The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng)
The Dream begins in heaven with the promise of a Crimson Pearl Flower. She vows to repay a “debt of tears” to the Magic Jade who saved her with a timely watering.
And so the two are born as humans in the mortal world to love, to suffer, and to awaken once more to their divine origins.
Within this otherworldly frame are the golden days and decline of the noble clan into which our heroes are born. Maids and delinquents, ghosts and kooky priests populate the five volumes of the Penguin Dream of the Red Chamber.*
Their intrigues form the backdrop of an 18th-century tale that remains one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
While “redology” is the stuff of scholars, the novel known as the Chinese “Romeo and Juliet” enjoys a considerable popular audience.
At the heart of the Dream is a boy who was born with a jade around his neck. Jia Bao-yu would rather play with the girls in the garden than study for worldly success or gamble with the boys. The girls are cleaner and smarter, and he reveres them – none more than his frail cousin Lin Dai-yu.
The relationship begins with a childlike innocence. Bao-yu comes upon Dai-yu sweeping up the fallen flowers to bury them and, far from laughing at her, joins her. He keeps her from sleeping after she eats so she won’t get sick. Dai-yu, for her part, blushes at talk of marriage one minute and destroys the purse she made for him the next. There’s perhaps no better testament to young love than their desperate wish to express a vague feeling that ends in mumbling or a squabble. As they weep over their failure to connect, a certain debt is being paid.
The early chapters are crammed full of episodes of family warmth and earthy humor. We meet Xi Feng, the family CEO, CFO, and HR rolled into one, and the one man she can’t quite manage — her ladykiller of a husband. We witness the family’s joy when Bao-yu’s sister becomes a concubine of the emperor, and share her sorrow when she can no longer see her father. Author Cao Xueqin captures the daily lives of the Beijing aristocracy with delicious details like a recipe for Cold Fragrance Pills — a cure-all for delicate maidens — and tips for mending a peacock-feather cape.
Yet what seems to be nostalgia for a lost childhood of privilege gains an increasing sense of menace. The Dream of the Red Chamber is a dream of a corrupt world in which a wealthy rogue can buy his way out of murder, in which a purse with a pornographic picture is found in the children’s garden, in which a nun is raped and killed. Bao-yu’s idyllic childhood is unmasked in what seems to be a Buddhist tale of worldly attachments leading to suffering. He and Dai-yu share a dream in which he cuts open his chest to show her his heart, only to find that it’s already gone.
In time, the magic jade returns to its source at Greensickness Peak. It paid the karmic debt it had on earth, as the Crimson Flower had hers. Like the monk who marvels at the twists of fate at the end, the reader of the Dream senses cosmic forces beyond human understanding.
* The Dream of the Red Chamber is actually the secondary title of this translation, but I prefer it to the more prosaic The Story of the Stone.
Translation
Penguin Classics edition
David Hawkes: The Golden Days, The Crab-flower Club, The Warning Voice
John Minford: The Debt of Tears, The Dreamer Wakes
I had to grin when characters said, “I say” or “good fellow.” Maybe it’s the postmodernist in me, but I like to think of the text calling attention to its nature as a translation, rather than allowing you to forget it’s not the original. More likely, the occasional Anglicisms are a throwback from the days of “domesticating” translations, a practice that seems to be less common nowadays.
Speaking of domestication, the translation has a donnish air that I find rather endearing. Hawkes refers to “hetaerae” (Ancient Greek courtesans) and names a nun “Euergesia” (Greek again, for “good works”). Oh, and then he breaks into Latin for poetic inscriptions. Don’t worry, these references are pretty rare. They reminded me of the bygone days when everyone — well, boys of certain pretensions, anyway — had the Classical languages drilled into their prepubescent brains, a sort of Goodbye, Mr. Chips scenario. It’s a world that’s as lost now as the world of the Dream.
From the Reader’s Notebook
* How can Cao Xueqin celebrate the garden and its pleasures for two whole books, then repudiate it so thoroughly? Bao-yu’s pregnant wife, devoted mother, and beloved maids: all become material attachments to be left behind. Does the author challenge the Buddhist notion that family bonds and sensual beauty are mere illusions? Or is this the fallacy of finding Satan the most sympathetic character in Paradise Lost? The enemy wouldn’t be as successful as he is without playing on our sympathies.
* In a way, it’s a book about the payment of debts, which is what the family fails to do materially even as the immortals do so spiritually.
