Red Inkstone's Prefatory Remarks to The Story of the Stone.

Cao Xueqin ..., the author of the eighteenth-century Chinese classic Hongloumeng ...(known to English readers as The Story of the Stone or A Dream of Red Mansions), is believed to have worked on his novel for 10 years during which he revised it five times. During his multiple revisions, Cao evidently shared his drafts with some of his close friends and relatives, who often wrote commentaries in the margins, sometimes complimenting the author on his artistry, other times urging him to remove a particular reference or even an entire plot. Although their identities remain a mystery, these early readers are collectively known as Zhiyan zhai ... ( Red Inkstone), the main nom de plume they used for their annotations. The many revisions and annotations of the novel's drafts, each time involving exchanges of copies between the author and multiple readers, during which no doubt pages were lost or new revisions were confused for older drafts, contributed to the labyrinthine nature of the novel's textual history. Since the discovery of a handful of early copies of the novel bearing Red Inkstone's annotations in the twentieth century, readers and scholars alike have become fascinated by these early manuscripts and the insights they may shine on how the novel came to be written. Here we provide the first ever complete English translation of the 'prefatory remarks' supposedly written by Red Inkstone found in the Jia Xu ... transcription, one such manuscript of the novel. The 'prefatory remarks' had been partially translated by David Hawkes and included in his introduction to the first volume of The Story of the Stone. But we feel that having a full translation along with annotations will help English-language readers of the novel understand the commentarial tradition that had been an inseparable part of the reading experience for Chinese-language readers for nearly two millennia. It was in this tradition that Hongloumeng was designed to have been read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]