The Golden Days

by Cao Xueqin

  Xueqin died before this chapter could be completed. Alas! Summer, 1767. Old Odd Tablet.

  Clearly ‘unfinished’ can mean rather different things. Dying before you have rewritten a lost page is rather a different sort of ‘unfinished’ from dying before you have got to the end of your book.

  That the unfinished state of the novel was to some extent due to the almost insane carelessness with which Xueqin’s manuscripts were treated is shown by the following comment on a passage in chapter 20:

  Snowpink comes into the story again in the section about the Temple of the Prison God. This side of Aroma’s nature was developed in the later chapter ‘Aroma is Determined to See Things Through’. I only saw it once, when I was making the fair copy. That and five or six other chapters, including ‘A Sympathizer Consoles Bao-yu in the Temple of the Prison God’ were all lost by someone who borrowed the manuscript to read.

  Presumably it would not have been beyond the competence of Odd Tablet to patch up the remaining drafts somehow or other and present die small and select public who were reading the novel in manuscript with the ending they so much longed to see. That he did not do so may have been due to the fact that he was deliberately suppressing it.

  There would have been a good reason for this. From clues found in the commentaries and in the text itself, we can tell that Xueqin’s denouement must have been far more harrowing than the somewhat bland ending the novel is given in Gao E’s version; and even though it could not conceivably have contained overt criticism of the Emperor who ordered the family’s downfall, a sensitive autocrat might well see implied criticism in a too harrowing description of the hardships attendant on a confiscation. It was precisely during the seven- ties and eighties of the century – the interval between the author’s death and the appearance of the novel’s first printed edition – that the prolonged literary witch-hunt occurred which is generally referred to as ‘Qianlong’s Literary Inquisition ‘. During this period many an author had his writings burned and his bones disinterred for much less than Cao Xueqin had written.

  The notion that anyone could ever have thought of the Stone as seditious may strike the modern reader as fanciful; but there is good contemporary evidence that the novel was regarded as potentially dangerous. The following is a marginal comment written by the poet’s uncle above a set of In Memoriam poems about Xueqin in a book by the Manchu poet Yongzhong (1735-93):

  The poems ate excellent: but I have no wish to read this ‘Dream of Red Mansions’. It is an unpublished novel which might, I fear, contain indiscretions.

  Whoever wrote the last forty chapters of Gao E’s version was taking no chances. It ends amidst almost deafening praises of the Emperor’s clemency.

  Who was this person?

  At first sight Odd Tablet seems the obvious guess. It was he who took over sole responsibility for the novel after Red Inkstone’s death. It was he who prepared the first eighty chapters for the public. He had, as we shall see later, seen fit to subvert the author’s intentions on at least one occasion during his lifetime. We know that he preferred Hong lou meng as a title, and that was the title which appeared on a 120- chapter manuscript version supposed to have been seen in 1790 and on Gao E’s 120-chapter edition of 1792.

  The drawback about this theory is that before undergoing Gao E’s editing, the manuscript of the last forty chapters appears to have contained many features which imply ignorance of Xueqin’s later revisions and Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet’s later editorial changes. In other words, in order to believe that Odd Tablet wrote the last forty chapters, you would have to assume that he deliberately ignored his own work on the first eighty, which is clearly an impossibility.

  My own guess is that there is an illiterate Manchu widow somewhere at the bottom of this mystery – either Red Inkstone’s or Odd Tablet’s, or (much more likely) Cao Xueqin’s ‘new wife’. She had this hoard of ageing manuscripts which she asked some male relation or family friend to ‘do something with’, and the result, a pretty botched job by all accounts, was the manuscript which Cheng Weiyuan bought and Gao E was asked to edit. And Gao E’s job, as a conscientious scholar, was to bring the text of this newly discovered last third of the book into line with the text of the Red Inkstone manuscript he used for the first eighty chapters. A brief study of the pains he took over this exasperating task at once reveals how little he deserved those decades of execration as ‘liar’ and ‘cheat’.10

