We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
MAIN DISCOVERIES FROM MY SCHOLARLY RESEARCH CONNECTED WITH TRANSLATION OF CAO XUEQIN HONGLOU MENG.
- Authors
Čarnogurská, Marina
- Abstract
Contrary to traditional Chinese narrative proses, which were written by their authors mainly for captivating amusement of their readers, Honglou meng is, (despite of its brilliant narrative), above all a very special literary formation of a wonderful kind of long story: - its author is not presenting it (to its readers) only as an interesting story, but by creating it as an especially sophisticated literary cryptogram, he tries to unravel in it, mainly for himself, the truth about his own life as well as about the life of his family in the reality of their existence in China at the end of the 17th and early 18th century. The main reason for it is seeking at once a timeless answer for why it all could happen to someone, who was thrown into the world's reality (like a stone) and is forced to survive there the life, and why it has happened just to him, an oversensitive artist and literary man, Cao Xueqin?! But his autobiographical portrait in this story is simultaneously expressed not only by one, but by a trinity of fates of its fictional heroes: by Jia Baoyue’s life is there created a cryptographic portrait of his own (Cao Xueqin's) carefree childhood and adolescence; in Zhen Shiyin's fate we can see his subsequent adult life in a cryptogram of the reality (after Cao’s family was plunged into the emperor's disgrace) as the fate of a poor writer, who becomes because of it a great visionary and thanks to all of it he has changed spiritually into a much more valuable man; and in Jia Yucun's fate there is a portrait of his possible life which he could have lived, if those terrible matters have not happened and, therefore, if he could live his every days' life as a dignitary and a well-ranking representative of the class of high state officers of those times. However, HLM is altogether not only a special literary gem and an ingenious narrative prose, but it is intertwined with a strikingly large number of excellent poems with many different poetic forms and styles, plus its prose encompasses an enormous quantity of wisdom of the broad-minded intellectual and encyclopedic knowledge from the whole Chinese cultural heritage. It is like an amazing literary symphony of everything what an excellent literary work could accomplish and its artistic value is so much beyond the mastery of World's many other major literary works, and this brilliant literary symphony was composed only by one man, Master Cao Xueqin.
- Subjects
ENGLISH translations of Chinese literature; HONGLOU Meng (Book); CAO, Xueqin, ca. 1717-1763
- Publication
Far East / Dálný Východ, 2014, Vol 4, Issue 2, p16
- ISSN
1805-1049
- Publication type
Article