly.

[Benjamin Smith]

Gato: The Hawkes/Minford is generally, I think, yes, more concise than mine, but I'm not sure I'd call that an advantage. A lot of the time I find their work to sometimes become a colourless recitation of facts, especially as you get further into the book. This is hard to reconcile with the book itself, which is always full of life and colour.

 

陳德聰: Specifically with the numbers, I went with something that would preserve the 12 and the 24 from the original, because I assumed they're more likely to be the meaningful elements than the actual size (Twelve months and twenty-four solar terms in the year); Hawkes went with 72 and 144 because...Honestly I have no idea why, since my 120 feet is still closer. 
I wouldn't call what I've done an adaptation rather than a translation however; I've stayed extremely close to the original, except when I need to diverge more to produce readable English prose, or when the author is assuming knowledge that a 21st century English speaker wouldn't have.
You're right though, some of the foreshadowing is going to be lost, along with many of the jokes, because a large portion of both are based on untranslatable word play and linguistic trickery. If you were going to capture all of that, you'd need a book that was 80% footnotes, and that's not a book I'd want to write. That's not a book I'd be capable of writing for that matter.

skylee: Yeah, that's the line I was trying to translate...I'll admit, that might not have been the best way to go about it, but I needed something that was a little bit absurd and would strongly contrast the way they're described when they appear in the physical world.

 

imron: Thank you, "Reads much more smoothly" is a big part of what I was going for. The books is naturally inaccessible for its size, there's no reason to deliberately make that problem worse.

[Zeppa]

 

awkward word choices (Amalgam? Greensickness? Calling the work of a goddess 'building operations'? Does the stone really need to be single, odd, AND all on its own? Can something even be X feet by Y feet square?). A lot of this is barely correct English, and that's just the first couple lines;

I think this may be a British/American thing. I think you must be from the USA, although it doesn't read strongly US, but your use of 'jurists', some spelling and 'throwing a wrench into their plans' suggests that. 'X feet by X feet square' is the standard expression. However, that is a measure of area, not of a cube. But your 'around' was one of the very places where I stopped to ask myself whether it was proper English.

 

When I read your text, I noticed several other oddities. Obviously I was suspicious because your version is new and unpublished, and I realize I am biased and yours is a work in progress. Every translation has problems like this! Nevertheless, I didn't feel the English in your text was 100% secure (but that is me, of course). In Hawkes, I find the 'building operations' amusing and deliberate. I have no problems with the other words you quote either. The Hawkes text (I think this volume was pre-Minford) wins me over.

 

It would be nitpicking to list everything where I paused in your text. An early one was 'loathe' instead of 'loath' or 'loth'. The 'heartfelt day of sulking' didn't work for me - heartfelt and sulking don't work together. I wanted a comma after 'For whatever reason'. Then there were some colloquial expressions that seemed a break of style, for instance 'Sound like a plan?' or 'a bunch of girls'. The last line of the verse, '...My story from forging to rust' I simply couldn't understand. Then 'even the rich are too busy lusting after more gold to stop and smell the roses' is a mixture of clichés.

 

I list these not to say your translation is bad, but the sum of oddities is not reduced over Hawkes for me. And I think my main problem may be this mixture of clichés and formality. At one moment you've got 'Give that here good sir' and at another 'a doozy' or 'Shit, I'm terribly sorry about this'.  Words like 'bullshit' and 'shit' don't work for me, because although I use them all the time when I'm talking, in a novel they attract too much attention to themselves and stop the reader. I wonder how you would handle the classroom scene where the boys make fun of each other!

[Benjamin Smith]

Zeppa: Thanks a lot for all your comments, it's really helpful for me. I'm a Newfoundlander, if that helps; the language I use certainly is coloured heavily by both American and British usage, with more than a few local idiosyncrasies; it can't be a bit of a mess at times. 

As for "x feet by x feet square" being a standard expression of area, I really don't think that's true. You can have "72 feet by 144 feet" as a measure of area, or you can have "144 feet square" as a measure of area, but "72 feet by 144 feet square"  means what? A surface area of 144 square feet (With some unknown measurements) and another dimension measured 72 feet? I guess his intention was to indicate that is was 72 feet tall and that the dimension of the side facing the ground was 144 feet square, but that would make its dimensions 12X12X72, standing on the small side. Maybe the stone was actually the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey? Never mind that he got the 72 and 144 out of nowhere.
I'm surprised my use of 'around' threw you off, but I couldn't think of a better way of expressing 方經 that wouldn't interfere with the tone of the introduction.
I agree that 'building operation' would've been fine with a touch of irony somewhere else, but I found the beginning paragraph to have a very mythological or fairytale-esque voice.

