Intercultural Interpretation Of David Hawkes’s The Story Of The Stone

The present thesis aims at a close look on Professor David Hawkes’s brilliant translation of the great18th-century novel Hongloumeng (or The Story of the Stone as the title chosen by him) and reflections upon his achievement as one of the best translators of Chinese Literature. David Hawkes is best and longest remembered for his extraordinarily rich, versatile and loving re-creation of the first three volumes of The Story of the Stone. Hongloumeng itself is series of the most complicated issues in the whole literary history of China, and thus David Hawkes’s translation inevitably has to deal with these issues first. To tackle the problems of Hongloumeng editions, which can be summarized as the demarcation between Zhiben and Chengben, David Hawkes manage to come up with a totally new edition for his translation, trying to reconcile the inconsistencies and discrepancies between Zhiben and Chengben, which become the major features of David Hawkes’ translation of Hongloumeng. One of the most conspicuous features of David Hawkes’s translation is that it has very few footnotes. Chapter Two of the present thesis brings out the incorporated footnotes used to translate literary idioms, cultural factors and Chinese operas as the topic for discussion. Chapter Three discusses his strategies of translating personal names--using different strategies for different categories. In addition, by analyzing the chronology problems and how David Hawkes dealt with them, we can see how Hawkes’ translation is trying to tell a logically intact story and how he is trying his best to smoothen the plot.