A Dream of Red Mansions (Chinese Classics, Classic Novel in 4 Volumes)
Cao Xueqin (1715? - 1763?) is the author of A Dream of Red Mansions. His personal name was Zhan, and his style (name adopted by a man at his coming of age), Mengruan. He was also know as Xueqin, Qinpu or Qinxi.His ancestral home was in what is now Liaoyang City, in Northeast China, and his forebears, although Han Chinese themselves, had been accepted into the ManchuRight White Banner. For three successive generations, a period of some 60 years, his ancestors had held the post of Textile Commissioner in Jiangning (present-day Nanjing). His paternal great grandmother, surnamed Sun, had been nursemaid to the infant who was later to become the Kangxi emperor's study companion and close attendant, accompanying him when he came to the throne on four of his six inspection tours of the south, a singular honor. After the death of Cao Yin, the family, under the headship of Cao Xueqin's father Cao Fu, continued to enjoy the emperor's favor, but when the Yongzhen emperor ascended the throne, Cao Fu was removed from his office and punished on charges of financial mismanagement and incompetence in the management of courier stations. The family property was confiscated, and the Caos' halcyon days came to an end. They moved to eijing. Cao Xueqin, who had spent his childhood in pampered luxury, now shared the family's fate of a wretched existence. Dogged by poverty, he eventually moved to arustic hovel on the western outskirts of the capital. The death of his young son in 1762 was a crushing blow to Cao, from which he never recovered, and on February 12, 1763 he himself passed away.Cao Xueqin was haughty by nature, but an extremely talented literary man. His friend Dun Cheng compared his poems to those of the Tang Dynasty poet Li He, descbribing them as bold, solid and having the cold glitter of a knife blade. Unfortunately, all that survives of Cao's poetry is two lines of a poem dedicated to a play adapted by Dun Cheng from the famous Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi's long narrative poem Song of a Lute Player. Cao was also a painter who liked painting stones, in a style described by another friend, Dun Min, as sturdy. But Cao Xueqin's fame rests on his magnificent achievement in writing the full-length novel A Dream of Red Mansions.About the Translators:Yang Xianyi was born in Tianjin in 1915. His wife Gladys was born in England in 1919. They both graduated from Oxford University in the 1930s. They were married in 1940 in China.After teaching at several universities, they went to work for the National Compilation and Translation Bureau in 1943, in charge of translation of literary works. In 1952, they joined the Foreign Languages Press (now the China International Publishing Group) in Beijing, where Yang Xianyi worked as the cheif editor of the magazine Chinese Literature. At the same time, he was a foreign literature research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, A council member of the Chinese Writers Association and a council member of the Chinses Translators Association.For many decades, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang have devoted themselves to translating and research into Chinses and foreign literary legacies. Their translations of classic Chinese works of literature especially have brought them global fame, making a great contribution the the cultural exchanges between China and the rest of the world. Apart from their monumental translation of A Dream of Red Mansions, they have translated the Elegy of Chu, Selections from the Records of the Historian, The Dragon King Daughter, The Courtesan's Jewel-box, The Man Who Sold a Ghost, Palace of Eternal Youth, The Scholars and a number of works by the famous modern Chinese writer Lu Xun.