... one of the great monuments of the world's literature ...
— Review of the Dream of the Red Chamber by Anthony West, The New Yorker[45]
Cao utilizes many levels of colloquial and literary language and incorporates forms of classic poetry that are integral to the novel, making it a major challenge to translate.[46] A 2014 study of fourteen translations of the novel concluded that the work is a "challenge even to the most resourceful of translators, and the process of rendering it into another language is bound to involve more translation problems, techniques, and principles than the process of rendering any other literary work." Accordingly, the aims and achievements of the translators differ widely.[47]
The first recorded translation into English was in 1812 by the Protestant missionary and sinologist Robert Morrison (1782–1834), who translated part of chapter four for the second volume of his unpublished 1812 book Horae Sinicae. In 1816, Morrison did publish a translation of a conversation from chapter 31 in his Chinese language textbook Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language. In 1819, the British diplomat and sinologist John Francis Davis (1795–1890) published a short excerpt in the London Journal Quarterly Review. Davis also published a poem from chapter 3 in the 1830 Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society.[48] In 1842, Karl Gützlaff's article, "Hung Lau Mung, or Dreams in the Red Chamber", in the sixth volume of the "Chinese Repository", included translation and criticism of some passages.
A literal translation of selected passages was published for foreigners learning Chinese by the Presbyterian Mission Press of Ningbo in 1846.[49] Edward Charles Bowra of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs published a translation of the first eight chapters in 1868[50] and H. Bencraft Joly of the first fifty-six chapters in 1892.[51] The Reverend E.J. Eitel reviewed Joly's translation and condemned the novel, saying that Chinese read it "because of its wickedness." Herbert Giles, whom John Minford called "one of the more free-thinking British consular officers," took a more favorable view in a twenty-five page synopsis in 1885 that Minford calls still a "useful guide."[52] Giles further highlighted it in his A History of Chinese Literature in 1901.[53]
In 1928, Elfrida Hudson published a short introduction to the novel titled "An old, old story".[54] An abridged translation by Wang Chi-Chen which emphasized the central love story was published in 1929, with a preface by Arthur Waley. Waley said that "we feel most clearly the symbolic or universal value" of the characters in the passages which recount dreams. "Pao Yu", Waley continued, stands for "imagination and poetry" and his father for "all those sordid powers of pedantry and restriction which hamper the artist".[55] In a 1930 review of Wang's translation, Harry Clemons of The Virginia Quarterly Review wrote "This is a great novel", and along with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it "ranks foremost" among the novels of classic Chinese literature.[56] Although Clemons felt "meaning was only fragmentarily revealed" in the English translated prose and that "many of the incidents" and "much of the poetry" were omitted, he nevertheless thought "at any rate the effort to read The Dream of the Red Chamber is eminently worth making."[56] In 1958 Wang published an expansion on his earlier abridgement, though it was still truncated at 60 chapters.
