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David Hawkes Archive
In 1997, the Research Centre for Translation acquired Professor David Hawkes’s original translation manuscript of The Story of the Stone, which covers chapter 2 to chapter 80 of the novel, totalling 2,210 pages. To make the manuscript available to scholars, translators and lovers of translation and Chinese literature worldwide, RCT worked with the University Library System to digitize the manuscript, which is now available for public access through the CUHK Chinese Literature Translation Archive, a major project undertaken jointly by RCT, the Department of Translation, and the University Library System.
About David Hawkes
Professor David Hawkes (霍克思, 1923–2009), much celebrated for his scholarship and creative ingenuity, was a renowned British Sinologist, and most well regarded for his masterful translations of Chinese literature.
Hawkes’s training in Chinese started in his twenties, when he majored in Chinese at Oxford University (1945–1947). He later became a research student at the then National Peking University (1948–1951). He left China and returned to Oxford in 1951 where he completed his doctoral dissertation on The Songs of the South. He was appointed Professor of Chinese at Oxford in 1959. From 1973 to 1983, he was a Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and later became an Emeritus Fellow. In 1983, he donated his personal library, The David Hawkes Collection which comprises about 4,500 volumes with works in Chinese, Japanese and English, including Chinese language and literature, history, philosophy, religion and drama, to the National Library of Wales.
Hawkes translated the poetry anthology, The Songs of the South, while he was still a young man, and the work was published by Oxford University Press in 1959. The work was later revised by the translator himself for the Penguin Classics edition published in 1985. His A Little Primer of Tu Fu, first published in 1967 by Oxford University Press and later in 1990 by Renditions, the Research Centre for Translation, is an authoritative study and translation of the best-known works of the great Tang poet.
Among Hawkes’s many contributions to Chinese literary translation, the most significant is without a doubt The Story of the Stone, a work to which he fully devoted himself, even resigning from the post of Professor of Chinese in Oxford in 1971 to focus on the project. His work on The Story of the Stone not only demonstrates the highest standard of scholarship but also the highest standard for the art of translation, and will provide inspirations for generations of literary translators to ponder and reflect upon.
About The Story of the Stone Manuscript
Among the existing translations of The Story of the Stone, the uniqueness of Professor Hawkes’s version may lie in his “one abiding principle”: “to translate everything—even puns”. This principle, as mentioned in the introduction of The Story of Stone, came from the belief that every element in the story is there to serve a purpose and must be dealt with and retained. Throughout the translation, we could see how he strived to preserve all symbols and word-plays in the original work to present to his English readers. Although he himself humbly confessed to have been unable to retain all subtleties, many critics consider his version of The Stone as one of the first truly successful English rendering of traditional Chinese fiction, scholarly and readable, while retaining the poetic and artistic aspects of the original text.
As the most important achievement of Professor Hawkes, The Stone has been a superb example of literary translation, and has set new, higher standards for Chinese literature in translation ever since its publication. Translation manuscripts often reveal the thoughts and emotions of the translator, and hence record the translator’s journey in tackling the challenges of translation. With all traces of editing easily distinguishable on Professor Hawkes’s manuscript of The Story of the Stone, scholars, students and literary lovers and translators can study when, how and why certain translation decisions were made, and witness first-hand how the great Chinese classic gradually came alive in another language.
It is our hope that through reading the manuscript, many will be inspired by Professor Hawkes’s passion in crafting the canonical masterpiece in English and join in the endeavour to share with the rest of the world some of the best works in Chinese literature.