Dream of the Red Chamber was finally published in print in 1791, but the text is still surrounded by controversy. He died in 1763, heartbroken it is said, by the death of his only son. The book was written in dribs and drabs: each new chapter circulated among family and friends, often in exchange for a meal and a pitcher of wine. So Yin’s grandson grew up in straitened circumstances, a brilliant but watchful boy, wary of all power, and never forgetting his grandad’s saying about the fickleness of fortune: “When the tree falls, the monkeys will be scattered.” He was good with the brush, both with paint and with words: but he had no aptitude for university, so he found himself down and out in his 30s, selling his paintings and working as a private teacher (he was eventually sacked for getting a maidservant pregnant.) By the end he was sleeping in barns and working in wine shops he clearly drank too much.Ī performance of Dream of the Red Chamber at the Cairo Opera House in 2010. They lost their mansion in Nanjing and moved to a modest house among the alleys of Beijing, south-east of the Forbidden City. But after Kangxi died, his son began a purge of corruption and incompetence, and the family were ruined. His grandfather, Cao Yin, was an imperial bondservant, an important functionary in the south, who enjoyed high favour with the emperor Kangxi. Cao’s story mirrors the tale of his own family.
DANGEROUS LIAISONS CHINESE FILM REDDIT TV
Today, everyone in China knows it, partly due to the much-loved 1987 TV version, which had the impact of the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice in the UK.ĭream of the Red Chamber was written in the 1750s “by a great artist with his very lifeblood”, said Hawkes. Chairman Mao claimed to have read it five times – and thought everyone else should too.
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It is full of incredible detail of the social, cultural and spiritual life of the time. The novel is an 18th-century saga, the tale of a noble family that falls from grace. When Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was given a copy of Shakespeare during his state visit to the UK, the new Chinese ambassador Fu Ying gave the queen the Hawkes translation. Hawkes’s translation was greeted as an introduction to “a masterpiece”, a “work of genius”, a “candidate for the Book of the Millennium”.
Hawkes eventually completed his great endeavour with the help of his son-in-law John Minford, who finished the last two volumes of the five, which were published by Penguin between 19. The critic Anthony West called it “one of the great novels of world literature … to the Chinese as Proust is to the French or Karamazov to the Russians”. The book was Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, written by Cao Xueqin. Then he became professor of Chinese in Oxford, but, as he put it, “I resigned in order to devote my time to translating a Chinese novel … well, the Chinese novel”. Later, as a teacher, he had done a wonderful translation of the Songs of the South, part of a poetic tradition earlier than anything that has survived in the west. As a student at Peking University, he had been in Tiananmen Square in 1949 when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. His name was David Hawkes.Ī gifted linguist, he had directed Japanese codebreakers in his early 20s, during the second world war. W hen I was a graduate student in Oxford many years ago I shared a house with a brilliant German sinologist who used to push translations my way, stroking his beard with a teasing smile: “Try this – you’ll really enjoy it.” Many visitors popped into our terraced house on Abingdon Road, and one night around the kitchen table I met a fascinating character, rangy with white hair and beard, and a twinkly eye.