Monkey (Penguin Classics)

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He has also written two acclaimed memoirs, Paperboy (winner of the Green Carnation Prize) and Film Freak, plus The Book of Forgotten Authors and Peculiar London, Bryant and May's singular and eccentric guide to the city. Whereas previous abridged versions of Journey to the West retained the original number of chapters but reduced their length significantly, Waley adopted the opposite approach: he translated only 30 chapters out of 100 episodes, but did so nearly in full, omitting mainly the poetry. In this, Waley followed an interpretation from earlier in the century by the scholar Hu Shih, who wrote an introduction to the 1943 edition of Waley's book. Professor of Chinese literature David Lattimore described it as a "minor landmark of 20th-century English translation" but with the publication of Anthony C.

The film was to be made in conjunction with Japanese company Shogakukan, owners of the publishing company Shueisha who publish the Shonen Jump series Dragon Ball. Plaks said Waley not only shortened the work, but "through its selection of episodes gave rise to the misleading impression that this is essentially a compendium of popular materials marked by folk wit and humor. Clever, wise, heartbreaking and yet also life-affirmingly funny: his literary comic lightness of touch is on a par with Wodehouse.A Comparative Study of Two Major English Translations of the Journey to the West: Monkey and The Monkey and the Monk".

Arthur Waley's abridged translation was published in 1942, and has also been published as Adventures of the Monkey God; and Monkey: [A] Folk Novel of China and The Adventures of Monkey, and in a further abridged version for children, Dear Monkey.But woven into this hugely entertaining and inspiring reflection on a literary life is an altogether darker thread. Waley chose to translate the entirety of the introductory and ending chapters, as well as three episodes, each several chapters long, of the journey to the west.

He had a reputation as a good poet but only a few rather commonplace verses of his survive in an anthology of Ming poetry and in a local gazetteer.

If you enjoyed Monkey, you might like Confucius's The Analects, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. Monkey: A Folk-Tale of China, more often known as simply Monkey, is an abridged translation published in 1942 by Arthur Waley of the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West conventionally attributed to Wu Cheng'en of the Ming dynasty. The British poet Edith Sitwell characterized Monkey as "a masterpiece of right sound", one that was "absence of shadow, like the clearance and directness of Monkey's mind. a glorious, witty and life-affirming ragbag of autobiography, cultural commentary and hard-won wisdom. Even in this attenuated form, however, Waley's version further deviates from the original by having left out large portions of certain chapters (e.

Past and present intermingle as, in prose as light as air, he relates with wry humour and remarkable honesty what he knows will be the final chapter in his story.Production stalled once it became apparent that the CGI would have been expensive to produce and Shogakukan backed out. Waley's translation was for many years the most popular version of Journey to the West in the English language and therefore cited by Western scholars of Chinese literature. They meet several bodhisattvas and fight fierce monsters, before finally arriving at Buddha's palace. Deeply moving, insightful and surprisingly funny, this is Christopher Fowler's life-affirming account of coming to terms with his own mortality. Monkey depicts the adventures of Prince Tripitaka, a young Buddhist priest on a dangerous pilgrimage to India to retrieve sacred scriptures accompanied by his three unruly disciples: the greedy pig creature Pipsy, the river monster Sandy - and Monkey.