Reading note III · The translations
Which English translation of Dream of the Red Chamber?
紅樓夢譯本
Exactly two complete English translations exist, and they are different books on purpose: one was made to be read as a novel by someone who has never seen Chinese, the other to carry the Chinese across near the line. Buy on that difference. It also decides whether the maid on your page is called Xiren or Aroma.
The two complete versions 全譯
| Edition | Covers | Published | What the translator was after |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes (vol. 4–5 by John Minford) | ch. 1–80 Hawkes, ch. 81–120 Minford | Penguin Classics; Hawkes's three volumes 1973, 1977, 1980; the set complete by 1986 | Penguin asked him for something that could appeal to English readers, and he resigned the Shaw Professorship of Chinese at Oxford to do it — a translation that would keep the realism and the poetry rather than the apparatus. |
| A Dream of Red Mansions, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang | ch. 1–120 | Foreign Language Press, Beijing; three volumes, 1978–1980 | The first complete version, commissioned and begun in 1961, stopped by the Cultural Revolution, finished after their release in 1974. Its aim is the text: rendering word for word, which scholars have contrasted with Hawkes's text for text. |
The name problem 人名
A great many names in this novel mean something, and one translator's choice is another's loss. Hawkes kept the family's names as sounds — Jia Baoyu, Lin Daiyu, Wang Xifeng, Jia Zheng, Lady Wang — and translated the servants instead, so a page of Penguin gives you Aroma where this site gives you Xiren. He put the Daoists' and Buddhists' names into Latin, and actors' names into French. The Yangs, keeping the text near the line, keep the Chinese names as names.
The four you are most likely to meet in the first month of reading:
| This site | Chinese | In Penguin's Hawkes | Who |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xiren | 花襲人 | Aroma | Baoyu's principal maid, the register's flower of the third roll; his first tenderness and the one who later marries the actor Jiang Yuhan. |
| Qingwen | 晴雯 | Skybright | The brightest of his maids, torn out of the house and dead of disgrace in chapter 77; the girl he writes the hibiscus elegy for. |
| Miaoyu | 妙玉 | Adamantina | The nun in the garden, cleaner than anyone is allowed to be, abducted in the last forty chapters. |
| Xiangling | 香菱 | Caltrop | The daughter stolen in chapter 1 and sold back into the family that took her; she learns verse in the garden at chapter 48 and is renamed Autumn Caltrop out of spite at chapter 79. |
The equivalences are as recorded in the article cited below. Where an edition renames the servants, the Chinese in a leaf's header is the fix: it is the same three or four characters on every page of this site.
The partial, the free and the lost 殘本
| Year | Translation | Covers | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1812 | Robert Morrison | part of chapter 4 | The first recorded English rendering; it sat in the second volume of a book unpublished in his lifetime. |
| 1830 | John Francis Davis | a poem from chapter 3 | Davis had printed an excerpt in 1819; this is the verse that got into print. |
| 1846 | Presbyterian Mission Press, Ningbo | selected passages | Made literal on purpose, for foreigners learning Chinese. |
| 1868 | Edward Charles Bowra | chapters 1–8 | The first run of the story in English. |
| 1892 | H. Bencraft Joly | chapters 1–56 | Public domain; still readable online, and reprinted with a foreword by John Minford. |
| 1929 | Wang Chi-Chen | abridged, the love story first | With a preface by Arthur Waley. Expanded in 1958 and still stopping at chapter 60. |
| 1950s | Bramwell Seaton Bonsall | all 120 chapters, as Red Chamber Dream | Probably the first complete English version; publication was abandoned when Penguin announced the Hawkes project. A typescript is online. |
| 1958 | Florence and Isabel McHugh | abridged | Made from Franz Kuhn's 1932 German translation, not from the Chinese. |
| 1973 | Lin Yutang's own abridgement | about half the book | Six copies printed and sent to publishers, all declined; the manuscript was found in a Japanese library in 2015 and his estate has refused to publish it. |
What the reviewers argue about 評
The disagreement is old and it is not about accuracy. Frederic Wakeman, reviewing Hawkes and Minford in 1980, called the novel a masterpiece and its author a literary genius. A 2014 study of fourteen translations into English, German, French and Spanish found some of the book's problems surmountable and others not, and gave Hawkes the prize for precision: he came up with versions that were accurate, ingenious and delightful, recreating the meanings and the sounds of the original more successfully than any of his fellow translators. Another scholar put the difference plainly — the Yangs are literal, word for word; Hawkes is literal at the level of the text, which is why he can keep a servant's joke and a mistress's allusion at different heights in the same sentence.
So the choice is not which is truer. It is whether you want to read a Chinese novel in English, or read this novel in English.
That last line is this site's own summary of the two aims, not a quotation. The quotation marks in the paragraph above are all from the article cited below.
Where these figures come from 出處
- English Wikipedia, “Dream of the Red Chamber” — the translation history, the 1812 to 1958 versions, Hawkes's naming policy, the 2014 fourteen-translation study (read 30 Sep 2026)
- The Guardian, David Hawkes's obituary — Penguin's commission, the resignation, and the volumes of 1973, 1977 and 1980
- Wikipedia, John Minford — 40 chapters of The Story of the Stone
- Joly's 1892–93 translation, first 56 chapters, archived by the University of Adelaide