 

As for the mixture of styles I use, that is absolutely deliberate; yes the book is filled with elegant prose, but it's also got more than a few fucks, cocks, and cunts. I follow Cao Xueqin's cues, or when there's no particularly strong stylistic indicators I use what ever I feel will sound most natural. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when the boys make fun of each other, or when Baoyu's servant Mingyan starts talking literally about buttfucking, but I'll want it to sound like teenage boys or angry young men, so yes, there's likely to be swearing.

Again, I don't expect everyone to agree with all the stylistic choices I make, and to be entirely honest even I don't 100% agree with all the choices I've made.

[mandel1luke]

Came back to this forum after several years, all for the sake of my favourite novel Hong Lou Meng.

 

I guess there are two schools of approach to translation, one which favors readability above everything else, and the other preferring a more literal approach. Hong Lou Meng is notoriously difficult to translate, since Cao Xueqin's Chinese is both vernacular, erudite and full of classical poetry and allusions.

 

To me, the David Hawkes translation is a classic. While it may seem a bit free, it in fact is accurate and lively. The only gripe I have is that Hawkes forgoes certain cultural nuances of the book. Hong Lou Meng becomes "The Golden Days", the maids "curtsey", Daiyu is "beautiful as an angel". Sometimes it grates a little to read Hong Lou Meng as if it was written as a native English novel. But it is full of clever and felicitous renditions. I think the pendulum has swung nowadays towards a more literal approach. Read the Pevears' War and Peace (a translation which uses Russian syntax and sounds to me almost ungrammatical in English) - yet the translation sold very well.

 

My very frank feedback to the OP, as someone who has read the Chinese original, is that your translation isn't more accurate than Hawkes's. Ideally I would like a translation that conveys the stylistic registers of this encyclopedic novel. Furthermore, one would like to know which edition of Hong Lou Meng (in Chinese) you are basing your translation on, since the novel has a complicated textual history. [Edit: I realize that you are using the Chengjia edition - sorry for missing out on the other posts] Your translation is certainly readable, but certain expressions don't work for me, like for Zeppa - "particular heartfelt day of sulking", "WHAM! diaster is bound to strike". These are far too slangy to my liking.

 

Hong Lou Meng is a monument in Chinese literature, so I would advise a cautious approach. Something like Roy's version of Jin Ping Mei would be good I think, as a third full translation.

 

Best of luck!

[Shelley]

I have to agree with Zeppa and mandel1luke about the use of slang and swear words. However this may appeal to some and if a new generation is exposed to this great piece of literature then it can't be all bad, but it is not for me. I am only worried that some may think this is how it was originally written so as said earlier maybe it should be made clear it is an adaptation rather than a translation.

 

It also seems to me that if you carry on in the same vein as the chapters you have already done, it is going to be twice as long if not more than it already is which may put some people off.

 

I am disappointed that you do not want to share your qualifications with us. Not sure how this is connected to your identity nor was I trying to imply you were not qualified or that you are preventing anyone else from trying.

 

i only wondered at what sort of level you need to be at to contemplate attempting something like this.

[陳德聰]

“骨格不凡， 丰神迥異”？

Yes skylee I tried re-reading that part a couple times thinking "is it distracting really?". They're super buff and much more beautiful than normal folk, but I didn't think our dear stone was all that enamoured. It was just a description of their appearance to me.

 

"WHAM" was where I stopped reading. It reads like a fanfiction, and I actually like fanfiction, but this would be on the lower end where the internal inconsistency is distracting. The jumps in register mentioned above were something that gave me pause too, and I think perhaps it would help if you are also a novel writer in English already, rather than just trying to jump into novel-writing by translating a classic work. Alternatively, slang up the entire book. I actually liked the Leo DiCaprio movie of Romeo and Juliet, and we used to try to make older works more accessible for the younger generation all the time in school projects, so that is certainly an option, but at that point it's an adaptation and not a translation (though really if we get nitpicky we can probably say that translations are a form of adaptation)... Can't remember where I was going with that.