  But the problem of inconsistency which preoccupied Gao E and continues to trouble translators is by no means all due to the anonymous author of the last forty chapters. Cao Xueqin himself must be held responsible for quite a few of the novel’s minor inconsistencies. This is partly due to the elaborate devices he used for disguising the facts of his family history – switching generations, substituting Peking for Nanking, and so forth – which make him peculiarly susceptible to slips about ages, dates, places, and the passage of time. As regards place, for example: the novel is quite obviously set in Peking. The interiors with their ‘kangs’11 are clearly Northern. The Imperial Palace is near at hand. There are even one or two Peking street-names scattered about the novel. Yet in chapter 4 the family are’ the Nanking Jia’ and in chapter 5 the young ladies of the household are referred to as the ‘Twelve Beauties of Jinling’ (Jinling is an old name for Nanking), even though elsewhere in the novel Nanking is ‘down South’ and people travel on long journeys from or to it. As regards ages and dates – indeed, almost anything at all in which numbers are involved – Xueqin is a translator’s despair, probably, I suspect, because he was just not very good at figures – the sort of person who can never count his change.

  These minor inconsistencies, which probably give trouble only to Chinese scholars and English translators and are not even noticed by the majority of readers, result mainly from a clash between the remembered fact and the demands of fiction. But the novel contains another kind of inconsistency which came about in quite a different way. I shall demonstrate it with the most notable example.

  Qin-shi, the little wife of Cousin Zhen’s son Jia Rong, is apparently a character modelled on a real person. From the words spoken by the drunken retainer in chapter 7 and from Cousin Zhen’s extraordinary behaviour after her death in chapter 13, it appears that she was involved in an incestuous liaison with her father-in-law. In chapter 5 both the riddle and painting about her in the Twelve Beauties of Jinling album and the song about her in the Dream of Golden Days song-cycle imply that she hanged herself when her adultery with Cousin Zhen was discovered. Yet in all extant versions of the novel, including all the manuscripts, Qin-shi dies in her bed after a mysterious illness.

  The explanation of this inconsistency is found in a note by Odd Tablet at the end of chapter 13 in one of the manuscripts, in which he says that he ‘ordered’ Xueqin to excise a passage of eight or nine pages describing Qin-shi’s suicide in the Celestial Fragrance Pavilion – presumably because he found it too upsetting.

  It would be naïve to suppose that Xueqin simply overlooked the discrepancy. It is much more likely that he made the alteration in chapter 13 very unwillingly and carried it out in a half-hearted manner and that his failure to make the necessary adjustments in chapter 5 was deliberate. If, as Zhao Gang has suggested, Odd Tablet was Xueqin’s own father Cao Fu, the unfinished state in which Xueqin left the novel may well have been due to the despair he felt at not being allowed to publish it and instead being repeatedly ordered to rewrite and alter it in ways he knew in his bones to be artistically wrong.

  But for all the little hair-cracks that the scholar’s magnifying glass reveals, The Story of the Stone is an amazing achievement and the psychological insight and sophisticated humour with which it is written can often delude a reader into judging it as if it were a modern novel. In fact neither the idea that fiction can be created out of the author’s own experience, nor the idea that it can be concerned as much with inner experience – with motives, attitudes and feelings – as with outward events, both of which
are a commonplace with us, had been so much as dreamed of in Xueqin’s day. His numerous rewritings and the various mythopoeic ‘devices’ with which his novel is littered all testify to his struggle to find some sort of framework on which to arrange his inchoate material. At one point, so Red Inkstone tells us, he even thought of abandoning the traditional romance-form altogether12 and writing a verse drama instead. Certainly he was influenced much more by the techniques of drama (which he loved) and painting (which he practised)13 than by any of the pre-existing works of Chinese prose fiction, which on the whole he rather despised.

  Tang Xianzu of Linchuan, the great playwright of the poetical, romantic drama of the sixteenth century in which Cao Xueqin was steeped, was, like Xueqin, preoccupied with the interplay between dream and reality. His four most famous plays are often referred to as ‘Linchuan’s Four Dreams’. We may be sure that Xueqin’s play, if he had written it, would have been called ‘A Dream of Red Mansions’. It is even possible that the ‘Dream of Golden Days’ song-cycle in chapter 5 was written at a time when he was still toying with the idea of writing a play.

