Introduction

In the words of the eminent Chinese scholar C.T. Hsia, it is the ‘greater philosophical ambition’ and the ‘deeper psychological insight’ which establishes the iconic greatness of The Story of the Stone, ¹ and it is a commonplace that Cao Xueqin is frequently coupled with William Shakespeare as the greatest creative writers in their respective cultures. Both artists create around their characters such a richness of human observation and linguistic play – literary, philosophical, historical, political, social, aesthetic – as to continue to generate an immense scholarship, and can rightly be thought of, in the famous lampooning words of the old courtier in Hamlet, as ‘the best in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited’ (H 2.2.334). It is this very ‘greatness’, however, which places such a huge demand upon translation of these texts, one ‘East’, one ‘West’, into each other’s languages, and which severely inhibits other than superficial comparison between the two writers, even when both can be ‘read’ in the same language – here, in English.