Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Kudos to Arthur Waley for somehow reducing this 100-chapter classic of ancient Chinese literature into a 30-chapter abridgment that makes sense. Certainly many hard choices were made along the way. There is almost none of the florid court poetry that the original has in abundance, and many fun adventures wound up on the cutting room floor, but what remains captures the spirit, humor, suspense, and moral lessons of Wu Cheng'en's "Xi You Ji" (Journey to the West).

Because this was published in 1943, all spellings follow the Wade-Giles guidelines instead of the cleaner, truer Hanyu Pinyin. This will hardly matter to readers with little knowledge of Chinese pronunciation, but I'm not a big fan of the earlier British Imperial language system for Mandarin and it slowed me down.

Waley also chooses quaint names for his quartet of seekers and loses any subtlety or richness in the process. Zhu Bajie (Eight Precepts Swine) becomes "Pigsy", for example. The priest Tang Sanzang becomes "Tripitaka" rather than "Hsuan Tsang". Tripitaka is "Three Baskets" (the very Buddhist Scripture this priest and his disciples are traveling to India to receive) and, as applied to this questing monk, is dry and reductive. It's rather like translating "Moses" as "The Tablets". I wasn't a big fan of this choice, either.

All in all, a 3.5-star treatment of a 5-star story.