  As regards the various ‘devices’ which Xueqin employs for converting remembered fact into artistic fiction, one he makes persistent use of throughout the novel is the antinomy of zhen and jia, meaning respectively ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, but both regarded by Xueqin as being different parts of a single underlying Reality:

  Jia zuo zben sbi zhen yi jia

  Wu wei you chu you huan wu

  Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true

  Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real

  is the inscription written up over the gateway to the Land of Illusion which we pass through at the beginning of the novel.

  ‘Jia’, the surname of the family in the novel, looks, in Chinese script, a little bit like the character for Cao; but it is also a pun on this other jia which means ‘fictitious’. The Jias of the novel are connected in various ways with a mysterious family in Nanking called the Zhens – another word-play – who are a sort of mirror-reflection of the Jia family. There is even a Zhen Bao-yu. One day Bao-yu has a dream about him from which he wakes up in tears calling out ‘Come back, Bao-yu! Come back, Bao-yu!’ and finds himself looking at his own reflection in the dressing-mirror beside his bed.

  A Mirror for the Romantic was, as we have seen already, one of the titles once considered for the novel by Xueqin and his family. It appears from Red Inkstone’s commentary that this was in fact the name of an earlier, probably much shorter draft of the novel which Xueqin subsequently discarded. Parts of it may be incorporated in the novel as it is today, like the Jia Rui episode in chapter 12 in which the magic mirror makes its appearance and which still, on close inspection, shows signs of tailoring. It is easy to imagine that many of the Stone’s ‘devices’ had their genesis at this stage: the presentation of fiction and reality or reality and illusion or the waking world and the dreaming world as opposite sides of a sort of single super-reality, for example – like the two worlds one on each side of the mirror.

  The idea that the worldling’s ‘reality’ is illusion and that life itself is a dream from which we shall eventually awake is of course a Buddhist one; but in Xueqin’s hands it becomes a poetical means of demonstrating that his characters are both creatures of his imagination and at the same time the real companions of his golden youth. To that extent it can be thought of as a literary device rather than as a deeply held philosophy, though it is really both.

  Such devices play a functional part in the structure of the novel; but many of the symbols, word-plays and secret patterns with which the novel abounds seem to be used out of sheer ebullience, as though the author was playing some sort of game with himself and did not much care whether he was observed or not. Chinese devotees of the novel often continue to read and reread it throughout their lives and to discover more of these little private jokes each time they read it. Many such subtleties will, I fear, have vanished in translation. Alas! – as Odd Tablet would have said.

  One bit of imagery which Stone-enthusiasts will miss in my translation is the pervading redness of the Chinese novel. One of its Chinese titles is red, to begin with, and red as a symbol – sometimes of spring, sometimes of youth, sometimes of good fortune or prosperity – recurs again and again throughout it. Unfortunately – apart from the rosy cheeks and vermeil lip of youth – redness has no such connotations in English and I have found that the Chinese reds have tended to turn into English golds or greens (‘spring the green spring’ and ‘golden girls and boys’ and so forth). I am aware that there is some sort of loss here, but have lacked the ingenuity to avert it.

  In translating this novel I have felt unable to stick faithfully to any single text. I have mainly followed Gao E’s version of the first chapter as being more consistent, though less interesting, than the other ones; but I have frequently followed a manuscript reading in subsequent chapters, and in a few, rare instances I have made small emendations of my own. My one abiding principle has been to translate everything – even puns. For although this is, in the sense I have already indicated, an ‘unfinished’ novel, it was written (and rewritten) by a great artist with his very lifeblood. I have therefore assumed that whatever I find in it is there for a purpose and must be dealt with somehow or other. I cannot pretend always to have done so successfully, but if I can convey to the reader even a fraction of the pleasure this Chinese novel has given me, I shall not have lived in vain.

