每一代人读出不同的红楼梦

我这次休假，把红楼梦从头到尾又读了一遍，感觉完全是另一本书了。年轻的时候读，只记得贾宝玉和林黛玉的爱情，这次读完，我印象最深的反而是整个贾家从繁华到衰败的过程。

On this vacation I read Dream of the Red Chamber all the way through again, and it felt like a completely different book. When I read it young, all I remembered was the love story between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu. Finishing it this time, what stuck with me most was actually the whole process of the Jia family's fall from wealth into decline.

我十七岁第一次读的时候，满脑子都是宝玉和黛玉，读到黛玉去世那一段，还哭了很久。你说的家族衰败，我当时基本没什么感觉，可能年纪小，还不太懂那些复杂的家庭关系和人情世故。

When I first read it at seventeen, all I could think about was Baoyu and Daiyu, and when I got to the part where Daiyu dies, I cried for a long time. The family's decline you're talking about, I barely felt anything about it back then, maybe because I was too young and didn't yet understand those complicated family relationships and social realities.

这就是我觉得这本书厉害的地方，同一本书，十七岁读是一种爱情故事，四十岁读又变成了另一种家族兴衰的悲剧，好像它会随着读者一起长大。

That's exactly what I think makes this book remarkable. The same book, read at seventeen it's a love story, read at forty it turns into a different kind of tragedy about a family's rise and fall, as if it grows up alongside its reader.

所以才会有专门研究这本书的学问，叫红学。我听说光是研究这本书的学者，几百年来出了无数篇文章，有人研究里面的诗词，有人研究曹雪芹自己的家族历史，还有人专门研究后面几十回到底是谁写的。

That's exactly why there's an entire field devoted to studying this one book, called Redology. I've heard that just among the scholars who study it, hundreds of years have produced countless papers, some studying the poems inside it, some studying Cao Xueqin's own family history, and others specifically studying who actually wrote the last several dozen chapters.

后面几十回不是曹雪芹自己写的吗？

Weren't the last several dozen chapters written by Cao Xueqin himself?

不完全是。一般认为，曹雪芹只写完了前面八十回，后面的部分，很多学者认为是高鹗后来续写的，两部分的风格有没有区别，续写的结尾符不符合曹雪芹原来的想法，这些到现在都还有人在争论。

Not entirely. It's generally believed that Cao Xueqin only finished the first eighty chapters, and that the later part was continued afterward by Gao E, according to many scholars. Whether the two parts differ in style, whether the continued ending matches what Cao Xueqin originally intended, people are still arguing about these things even now.

这么说，连这本书是怎么写完的，都是一笔糊涂账，可是好像也没有影响大家喜欢它。

So even how this book actually got finished is a complete mess nobody can sort out, but that doesn't seem to have stopped anyone from loving it.

对，这就是我不太确定的地方。这本书到底是因为写得太复杂太深，才能让每个年纪的人读出不一样的东西，还是说，其实每个人读到的，只是自己那个年纪的心事，书本身没有变，变的是我们自己？

Right, and that's the part I'm not sure about. Is it really because this book is written with so much complexity and depth that people of every age read something different in it, or is it that what each person actually reads is just their own concerns at that age, the book itself hasn't changed, we're the ones who've changed?

我倒觉得两个都对。书写得好，才给了读者这么多不同的角度，但是读者最后看到的，确实也是自己心里已经有的东西。要是我五十岁再重读一遍，说不定又会看到完全不一样的贾家。

I actually think both are true. The book being well written is what gives readers so many different angles, but what a reader ends up seeing really is also what was already inside them. If I reread it again at fifty, who knows, I might see a completely different Jia family all over again.

那你说，这到底是红楼梦写得好，还是我们每个人本来就很会在别人的故事里，看见自己？

So tell me, is this really because Dream of the Red Chamber is so well written, or is it just that every one of us is naturally good at seeing ourselves inside someone else's story?

我说不好。也许这两件事本来就分不开，这大概就是红楼梦最厉害的地方，它好像永远都没有读完的时候。

I honestly can't say. Maybe the two things were never really separable to begin with, and that's probably the most remarkable thing about Dream of the Red Chamber, it's as if there's never a point where you've finished reading it.