The Dream of The Red Chamber: Hung Lou Meng (The Story of the Stone) Paperback – November 1, 2017

The Hawkes translation The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days is probably the most enjoyable for English readers, though in some ways it is maybe over-adapted. The Yang translation A Dream of Red Mansion: Complete and Unexpurgated is more literal. This Joly translation is the most literal and even contains some explicit parenthetic explanations of various Chinese terms. It is awkwardly literal sometimes.Few readers will be in this position: but if you want an English translation to help you with the Chinese original this is probably the best. Yang is just about as helpful.

If I could get my money back on this book, I would. It is like it was translated by a free translation service.

The book should include all chapters. But it does not. It’s not same as described. The book quality is ok though.

Truth in advertising should, I believe, dictate that potential buyers be aware of two issues with this book: First, the book may have been recently published, but the translation goes back to two turns of the century ago. That's not a bad thing, but the buyer should know that this is not even close to a recent translation. Second, this book is not the whole book. It actually contains less than half of "The Dream of the Red Chamber," and abruptly breaks off leaving the reader suspended with nowhere to go. That's not necessarily bad either if only we were told that this was the case, but we are not. If you want the whole story, this is not the book for you.

Reminds me of Jane Austin. Interesting peak into Chinese society. Well Ming era anyway.The 2nd book maybe better, I hope.

This is a tough read. It is apparently a well known book in China, but in translation it is nearly incomprehensible.

Joly's was the first substantial translation of the classic Chinese novel "Dream of the Red Chamber", now reissued by Tuttle, lightly revised (or so it seems). However - and this is a big however - while the translation is relatively free from major errors, it has a nauseatingly crabbed and archaic style which makes understanding a near-impossibility. The thous and whithers and whenceforths are not excised from this text. Now that we have the David Hawkes/John Minford Penguin translation and the Yangs' more literal version, Joly's version can safely be binned. If you are curious about this version, Joly's 56 chapters are all available at the Gutenberg website.