The Translators 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.

Autorentext

Fan Shengyu is Associate Professor/Reader in Chinese Studies at the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt

Contents,

List of Figures,

Preface,

Some Words Before the Curtain,

Prologue: the Hawkesian World,

1. "Profound Scholarship and Patient Research": Sinology as Foundation,
2. 'To Change or Not to Change, That is the Question': Construction of Base Text,
3. "Comes to Life on the Page": Sound, Shape and Style in Translation,
4. "So Much Ink Splashed for Fun":Playfulness and Imagination,
5. "The Key to Good Translation is Revision": Manuscripts, Notebooks and Typescripts,
6. "Little Private Jokes": Western Literary Allusions in a Chinese Novel,
   Epilogue: "A Text that Rumbles with Echoes and Reminiscences",

Bibliography,

Index