The Other Side of the Mirror: David Hawkes’ Aesthetics of Literary Translation in The Story of the Stone

Abstract

David Hawkes’ brilliant English translation of the first eighty chapters of the most famous Chinese novel Hongloumeng, or The Story of the Stone, is an amazing achievement in the history of Chinese-English translation. He conscientiously adopted Greek and Latin traditions as well as English literary traditions that he grew up with and his potential readers are familiar with, thus successfully recreated a modern English novel with distinctive Chinese characteristics. The aesthetics of Hawkes’ literary tradition, as well as his skillful and artistic combination of tradition and modernity, are worthy of further exploration and elaboration for readers to benefft from his strategies when handling crosscultural communication.