“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
曹雪芹 Cao Xueqin pinyin: Cáo Xuěqín era un escritor chino de la dinastía Qing.
Descendía de una gran familia destronada natural de Fengrun, en Hebei, que sirvió en las fuerzas Han bajo los manchúes. Escribió la novela Sueño en el pabellón rojo que dejó inacabada y se publicó muchos años después de su muerte con el final que le puso Gao E., editor de la obra . Esta novela es considerada una de las cuatro novelas clásicas chinas.
El sueño del pabellón rojo describe la vida de las familias ricas y aristocráticas de una época en que empieza su decadencia, vísperas del colapso del feudalismo: las familias Rong y Ning. Sus dos famosos personajes principales, la pareja de jóvenes rebeldes Jia Baoyu y Lin Daiyu, se oponen obstinadamente a las viejas tradiciones. A Baoyu le disgustan las relaciones con los literatos y se niega a escribir ensayos bagu, pero le gusta en cambio la compañía de las mujeres y simpatiza con las criadas de su casa. Daiyu es parecida a él y entre ellos nace un amor verdadero. Al final Daiyu muere llena de angustia y Baoyu huye empujado por la desesperación, porque los jóvenes como ellos no son tolerados por las fuerzas reaccionarias. En el último siglo, esta fue la novela más popular de China.[1] Wikipedia

“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 1
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Fall'n the great house once so secure in wealth,
Each scattered member shifting for himself.”
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“All those whom history calls great
Left only empty names for us to venerate.”
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 2
Cao Xueqin, as quoted in the introduction attributed to his younger brother (Cao Tangcun) to the first chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, present in the jiaxu (1754) version (the earliest-known manuscript copy of the novel), translated by David Hawkes in The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days (Penguin, 1973), pp. 20–21
“One day, when spring has gone and youth has fled,
The Maiden and the flowers will both be dead.”
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 27
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fuente: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Let others laugh flower-burial to see:
Another year who will be burying me?”
Cao Xueqin libro Dream of the Red Chamber
Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760)
“Words on the paper mix with blood,
The extraordinary labor of ten years!”
(zh-TW) 字字看來皆是血,十年辛苦不尋常 。
Red Inkstone, couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); quoted in Zhou Ruchang's Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181.
Couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); the couplet is "generally considered to be written by Cao Xueqin" according to Wong Kwok-pun in Dreaming across Languages and Cultures (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), footnote on p. 71, but Zhou Ruchang attributes it to Red Inkstone in Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181. note: Variant translations: note: Every word [in the novel] which one looks at is a drop of blood. The ten years ' painstaking labour is no commonplace.
Fuente: From On The Red Chamber Dream by Shichang Wu (Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 24