CAO, Xueqin.

£9,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Hung Lou Meng; or, the Dream of the Red Chamber. Translated by H. Bencraft Joly. First edition of the first substantial translation into English of Cao Xueqin's famous novel, covering the first 56 chapters. A member of the British consular service in China, Bencraft Joly planned to translate the entire work but died after completing these first two books. His efforts were preceded only by translations of short sections. Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as Story of the Stone, was first published in Chinese in 1792, three decades after Cao's death. The British missionary sinologist Robert Morrison rendered part of one of its 120 chapters into English in 1814, and in succeeding decades John Francis Davis, Edward Charles Bowra, and Herbert Allen Giles translated excerpts ranging in length from a few paragraphs to no more than eight chapters. Like those before him, Joly (1857-1898) was motivated by a desire to help Western scholars and diplomats master the complexities of literary Chinese, but his efforts laid a foundation for the explosion of Western interest in the novel as a work of literature in the early 20th century. The first translation of the entire novel was only completed in 1986.

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