Monkey

A very readable translation by Arthur Waley of the Chinese classic, attributed not without debate to the Ming writer Wu Cheng'en. Waley translated 30 chapters out of the original 100, choosing to keep those 30 chapters more or less intact, instead of printing excerpts from all chapters. It's the right decision, I think, since the intention was to produce a reading text. Nothing more annoying than to read disjointed and scattered episodes from a long narrative. Still, he removed most of the poems and much of the religious references from the original, as scholars point out, and the result has been described as more of a retelling than a translation. This retelling focuses very much on the wit, humor, and inventiveness of the original. It "universalizes" the text at the expense of some of its particularities.

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