  DAVID HAWKES

  Note on Spelling

  Chinese proper names in this book are spelled in accordance with a system invented by the Chinese and used internationally, which is known by its Chinese name of Pinyin. A full explanation of this system will be found overleaf, but for the benefit of readers who find systems of spelling and pronunciation tedious and hard to follow a short list is given below of those letters whose Pinyin values are quite different from the sounds they normally represent in English, together with their approximate English equivalents. Mastery of this short list should ensure that the names, even if mis- pronounced, are no longer unpronounceable.

  c = ts

  q = cb

  x = sb

  z = dz

  zh = j

  CHINES SYLLABLES

  The syllables of Chinese are made up of one or more of the following elements:

  an initial consonant (b.c.ch.d.f.g.h.j.k.l.m.n.p.q.r.s.sh.t.w.x. y.z.zh)

  a semivowel (i or u)

  an open vowel (a.e.i.o.u.ü), or

  a closed vowel (an.ang.en.eng.in.ing.ong.un), or

  a diphthong (ai.ao.ei.ou)

  The combinations found are:

  3 on its own (e.g. e, an, at)

  1 + 3 (e.g. ba, xing, bao)

  1 + 2 + 3 (e.g. xue, qiang, biao)

  INITIAL CONSONANTS

  Apart from c = is and z = dz and r, which is the Southern English r with a slight buzz added, the only initial consonants likely to give an English speaker much trouble are the two groups

  jqxandzhchsh

  Both groups sound somewhat like English j cb sb; but whereas j q x are articulated much farther forward in the mouth than our j cb sb, the sounds zh ch sh are made in a ‘retroflexed’ position much farther back. This means that to our ears j sounds halfway between our j and dz, q halfway between our cb and ts, and x half-way between our sb and s; whilst zh ch sh sound somewhat as jr, cbr, sbr would do if all three combinations and not only the last one were found in English.

  Needless to say, if difficulty is experienced in making the distinction, it is always possible to pronounce both groups like English j, cb, sb, as has already, by implication, been suggested overleaf.

  SEMIVOWELS

  The semivowel i ‘palatalizes’ the preceding consonant: i.e. it makes a y sound after it, like the i in onion (e.g. Jia Lian)

  The semivowel u ‘labializes’ the preceding consonant: i.e. it makes a w sound after it, like the u in assuages (e.g. Ning-guo)

  VOWELS AND DIP
HTHONGS

  i. Open Vowels

  a is a long ah like a in father (e.g. Jia)

  e on its own or after any consonant other than y is like the sound in French oeuf or the er, ir, ur sound of Southern English (e.g. Gao E, Jia She)

  e after y or a semivowel is like the e of egg (e.g. Qin Bang-ye, Xue Pan)

  i after b.d.j.l.m.n.p.q.t.x.y is the long Italian i or English ee

  as in see (e.g. Nannie Li)

  i after zh.ch.sh.z.c.s.r is a strangled sound somewhere between the u of suppose and a vocalized r (e.g. Shi-yin)

  i after semivowel u is pronounced like ay in sway (e.g. Li Gui)

  o is the au of author (e.g. Duo)

  u after semivowel i and all consonants except j.q.x.y is pronounced like Italian u or English oo in too (e.g. Bu Gu-xiu)

  u after j.q.x.y and ti after 1 or n is the narrow French u or German «, for which there is no English equivalent (e.g. Bao-yu, Nii-wa)

  ii. Closed Vowels

  an after semivowel u or any consonant other than y is like an in German Mann or un in Southern English fun (e.g. Yuan-chun, Shan Fing-ren)

  an after y or semivowel i is like en in hen (e.g. Zhi-yan-zhai, Jia Lian)

  ang whatever it follows, invariably has the long a of father (e.g. Jia Qiang)

  en, eng the e in these combinations is always a short, neutral sound like a in ago or the first e in believe (e.g. Cousin Zhen, Xi-feng)

  in, ing short i as in sin, sing (e.g. Shi-yin, Lady Xing)

  ong the o is like the short oo of Southern English book (e.g. Jia Cong)

  un the rule for the closed u is similar to the rule for the open one: after j.q.x.y it is the narrow French u oirue; after anything else it resembles the short English oo of book (e.g. Jia Yun, Ying-chun)