Influence
Despite being highly abridged, Waley’s translation was for many years the most popular translation of Journey to the West available in the English language. Due to this, it has been heavily cited by Western scholars of Chinese literature. Literary critic 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.” Chinese professor David Lattimore described it as a “minor landmark of 20th-century English translation”, though adding that it had been overtaken as the most authoritative English edition with the publication of Anthony C. Yu’s four-volumes, unabridged translation published in the late 1970s and early 80s from the University of Chicago Press. Nonetheless, as noted by Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Monkey remains “the most popular and textually accessible translation” of Journey to the West.
Read more about this topic: Monkey (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.”
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“Life is made too easy. Mankind’s moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.”
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“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
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