The Translator’s Mirror for the Romantic

The Translator’s Mirror for the Romantic: Cao Xueqin’s Dream and David Hawkes’ Stone is a book that uses precious primary sources to decipher a master translator’s art in Stone, a brilliant English translation of the most famous Chinese classic novel Dream.

This book demonstrates a bilingual close reading which sheds light on both the original and its translation. By dividing the process of translation into reading, writing, and revising, and involving the various aspects of Sinological research, textual criticism, recreation, and literary allusions, this book ventures to emphasise the idea of translation as a dialogue between the original and the translated text, between the translator and his former self, and a learning process both for the translator and the reader of his translation.

Any student of Chinese language and literature, or Chinese–English translation, will benefit from this book; for students and scholars who want to study David Hawkes and his Stone, this book is an indispensable aid. Readers will be interested to see how a non-theoretical analysis could be used to evaluate this translation, for it makes an extremely important and useful contribution to this subject.

范圣宇，澳洲国立大学(Australian National University)亚太学院 (College of Asia and the Pacific) 中文系高级讲师。2019年度复旦大学中华文明国际研究中心访问学者，“文化的解码与译者的立场：《红楼梦》及中国古代文学经典翻译”国际学术工作坊召集人。北京师范大学比较文学博士（2003），曾任2012年上海外语教育出版社汉英对照霍克思、闵福德译五卷本《红楼梦》版本校勘。