The Translator's Mirror for the Romantic: Cao Xueqin's Dream and David Hawkes’ Stone Available to Purchase

Hongloumeng 紅樓夢 (The Story of the Stone, or Dream of the Red Chamber, hereafter Dream), written by Cao Xueqin, may be the most well-known text in the history of Chinese literature and the classic measure of all Chinese classical vernacular novels. It reflects a breadth of quotidian details of Chinese culture, such as in language, food, clothing, and architecture, that is virtually unequaled. This has recommended it for understanding China in depth. Therefore unsurprisingly, Dream has been translated into many languages, including English by David Hawkes and John Minford (1973–1986),¹ Malay by Yan Chuan Seng and Boon Eng Khor (2017), and Dutch by Silvia Marijnissen, Mark Leenhouts, and Anne Sytske Keijser (2021). Although recent years have seen a steadily increasing number of studies conducted on translations of Dream, mostly based on translation theories, Shengyu Fan did not choose this approach. Instead, Fan published his monograph, The...