Monkey by Arthur Waley and Wu Ch-Eng En | Spoiler-Free Review | Plots & Points
Vložit
- čas přidán 11. 08. 2019
- Join me as we take a Journey to the West! Will we find enlightenment, excitement and action in the pages of Arthur Waley's treatment of this legendary Chinese classic or will it be an ABRIDGEment to far!? (HAWHAW!)
Nice review 👍🏾 Waley translated 30 chapters from the original 100; the first 7 & the last 6, if I recall correctly, and 3 narratives made up of several chapters for the middle part, which he felt would best engage western audiences at the time, but I agree, it was at the expense of character development. We don't see how Sun Wukong goes from insolent jerk to Buddhahood, it just kind of happens & bang, the end.
Very cool, I've got a collection of Arthur Waley's translated Chinese poetry from about 1930 which was pretty good!
Nice! The translation wasn't the issue, just the abridgement process. Given his body of work it's pretty clear that Waley had a passion for this stuff and it's great that it's accessible to Western audiences. I just don't think this particular edition brings out the best in the source material
@@PlotsAndPoints For sure, it sounds a little like that's the nature of the beast in some ways!
I'm happy you got to this. 2000-ish sounds about right. 😅 How many pages is your edition?
Just over 300. There's no way he managed to get the point across properly
@@PlotsAndPoints Quite true. Since it's a Penguin Classics, they should have given it 700-1000 pages which is what they gave The Mahabharata & The Shahnameh. Journey to the West seems to have a lot of the philosophy, comparable to The Mahabharata. You're super right they took a lot of that out to make this abridgement. A bit like Simplified Chinese characters take the heart out of the Traditional. 😕 (It's better for literacy & all that. Just a comparison is all.) Had to ramble, I can't help it! 😅 Pretty good summary & review! I hope your week is pretty awesome! 🤓
You should check out Never Die by Rob J Hayes. It’s a fairly neat asian inspired self contained fantasy book about a group of characters on a suicide squad type journey. I’m bringing it up because this monkey thing sounds kinda similar.
Sounds kind of interesting. I might give it a look
White guy don’t like the white guy translation of the most famous and influential piece of literature of all time? Oh no.
Jokes aside, thanks, I was actually looking for this book.
To be honest it's not so much the translation itself and more that it's been SUPER abridged to the point where it doesn't flow particularly well