The Dream of the Red Chamber
translated by Florence and Isabel McHugh
based on the German Der Traum der Roten Kammer
translated by Dr. Franz Kuhn
The woodcuts illustrating this volume are reproduced from the Hong Lou Meng T'u Yong
Introduction
Author: The authorship of the Hong Lou Meng, which first appeared in 1791, was for a long time unknown. As late as 1921 Dr. Hu Shih's exhaustive research made it possible to ascribe the first eighty chapters of the original, which has one hundred twenty chapters, to Tsao Hsueh Chin, and the remaining forty chapters to Kao Ngoh, one of the two editors of the first printed edition published in 1791. This dual authorship seems to indicate that Tsao Hsueh Chin probably left more than eighty chapters and that Kao Ngoh edited, expanded, and correlated the remaining forty chapters.
The versions on which the present text is based are an edition of 1832 published by the Tsui Wen Company, and a modern annotated version with commentary published by Commercial Press, Shanghai.
Title: Chinese architecture provides for the mass of the population low, one-story buildings. A mansion with a second story is called lou
¡X and Hong Lou stands for "Red Two-Story Building." According to Buddhist usage, it is also a metaphor for such concepts as worldly glory, luxury, wealth, and honors ¡X similar to the Buddhist interpretation of "red dust" as "wordly strivings," "the material world."Period: The text does not mention any particular date. However, there are implicit indications that the action takes place during the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644
¡V1912). Official titles and ranks correspond to those of the last dynast, and Manchuria could be referred to as a province only since the Ch'ing Dynasty. According to the findings of Dr. Hu Sh'ih, the author Tsao Hsueh Ch'in wrote about contemporary events and his own experiences. Internal evidence indicated that the main narrative covers the period between 1729 and 1737.Place: The text speaks alternately of the capital and Chin-ling. The capital under the Ch'ing Dynasty was Peking. Chin-ling, which means "golden tombs," is probably an allusion to the well-known imperial burial places in the vicinity of Peking. The mountains outside the city gates, where the Prince Hermit lives in seclusion, suggest the famous western mountains near Peking, with their splendid temples.
The Hong Lou Meng has been described to the Westerner as a forbidding literary monument with hundreds of characters. Only one European before myself, Bancroft Joly, an English consul in China, has dared to approach the task of translation. However, he did not even reach the halfway point of the original. His two-volume translation, Dream of the Red Chamber, was published by Kelly and Walsh in Hong Kong in 1892
¡V93.Another more recent attempt to make the Hong Lou Meng accessible to the Western mind came from the Chinese side, Chi Chen Wang's translation and adaptation, Dream of the Red chamber (George Routledge & Sons Ltd., London, no date). But Mr. Wang's work covers barely one-forth of my version and, particularly in its later part, is more in the nature of an abstract than a translation. He eliminates a great many details of compelling interest to the Western reader, and also a number of incidents essential to the logical development of the story, for instance, the entire magnificent dream vision toward the end of the book (Chapter 49 in the present version), which is one of the literary peaks of the novel and quite indispensable to it.
My translation into the German, on which the present English translation is based, presents about five-sixths of the original. It is intended not so much for a restricted scholarly audience as for the general reader interested in Chinese literature. Though my translation is not a complete one, I may still claim to be the first Westerner to have made accessible the monumental structure of the Hong Lou Meng. My version gives a full rendering of the main narrative, which is organized around the three figures of Pao Yu, Black Jade, and Precious Clasp. I have treated the secondary plots more or less comprehensively according to their importance, always with a view to avoiding gaps in the story development. There can be no doubt that sociologically this novel is of the greatest interest. But it can claim our attention equally on purely literary grounds: the narrative is compelling, the characters are most vividly individualized, the background is impressively and realistically drawn.
In China the Hong Lou Meng is considered the outstanding classic novel of the Ch'ing Dynasty. A considerable body of critical literature has grown up around it. The general assumption is that the author drew on his own experiences and that his hero, Pao Yu, is a self-portrait. Tsao Hsueh Ch'in was the pampered son of a rich and highly cultivated Mandarin family in which the lucrative office of Inspector of the Imperial Silk Factories in Kiangsu had been hereditary for generations. In spite of his great intellectual gifts, he failed at the Literary Examinations and was barred from office. He took refuge in the spheres of philosophy and letters.
