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:
“For character too is a process and an unfolding ... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has “never had a chance, poor devil,” you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)