The translator as an observant reader in the Story of the Stone from the perspective of aesthetic illusion and habitus

Abstract

ABSTRACT The classic Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng is renowned for portraying a verifiable world with various characters. Previous scholars of translation studies demonstrated a lopsided interest towards the translated Hong Lou Meng texts without highly considering the translator’s experience in perusing the original fiction. The current study endeavours to integrate narratology and sociological theory with translation studies by referring to The Story of the Stone: A Translator’s Notebooks, which aims to examine the translator David Hawkes’s mental state of aesthetic illusion as an observer before translating Hong Lou Meng. Specifically, Hawkes was postulated to be both the translator and reader immersed in the imaginary setting of Hong Lou Meng to observe the personas. Simultaneously, Hawkes remained a certain distance from the fictional world to enable pinpointing of the author’s inconsistencies through professional habitus, which is critical to resolving the source text inconsistencies while translating.