you My Friend but look out on these mountains the actual the real window/horn of snow
Cao Xueqin, you end all your chapters with sentences like this: “To know what the outcome was read the next chapter.” “To know how he made out, read on.” “If you want to know what became of her continue reading.” But you also wrote, “In the end, neither author nor transcriber nor reader will know what to make of this book.” As I translate, the pages turn to vapor in my hands.
You called your working-place “Mourning-the-Red-Studio.” I wonder why you called it this. Is this also where I live?
You wrote that in your book the real (zhen) and imaginary (jia) can’t exist apart from each other. (each time my eye blinks it creates separations)
Soon Baoyu will head off to take the official exam. He’s studied hard for months. If he does well he’ll salvage his family’s ill fortune.
Daiyu’s dead. Miaoyu’s been raped and abducted, all her hair shorn off. (I wanted to believe in “The One Outside the Threshold” and now I can’t think of her and the notes she left without thinking she’s come to harm)
Why did you paint pictures of stones onto stones? What did you think you were doing?
Over time you crowded your characters so close together it was hard for the red-inked comments to fit in. They migrated toward the margins, unsigned and undated—
Always before your birth date a question mark, and after your death date a question mark.
I spend all this time with you, I wait for Red Inkstone to come, even for Odd Tablet to come …
You wrote that the real is unreal and the unreal real. I spend all this time with you in this world whose existence you questioned and which you called Red Dust—
Clerval looks tired all the time. His back must hurt from so much sitting. He never gets up to look at the smoke trees, or nod to his neighbor, or buy melons from the melon cart. Papers are strewn over his table like all that snow Claire looked out on for so long.
Dream of the Red Chamber
A Dream of Red Mansions The Re Scarlet Dream
Story of the Stone
TRANSLATION OF RED INKSTONE’S NOTES:
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “every phrase forsees the true way ahead, every word saddens one’s heart. Reading this passage, I almost don’t know what I am.” (my friend, reading your letters I almost don’t know what I am)
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “Cao Xueqin, I visited the garden. Its terraces are nothing but piles of broken tiles now. Here and there pines still stretch out their branches; below them, the ruins of the vegetable beds.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “I have made five copies of the pages you gave me. This one is for you, I will keep the others here for now. The end of the chapter seems to have been broken off or lost. Since you’re ill, I have seen to repairing it as best I could.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “but how will we come to a ‘settled version’?”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “There are many irregularities and chronological problems. I will fix what I can. I know you are weak now and in the end they are not so important. In the Nine-fold Spring of the other world, no one will care that, when Baoyu is 19, Chia Yun can’t be old enough to be sold off as a concubine. What your readers will care about is her suffering. I hope you’ve gotten some sleep and that your fever has improved.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “I have made five copies of these new chapters (my suggestions are few this time, and in red ink, as always). If you don’t live to finish the book I promise I will see that it is finished.”
∼∼ Red Inkstone: “and what if you don’t ever come to a ‘settled version.’ Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
My Friend,
In between words and in the margins Red Inkstone writes his commentary for Cao Xueqin. He writes of the ruined garden, of “irregularities,” and “problems,” that there’ll never be a “settled version” of this book. I hold no settled view of you, of anything Baoyu slips through my fingers. Meanings build and crumble. I see your hand in numbness and in flame. The properties of. The reality of/the actuality of. And in faithfulness to what? How can I XXX and finally. How are your eyes now? And your face, has it greatly changed since we last met? (you wrote of a tenderness that suffers). Ink, red