>Dream of the Red Chamber
>one of the best books from one of the largest countries with the largest populations on this planet
>hardly anyone I know even knows about it
Why isn't more said about Chinese literature and what are some of the more modern works?
Posting what I've saved from some threads about Chinese lit here: (each paragraph is a different post)
阿城《棋王》 is the best work of Chinese fiction I've ever read. Aside from one Daoist/mystic section about chess, it's very readable. 《孩子王》 is alright too.
鲁迅 is not very difficult and《阿Q正传》is hysterical (especially if you've ever spent any time with mainland Chinese)
《活着》is pretty easy. Neither 王朔's nor 莫言's books are difficult, but I find both authors juvenile.
If what you're really after is 武侠 shit like Crouching Tiger, just watch a bunch of 武侠剧 and maybe listen to a radio drama of 水浒 or 西游. That'll build up a concrete kung-fu vocabulary that'll enable you to read stuff like 雪山飞狐 (better than crouching tiger) and maybe eventually 水浒.
Last note: bail on the thought of ever reading 红楼梦 and probably 三国 in the originally. Too fucking hard. But the other two are fairly approachable.
Just read 金庸. Chinese literature is garbage.
>maybe listen to a radio drama of 水浒
>and maybe eventually 水浒.
It's like the Chinese room problem has learnt how to shitpost.
I'm assuming the radio drama is an abridged version and not an audiobook.
What are the best translations?
The best translation of Dream of the Red Chamber is by David Hawkes. He also uses the title "Story of the Stone".
>bail on the thought of ever reading 红楼梦 and probably 三国 in the original
Nonsense, you can read anything in the original with a dictionary and patience. 'Understanding' literature isn't binary, it advances by degrees. So if you have to look up every word in the dictionary and only have a very basic idea of what is happening, your understanding still exists on the same sliding scale as semi literate native speakers and native speakers who are literature professors.
I'm currently reading water margin and pu songling.
Are there any other popular work which are smutty stories with fox/ghost waifu's?
Ezra Pound translated some Chinese classics which stand alone
I don't know that a radio version exists in English, but in Chinese there are two different kinds. One is just the standard audio-book, read the text aloud. The other is what's called 评书, in which a story teller tells the story in their own language (i.e. mostly modern vernacular with the story teller's own color, etc.)
For all of the classics there are several versions of each, most of which are not abridged at all. The 评书 I listened to for Water Margin was 320 some episodes of half-an-hour each read by 田连元 and it was fucking awesome.
I recommend these to Chinese language learners over listening to the original because, while 水浒 is closer to modern spoken Chinese than the Red Chamber, it's still far from simple. First acquainting yourself with the story is useful.
Of course it advances by degrees, but reading google translates version of the Dream of the Red Chamber is like not reading it at all. Not only will you miss the marrow of the text (which seldom lies merely in plot), but if your language is not up to task you'll likely end up with significant misunderstandings owing to unclear constructions. I've read Chinese translations of Western literature that go so far as to render negative sentences affirmative and vice-versa owing to the translator's unfamiliarity with certain English constructions. I've likewise read Americans translating from Chinese who make very similar mistakes. The difficulties of translation are much more than simply missing a little color and knowledge of the dictionary is not the same as knowledge of a language.
Plus no one who says they want to "read" the Red Chamber means to say that they want to slog through it word-by-word in a dictionary. They obviously hope the reading to be a pleasurable and meaningful experience.
Well I'm a native English speaker and I've slogged through lots of impenetrable works of literature in French and Chinese, understood very little and got lots of pleasure from them. Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Rabelais, Proust, Tang and Song poetry, Zhuangzi, Hongloumeng, Qian Zhongshu 的管锥编, 禪宗語錄、佛經、明末小品、清末民初的詞話
There's a nicely annotated modern edition of Hongloumeng coming out soon from 台灣的里仁書局.
You're all fucking idiots. Borges made up the "Dream of the Red Chamber." You've been punk'd hard.
Googling, delighted to find that Borges had read Dream of Red Chamber.
>Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Victoria Ocampo included a slightly modified version [of a chapter of Red Chamber] in their compilation "Antología de la literatura fantástica". In his "Textos cautivos" Borges writes that the topic of "Red Chamber" is "the degradation of man and his final redemption through mystics." Dreams appear frequently, and "they are intense, the more because the writer does not tell us they're being dreamt, and we believe they are reality, until the dreamer awakes."
I thought he couldn't read Chinese
He couldn't. Presumably he wrote it in Spanish then sold the manuscript to a melancholy Englishman, who took it to Hong Kong where the triads translated it into Chinese and faked its bibliographical history to make a philosophical point about the nature of the imagination.
ching chong ping pong!!!
Maybe you just have pleb friends.
Red Chamber's always felt like the kind of book that could've been released in the early Twentieth century with no-one batting an eye. In English, I mean.
But does it *know* it's shitposting—or is it just shitposting?
Does a clam *know* it's shitting -- or is it just shitting?
Whoops, I thought you were responding to a post about Borges.
No, Pound couldn't read Chinese, he produced his translations of Chinese poetry working from word for word English translations produced by an English scholar of Japanese. Luckily Pound is a great poet.
Also how the dicks did you get a proper dash? Did you -- paste it in?
>what are some of the more modern works
The two main figures of 20th century Chinese literature are Lu Xun and Eileen Chang. They both wrote incredible short stories and essays.
I think they are both quite readable in English, but a lot of their reputation is based on their use of language, their mixture of the rhythms and registers of spoken Chinese and Classical Chinese.. So after reading them you may feel 'that was kinda interesting, but it wasn't amazing'.