Simple Yet Ambitious

How Cao Xueqin uses poetry to describe character

Simple Yet Ambitious

The hardest part about translating classical Chinese poetry into English is bridging the linguistic and cultural gaps.

You probably already know what I’m talking about. It’s almost impossible to take a poem that feels one way in Chinese and make it feel the same way in English.

People far smarter and more talented than me have tried this and failed over the years. And it’s a big problem, too.

You see, unlike almost all other Chinese classical works of fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber is entirely dependent on poetry. You can’t even hope to translate this book unless you take the poetry seriously and at face value. You certainly can’t skip any of the poems, because the poems are the entire point of the book.

This is why I’ve been writing these commentary posts, and why I’ve written so much about this book already. Instead of going quickly, we want to go slowly, and try to get as much nuance and context as we possibly can. The nice thing about this blog / newsletter format is that it allows us to dig a lot deeper than we could otherwise dig with this source material. It also means that we can fix a lot of the problems that other translators have encountered.

Let’s look at these poems one by one and what they tell us about the sort of person Jia Yucun is. We’ll also compare our translations of them to what Hawkes and Yang did to the poems — and hopefully you’ll be able to see why their translations are ultimately inadequate.

As usual, don’t worry if you don’t have any background in Chinese at all. I’ll do my best to help you. If you do know a few characters or have studied the language, however, you’ll notice really quickly that Jia Yucun’s poetry really isn’t that hard to understand. This is by design: Cao Xueqin has turned Jia Yucun into a simple minded yet wildly ambitious character, and has managed to do so solely through the poetry that the character creates. This is a brilliant bit of literary mastery that I don’t think has a parallel anywhere in world literature.

Anyway, off to the first of the three poems.