This translation—from the one-hundred-chapter version of the book, republished in 1954 by Zuojia chubanshe—aims to bring out the many voices of the novel. I was greatly helped by reference to previous translations, above all Anthony Yu’s complete translation (Journey to the West) published by the University of Chicago Press between 1977 and 1983, and by Arthur Waley’s abridgment, Monkey (1945). Two considerations drove the decision to undertake a new translation. First, language changes. The most recent complete version—W.J.F. Jenner’s Beijing Foreign Languages Press edition—was commissioned and completed thirty years ago, in the 1980s. Second, the sheer length of the original—a full translation stretches to four large volumes—makes an abridged version an appealing option for teachers, students, and general readers. Waley’s version still has great charm and dynamism; because his names for Tripitaka’s pilgrims are so well known, I have adopted them here. But it left much scope for translating episodes that it had cut out.
This version comes to about a quarter of the length of the original. I have reduced the novel in two ways. First, although I have translated the book’s opening and concluding chapters—which set up and conclude the quest—almost entirely, I have omitted outright some of the episodes describing parts of the pilgrims’ journey. The structure of the book lends itself easily to this approach, for the scripture quest is made up of a succession of incidents, most of which are unconnected by narrative threads. Some are only a chapter long, others more extensive. These omission decisions have often been difficult, for there are many fantastical and significant episodes that could not be fitted in: the Buddha’s scheme, early in the pilgrimage, to seduce the lustful Pigsy with a household of beautiful women; a monastery of larcenous monks; the appearance of an evil monkey doppelgänger whom Monkey must destroy; a den of soccer-playing spider fiends. I have tried, wherever possible, to ensure that the themes and character traits that appear in omitted episodes are covered in those I included: the temptations of the senses; Monkey’s struggles with multiple selves; the novel’s extraordinary, inventive fantasy.
I have also sometimes reduced and compressed individual chapters. The Chinese original shows its roots in oral storytelling by regularly recapitulating elements of the story so far, inheriting the fear of the marketplace raconteur that listeners might have wandered off then returned between scenes or simply forgotten key plot twists. To speed up the narrative, I have almost always left these repetitions out. The Chinese features a great many descriptive poems, which embroider on situations, landscapes, and battles. Again, in the interests of narrative economy and pace, I have for the most part omitted these, except for where they are an integral part of the plot. I have, however, often incorporated their descriptive elements into the surrounding prose.
Literary translators have two responsibilities: to the original text and to readers of the target language. Whichever languages translators work between, satisfying both constituencies can be difficult, but when working between two literary cultures as remote chronologically and geographically as sixteenth-century China and the twenty-first-century Anglophone world, the challenges are redoubtable. Sometimes, a translator has to sacrifice technical, linguistic fidelity to be true to the overall tone of a text. Wordplays—ubiquitous in Journey to the West—are difficult to translate without explanatory footnotes that problematically slow down the delivery of the joke. Where I decided to omit these puns, I sometimes tried to compensate by enhancing the humor of other parts of the narrative or dialogue. In places, therefore, this version might read as a reworking as well as a translation; my hope throughout has been to communicate to contemporary English readers the dynamism, imagination, philosophy, and comedy of the original.
I’m very grateful to John Siciliano and his editorial team for meticulously guiding the manuscript through publication. I would like to thank warmly Desmund Cheung, Craig Clunas, Hao Ji, Liang Yan, Liu Chiung-yun, Tian Yuan Tan, Edward Wilson-Lee, and Vincent Yang for their generous assistance with planning and completing the abridgement and introduction. Hao Ji and Liu Chiung-yun provided invaluable guidance for the map of the pilgrims’ route. Many thanks to Julith Jedamus, Thelma Lovell, and Robert Macfarlane for reading and commenting on the manuscript. I also benefited from invaluable conversations about early medieval Asia and early modern religious texts with Rebecca Darley, Kate Franklin, and Kat Hill.
julia lovell