Mislay Me Not, Forget Me Not: David Hawkes and The Story of the Stone. Sinologist and Translator, the Man and the Book: Exhibition talks
1.The David Hawkes Archive at CUHK library
Professor John Minford, David Hawkes’ Literary Executor, who donated the bulk of his father-in-law’s papers to the library in 2011-2012, will describe some of the main items in the Archive, and their unique history.
Speaker: Professor John Minford (Emeritus Professor of Chinese, Australian National University)
Date: 6 October 2023 (Friday)
Time: 4:30 to 5:15 pm
Venue: User Education Room, G/F, University Library, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Video recording: Exhibition Talk — The David Hawkes Archive at CUHK Library – YouTube
2.David Hawkes: The Art of Translation
Professor John Minford will discuss some aspects of David Hawkes’ approach to translation, drawing mainly on examples from the first 80 chapters of The Story of the Stone (1973-1980), his masterly translation of the novel.
Speaker: Professor John Minford (Emeritus Professor of Chinese, Australian National University)
Date: 9 October 2023 (Monday)
Time: 6:30 to 7:30 pm
Venue: WLB109, Shaw Campus, Hong Kong Baptist University
Language: English
Organizers: Department of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library, and Hong Kong Translation Society
Video recording: Exhibition Talk — David Hawkes: The Art of Translation – YouTube
3. The Story of the Stone’s Journey to the West: A Translation History 《紅樓夢》西遊記：一段翻譯史
This talk traces the fascinating history of early English translations of the renowned Chinese novel, The Story of the Stone (石頭記), also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), in the nineteenth century. It tells lesser-known stories of Western missionaries and diplomats in China as pioneer translators diligently rendering this Chinese literary masterpiece into the English language. Interestingly, these English translations do not always prioritize the literary merits of the Chinese novel; rather, they were made with other, more pragmatic purposes and approaches. This captivating chapter in the history of translation unveils the multifaceted dimensions of The Story of the Stone appreciated and exploited, the intricate nature of literary translation in history, and a cultural perspective to the grand narrative of China’s encounter with the West.
Speaker: Professor JI Lingjie (Assistant Professor, Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Date: 15 November 2023 (Wed)
Time: 4:00 to 5:30 pm
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, G/F, University Library, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Video recording: Exhibition Talk — The Story of the Stone’s Journey to the West: A Translation History 《紅樓夢》西遊記：一段翻譯史 – YouTube
4. To Nothingness do Sink: David Hawkes and the Banquets in The DREAM 無為有處：霍克斯的紅樓家宴
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.
This talk invites its audience to follow David Hawkes’s imaginative journey into the fictional truth in the dreamlike world of the Story of the Stone. It features a series of maps David Hawkes drew when translating some banquet scenes in the novel, through which, those fictional and unreal banquets become real and visible to the reader’s eyes. This talk tries to visualize the mysterious and miraculous process by which a literary translator engages in the work of imaginative creation, and to unveil the intricacy and complexity lurking beneath the deceptive transparency of Hawkes’s translational artistry.
Speaker: Dr. Leonora Min Zhou, Associate Professor in Translation Studies at Zhejiang University
Date: 24 January 2024 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:00p.m. – 6:30p.m.
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, G/F, University Library, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Language: English
About the speaker
Leonora Min Zhou is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at Zhejiang University. She is particularly interested in the translator-as-reader’s spatialization, visualization and re-making of literary world. Her recent work experiments on using graphical materials to demonstrate the translator’s cartographic imagination and the continuity between visual representations and verbal representations in the art of translation.
Video recording: Exhibition Talk — To Nothingness do Sink: David Hawkes and the Banquets in The DREAM 無為有處：霍克斯的紅樓家宴 – YouTube