The stream of translations and literary studies in the West grew steadily, building on Chinese language scholarship. The 1932 German translation by Franz Kuhn[57] was the basis of an abridged version, The Dream of the Red Chamber, by Florence and Isabel McHugh published in 1958,[58] and a later French version. Critic Anthony West wrote in The New Yorker in 1958 that the novel is to the Chinese "very much what The Brothers Karamazov is to Russian and Remembrance of Things Past is to French literature" and "it is beyond question one of the great novels of all literature."[45] Kenneth Rexroth in a 1958 review of the McHugh translation, describes the novel as among the "greatest works of prose fiction in all the history of literature", for it is "profoundly humane".[59] Bramwell Seaton Bonsall finished what is probably the first complete 120 chapter translation in the 1950s, Red Chamber Dream, but publication was abandoned when Penguin announced the Hawkes project. A typescript is available on the web.[60]
The respected and prolific Yang Hsien-yi was commissioned to translate the first complete English version. Though he confessed that this was his least favorite of the classic novels, Yang began work in 1961 and had finished roughly 100 chapters in 1964, when he was ordered to stop. He and his wife, Gladys Yang, were imprisoned on suspicion of espionage during the Cultural Revolution, but they finished the translation as a team after their release in 1974. It was published by Beijing Foreign Language Press as A Dream of Red Mansions, in three volumes, 1978–1980.[61] The second complete English translation to be published was by David Hawkes some century and a half after the first English translation. Hawkes was already a recognised redologist and had previously translated Chu Ci when Penguin Classics approached him in 1970 to make a translation which could appeal to English readers. After resigning from his professorial position, Hawkes published the first eighty chapters in three volumes (1973, 1977, 1980).[62] The Story of the Stone (1973–1980), the first eighty chapters translated by Hawkes and last forty by his son-in-law John Minford consists of five volumes and 2,339 pages of actual core text (not including Prefaces, Introductions and Appendices) and over 2,800 pages in total.[63] The word count of the Penguin Classics English translation is estimated at 845,000 words. In a 1980 review of the Hawkes and Minford translation in The New York Review of Books, Frederic Wakeman, Jr. described the novel as a "masterpiece" and the work of a "literary genius".[64] Cynthia L. Chennault of the University of Florida stated that "The Dream is acclaimed as one of the most psychologically penetrating novels of world literature."[65] The novel and its author have been described as among the most significant works of literature and literary figures of the past millennium.[66][67]
The sinologist Oldřich Král also undertook a Czech translation of the entire novel, Sen v červeném domě (Prague: Odeon, three volumes, 1986–1988). Slovak sinologist and philosopher Marina Čarnogurská translated into Slovak whole four volumes of the novel, Sen o Červenom pavilóne (Bratislava: Petrus, 2001–2003. ISBN 80-88939-25-9).
In 2014, an abridged English translation of Dream by writer Lin Yutang resurfaced in a Japanese library. Lin's translation, about half the length of the original, is reportedly not a literal one.[68]
In a study of fourteen translations into English, German, French, Spanish, Laurence K.P. Wong finds that some challenges to translation are "surmountable", some "insurmountable," though translators sometimes hit on "surprisingly happy versions that come very close to the original," Hawkes, however, normally came up with versions that are "accurate, ingenious, and delightful...." Hawkes recreates the meanings and sounds of the original with "remarkable precision, achieving much greater success than any one of his fellow translators in surmounting the limits of literary translation...."[69] Another scholar agreed that the Yang's translation is "literal" in the sense of rendering word for word, but argued that the Hawkes translation achieved what should be called a "higher level of literalness: in the sense of "text for text." That is, Hawkes tries to maintain the range and contrasting levels of usage of the original while the Yangs smooth out the language with a "plain international English" and add explanations in footnotes.[70]
Other scholars examined particular aspects of the Yangs' translation and the Hawkes and Minford translation. The names of some characters sound like the words for their personality traits, and some names serve as allusions. Hawkes conveys the communicative function of the names rather than lexical equivalence; for example, Huo Qi is homonymous with "the beginning of catastrophe", and Hawkes makes the English name "Calamity". Hawkes sometimes uses Italian/Sanskrit terms when Western Christian culture lacks a term for a concept.[71] Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi prefer literal translation, informing readers of names' meanings through annotations. Zhu Jian-chun argued that Hawkes’ choice to simply translate certain names that are puns makes the author's intentions clearer, and that the Yangs' choice of transliteration leaves the meaning more elusive, even if the transliterated names are more believable as character names. Zhu questioned the Yangs' translation of "Dao Ren" as "reverend".[71] According to Barry Lee Reynolds and Chao-Chih Liao, the Yangs' version contains more faithful translations of religious expressions but is also less readable to English language readers.[72] Xuxiang Suo argued, “Hawkes successfully conveyed the original textual information to foreign readers with smooth and beautiful English, but the loss of Chinese culture-loaded information is inevitable. Mr. Yang mostly adopted the way of literal translation, trying his best to keep the true and idiomatic Chinese style and national tint."[73]
