Overview

The Translator’s Mirror for the Romantic: Cao Xueqin’s Dream and David Hawkes’ Stone is a book that uses precious primary sources to decipher a master translator’s art in Stone, a brilliant English translation of the most famous Chinese classic novel Dream. This book demonstrates a bilingual close reading which sheds light on both the original and its translation. By dividing the process of translation into reading, writing, and revising, and involving the various aspects of Sinological research, textual criticism, recreation, and literary allusions, this book ventures to emphasise the idea of translation as a dialogue between the original and the translated text, between the translator and his former self, and a learning process both for the translator and the reader of his translation. Any student of Chinese language and literature, or Chinese–English translation, will benefit from this book; for students and scholars who want to study David Hawkes and his Stone, this book is an indispensable aid. Readers will be interested to see how a non-theoretical analysis could be used to evaluate this translation, for it makes an extremely important and useful contribution to this subject.

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9781032147741

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Reviews

This is a masterly study of how a great translator recreated in English the masterpiece of Chinese fiction. Those interested in fiction generally, in the Hongloumeng in particular, and in the magical alchemy whereby David Hawkes transformed the novel into The Story of the Stone will find this book an enthralling read. Fan Shengyu's close reading of original and translation allows us a better appreciation of the 'true flavour' of both, and an understanding of the serious playfulness with which Hawkes approached his work as translator. -Duncan M. Campbell, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Cao Xueqin's Honglou meng is a masterpiece; David Hawkes's The Story of the Stone is equally a masterpiece. Connecting the two is a phantom text, Cao's Honglou meng as imagined and desired by his translator Hawkes. Fan Shengyu is the first person to attempt to capture and record this phenomenon of intercultural dreaming, the 'lost translator's copy' that existed in Hawkes's mind and that grants us entry to a world of textual, aesthetic and historical choices otherwise invisible. Fan deserves our gratitude for his painstaking, sympathetic reconstruction of the many forking paths in the Cao-Hawkes garden. -Professor Haun Saussy, University of Chicago, USA

This is a masterly study of how a great translator recreated in English the masterpiece of Chinese fiction. Those interested in fiction generally, in the Hongloumeng in particular, and in the magical alchemy whereby David Hawkes transformed the novel into The Story of the Stone will find this book an enthralling read. Fan Shengyu's close reading of original and translation allows us a better appreciation of the 'true flavour' of both, and an understanding of the serious playfulness with which Hawkes approached his work as translator. -Duncan M. Campbell, Victoria University of Wellington Cao Xueqin's Honglou meng is a masterpiece; David Hawkes's Story of the Stone is equally a masterpiece. Connecting the two is a phantom text, Cao's Honglou meng as imagined and desired by his translator Hawkes. Fan Shengyu is the first person to attempt to capture and record this phenomenon of intercultural dreaming, the 'lost translator's copy' that existed in Hawkes's mind and that grants us entry to a world of textual, aesthetic and historical choices otherwise invisible. Fan deserves our gratitude for his painstaking, sympathetic reconstruction of the many forking paths in the Cao-Hawkes garden. -Professor Haun Saussy, University of Chicago

Author Information

Fan Shengyu is Associate Professor/Reader in Chinese Studies at the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.

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