Chinese literary criticism has offered other solutions to the puzzle, however. A not improbably theory identifies Pao Yu with the youthful Emperor Chien Lung (r. 1736
¡V1796), of whom it is said that, like Pao Yu, he had the habit of licking the rouge off the lips of the young ladies of his entourage. According to this theory, Pao Yu's father, the stern Chia Cheng, represents Emperor Yung Cheng (r. 1723¡V1735), Chien Lung's predecessor. This theory has much to commend it. Among the host of characters in the novel, Chia Cheng is the pure type of the stern Confucian. History preserves the memory of Emperor Yung Cheng as that of the great Confucian on China's throne, the ruler of common sense and social consciousness.Though at first sight the Hong Lou Meng appears to be an inexplicable chaos of innumerable characters and events, on closer scrutiny the novel reveals itself to be a harmonious structure, well ordered, logical, consistent. The main characters
¡X Black Jade, of a nearly saintly chastity; the Princess Ancestress, earthy and motherly; Precious Clasp, womanly, warm, sensible; Bright Cloud and Mandarin Duck, touchingly loyal and devoted; Chia Cheng, stern and dutiful ¡X are admirably drawn. But the many secondary figures also fill their positions solidly and have their definite functions within a carefully calculated plan. To give one example among many, the seemingly gratuitous appearance of the old servant and grumbler at the opening of the novel becomes meaningful when he reappears at the end of the story and the reader realizes that the old warrior functions as the unwanted and unheeded prophet.The two mysterious monks that keep reappearing add an element of the supernatural; they are messengers from the beyond. They represent the recurring motif of the fundamental themes of the work, which is undeniably Taoist. The action begins with a prologue in the Phantom Realm of the Great Void, the Taoist heaven; it ends with an epilogue in the Blessed Regions of Purified Semblance, which is another name for the same sphere. Four times we see characters pass through the gates of the Great Void, which, in Taoist language, means to renounce the world: Shih Ying, the Cold Knight, Grief of Spring, and finally Pao Yu, the hero himself.
A second motif of the novel seems to me the matriarchy, eloquently represented by the Ancestress, who, always optimistic and ready to celebrate, admonishing and pacifying, holds the family together. The Confucian philosophy of life, of course, could not be absent from a Chinese novel. It appears in the person of Pao Yu's father, Chia Cheng.
What, briefly summarized, is the core of the novel?
From the Confucian point of view, it might be the story of the wealth and honor of a great and noble house and its self-destruction. The house is rehabilitated in the end through the intellectual and moral achievement of a son hitherto considered degenerate
¡X since Pao Yu dutifully conforms to the wishes of his parents and submits to the ordeal of the examinations.From the Buddhist and Taoist points of view the answer might be: It is a story of the gradual awakening, purification, and final transcendence of a soul originally sunk in the slime of temporal and material strivings.
From the Western point of view the answer might be this: It is the case history of a highly gifted but degenerate young aristocrat, a psychopath and a weakling, asocial, effeminate, plagued by inferiority complexes and manic depressions, who, though capable of a temporary rallying of energies, founders among the demands of reality and slinks cravenly away from human society.
The last stage of Pao Yu's development, his change into a spirit, goes beyond the comprehension of the Western mind. For Taoism is not only a theory but, above all, practical experience.
And finally, the often-mentioned spirit stone probably symbolizes the innate disposition, the spiritual nature, of a man, which he may not betray within risking the loss of his essential self.
The goddess Nu Wa and the 36,501 stones for the repair of the pillars of heaven, with which the novel starts, are mythological metaphors of rather prosaic significance. Countless as stones, men inhabit the earth; among them Providence picks a certain number and assigns them to administer the State as embers of the hierarchy of official and to preserve the mass of the people from the threat of anarchy. Pao Yu was rejected as unfit for this service, but he had been touched by the hand of the goddess and ennobled by her touch. Laziness makes him wish to be an ordinary stone among stones, but a higher destiny frees him and he becomes conscious of his quality as "Precious Stone." For this reason our novel has a second title in China, Shi Tou Chi, "The Story of the Stone."
Franz Kuhn
Last updated: July 7, 1997