#ReadingTheStone S1 Episode 10: On Poetry in the Garden, Gaokao exam questions, and is Baoyu a F-boy?

#ReadingTheStone

[Originally recorded on 6-11-2022]
Episode 10 saw us ranging widely, though we nominally discussed Chapters 17 to 21. First, we chatted about all the buzz over the 2022 PRC college entrance examination (gaokao) essay question on Dream of the Red Chamber - over tweets and in our live chat this week, we discussed a) whether one needed any knowledge of HLM to answer it, and more important, b) if the question was a fair one to pose to 17 year olds under extreme pressure. The #ReadingTheStone community mainly saw it as a question of translation - literal or interpretive?
Conversation about translational choices of course led us back to David Hawkes and his rendering of the poems in these chapters - does the author (and translator) calibrate the quality of the poems to the varying poetic skillsets of our young fictional characters?
And as ever, Baoyu and his slightly dubious distinction between love and lust was a topic of discussion, too.
Please note: as our first zoom meetup on June 25, 2022 was not recorded, this was our last recorded #ReadingTheStone chat for June 2022.

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