The Dream of the Red Chamber: Hung Lou Meng [Hardcover]

Chan Ts'ao (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, German, Chinese (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 604 pages
• Publisher: Greenwood Press Reprint (July 8, 1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0837181135
• ISBN-13: 978-0837181134
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,242,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great translation of a great book, April 18, 2001

By 

JLind555 - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: The Dream of the Red Chamber: Hung Lou Meng (Hardcover)

I have read several versions of "The Dream of the Red Chamber", including the five-volume edition published by Penguin Classics ("The Story of the Stone"), and this version is by far the best. It's been out of print for several years and I'm delighted it's been reissued. It's concise, omits nothing of importance to the story, and it's a great read. "Red Chamber" is the story of the Chia clan, a large and very rich Mandarin family, racing headlong into financial and moral ruin, which is redeemed by the youngest son of the house, the spoiled and effeminate Pao Yu. Heading the family is the Princess Ancestress, one of the most arresting and interesting characters of any literature, able to stand up to and hold her own against anyone. Other strong figures in the family are Pao Yu's father, Chia Cheng, a stern, upright, moralistic individual, unable to see past his own nose, and his aunt Phoenix, too shrewd and clever for her own good, whose intrigues and double-dealing bring the house crashing down. The tale of ruin and redemption is an old one in Chinese literature, and "Red Chamber" relates it excellently, all the while giving us fascinating insights into Chinese life, culture and values. For anyone interested in things Chinese, or anyone who just appreciates a great book, this book is a must-read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Morbid sensibility between the lovers, October 23, 2005

By 

Matthew M. Yau "Voracious reader" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dream of the Red Chamber: Hung Lou Meng (Hardcover)

The second installment of The Dream of the Red Chamber is saliently deprived of all the supernatural phenomena, celestial illusions and fairy appearances that were mandatory to account for the general background of the novel. This volume begins with the whimsical resolution of a life-threatening black magic spell that had befallen Baoyu and his cousin Wang Xi-feng owing to the concubine's vicious scheme to rid the only heir of the Jias. A Taoist restored the power of Baoyu's jade, which had been inevitably contaminated and thus divested of its visceral power by worldly lust and temptation. Again above the novel hangs the constant reminder of another dimension of existence, scrupulously governed by Buddhist beliefs.

The narrative of Volume 2 is firmly grounded in the Jia's domestic life and the world's affairs. An affluence of prose devotes to the cousins' founding of the poetry club in the Prospect Garden, The Crab-Flower Club. The story now becomes entwined with the conceiving, writing and critique of poems. Although this volume is deprived of the excitement of magic, it holds significant value in Chinese literature. The text proliferates with passages containing references to books, plays, and poetry that to most readers, lacking the literary background that Cao Xueqin was able to take for granted in his Chinese contemporaries that are quite difficult to read. The characters made frequent allusions to the Four Books, Five Classics, and Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty, literature that were among the syllabi for civil service examination and reading lists of well-nurtured youngsters. Lin Daiyu composed lines that demonstrated a form of poetry that became perfected in the 18th century known as regulated verse. Regulated verse exploits the characteristic tonality of the Chinese language, using an extremely rigid formal structure in which tension is created by combining tonal contrast with verbal parallelism.

Daiyu's verses reveal effort of deep thought and grief in her morbidly austere relationship with Baoyu. As banal as the domestic life this volume so tediously portrays, an important fact one can conceive out of the family's daily hurly-burly is the mutual affection between Baoyu and Daiyu. He assured her that she the only one in his heart other than Grandmother and his parents and renounced "a jade to match the gold" (Baoyu's cousin Bao-chai possessed a gold locket). The boy might be all wrapped up in his thoughts for Dai-yu but owing to his eccentricity he failed to convey them to her. For a long time his feeling for her had been a very peculiar one: one that was stippled with anticipation but fear. A sense of morbid sensibility overcame him and rendered the relationship teetering on a precipice. They would contrive to speak circuitously, proceeded in a beat-around-the-bush manner to probe each other to see if the feeling was reciprocated. The outcome was an awkward situation in which both parties concealed their real emotions and assumed counterfeit ones in an endeavor to find out what the real feelings of the other party were. It was not surprising that a paltry misunderstanding could throw Dai-yu into a seasonable sorrow, which found its expression in a violent outburst of grief.

While sibling rivalries drove the first volume to a climax in which Baoyu's life was threatened, adultery seized the attention and broke the monotonous formality of the family. Xi-feng caught her husband in bed with this omnivorously promiscuous creature, the wife of the cook, and vented her anger on her able maid. Terribly unjustly treated and humiliated in front of a crowd, the maid dashed from the scene and vowed to stab herself to claim her innocence in the matter. Domestic drama like adultery, match-making, money matters, and forced appropriation of a maid to be concubine expose not only the women's being at the mercy of men but to the interest character analysis Baoyu's tenderness and understanding in handling the girls around him. His consideration for his personal maid Aroma, his solicitous effort to appease Patience of the injustice to which she was subjected, and his punctilious caring the Skybright in sick bed, all confirmed the illusions the fairy had shown him in Volume 1. His surreptitious excursion at to the temple to mourn Golden, who had taken her own life at Baoyu's wrongdoing, also showed remarkable understanding and sentiment in his relations to the girls even though they were only his servants.

The rapprochement between Daiyu and Bao-chai also strikes a significant note in Volume 2. Fate might have paired up the crimson pearl flower and the stone, but the Jias had always deemed holders of the jade and golden locket a perfect match. Knowing Bao-chai is his parents' favorite and found favor with everyone, Daiyu had always harbored a resentment toward Bao-chai. She was jealous of her and hated to hear the praise of Bao-chai's kindness and virtue, which she deemed skeptically as a cover up for some secret vices. It was not until Bao-chai, who out of her volition made frequent visits to the illness afflicted Dai-yu and offered her bird's nest soup and kept her company that Dai-yu realized she had been wrong about her. Bao-chai's gesture of kindness finally broke the ice and it dawned on Daiyu that Bao-chai really did care about her. This laid the ground for the mistaken marriage between Baoyu and Bao-chai.

As the text becomes more concretized as opposed to the illusion and mystery, one becomes familiar with the traditions, culture, and formality of a highborn Chinese household. Wealthy families usually populate with troops of concubines and half-siblings. Proliferation of extended family and the retinue of maids, junior maids, women servants staffing the domestic hierarchy were reflections of a family's grandeur and status. Concubine appropriation bespoke the weak-willed, complacent nature of women who, at that time, were at the mercy of men. For the sake of a quiet life and financial security, a married woman would tolerate sharing a husband with concubines and please her husband at all cost.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent introduction, July 9, 2006

By 

Rozencrantz the Sane "Messiah at large" (seattle, washington United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dream of the Red Chamber: Hung Lou Meng (Hardcover)

This was the first translation of Hong Lou Meng that I ever read, and it quickly became one of my favorite novels. This edition omits many of the long descriptions of elaborate ceremony that pepper the original, and are only of interest for what they reveal about the culture of the time. Nothing of the narrative proper is ommited, and the language is far more masterful than the FLP edition.

My only objection was in the way that names were handled, and in fact I have yet to see a satisfactory way of translating the names. Kuhn uses the convention of litteraly translating most, but not all, of the female names (leading to such unfortunate coinages as "Little Lung" and "Mandarin Duck") and rendering the men's names in Wade-Giles.

This was a great first translation, and has launched me on a path to explore Chinese literature more fully.