2014/2015 School of Chinese Seminar 中文學院學術講座
Date and Time: June 26, 2015 (Friday); 4:00-5:30pm
Venue: Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Language: English
The Treasures of the Translator’s Notebooks of Professor David Hawkes on The Story of the Stone
Christina Chau (Information Management Librarian at the Hong Kong Institute of Education)
The Story of the Stone: A Translator’s Notebooks documents the scholarly sources consulted by Professor Hawkes in his rendition of the Stone, which preserves and makes available the first hand materials on the translation of Hongloumeng, a treasure trove for the research of translation andHongloumeng. This talk illustrates the extensive range of scholarly sources recorded in the Translator’s Notebooks during the 10 years in the making of the first 80 chapters of The Story of the Stone.
Getting to Know a Translator: The David Hawkes Papers at CUHK Library
John Minford (Professor of Chinese at the ANU in Canberra, Australia)
There has always been an acute shortage of primary materials for the study of translation, partly because translators themselves have traditionally been so self-effacing, partly because no one has been bothered to preserve documents of this nature. As a result, much of the writing about translation has been based on one inadequate theory or another, seldom grounded in empirical facts. In depositing the papers of my father-in-law and teacher David Hawkes (translator of The Songs of the South 楚辭 and The Story of the Stone 紅樓夢) at the CUHK library in 2013, I was consciously wishing to set an example, pointing to a possible future direction in the study and practice of translation. In this seminar I will describe some of the documents included in this collection, and say why I consider them important for an understanding of one of the great translators of our time.
