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Joanne Pan
ENGL344
Professor Gwiazda
October 13, 2015
Critical Project Paper
Along with Outlaws of the Marsh, Three Kingdoms and The Chamber of Red Dreams,
Wu Cheng En’s Journey to the West is considered one of the four great classical novels of China,
and are collectively referred to as the 四大名著 (sì dà míng zhù). Journey to the West was written
during the Ming China. The story has been turned into television shows, comic books, operas,
children’s stories, novels, and has been translated into Japanese, English, French, German,
Russian, Vietnamese, and Korean. The prologue focuses on the Monkey king Sun Wukong and
his creation on a mountaintop. W.J.F. Jenner’s four-volume translation is uses a word-for-word
translation based on older English translations and focuses on Sun Wukong’s actions and
punishments while Shelley Fu’s translation retells the story for children and focuses on the
journey.
The original author of the text was believed to be unknown because it was based off of
oral tales, but the generally accepted author is Wu Cheng En. Shi Changyu of the Institute of
Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences wrote the preface to Jenner’s translation
and gives the historical context of the novel, Wu’s background, and which English translation
Jenner based his translation off of. Shi writes that “This present translation is based on the text of
A Taoist Interpretation of Journey to the West…not just because the former has been the most
popular edition for 200 or 300 years, but chiefly because it is considered to be a more mature

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literary work than any of the Ming Dynasty editions” (Shi, 22). The story itself can be seen as a
metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, and how Sun Wukong is the everyday person who
struggles to find that enlightenment all Buddhist practitioners strive for despite the hardship
around them. The text also is a way of explaining different religions in Chinese history, and how
they change over time.
Wu Cheng En was a scholar in Ming China and was believed to have lived from 1500-
1582 during the Jiajing period. He came from an educated family and was highly educated
himself, but he failed the exams for becoming a civil servant several times and only “entered the
Imperial College with recommendations” (Shi, 6). During his lifetime “in the middle part of the
Ming Dynasty…prose of the Qin and Han dynasties were the fashionable models for literary
men. But Wu’s works were not modeled on any of the ancient styles…” (Shi, 6). Not only did
Wu reject the socially acceptable ways of writing for someone who was educated, Wu suffered
from “political corruption and ever-increasing social despair” (Shi, 7), but Shi claims that the
story does not represent spiritual enlightenment but instead how Wu felt about the society he
lived in.
Jenner’s version of the story divides the one hundred chapter long story into four
volumes, and the first seven chapters focus on Sun Wukong’s beginning, and how his actions led
him to be imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years before the story begins. Jenner
starts off the story by talking about how time was divided in order to create the world. In the
original, Wu wrote “蓋聞天地之數，有十二萬九千六百歲為一元。將一元分為十二
會，乃子、丑、寅 、卯、辰、巳、午、未、申、酉、戌、亥之十二支也。每會
該一萬八百歲”, which Jenner translates as “In the arithmetic of the universe, 129,600 years

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make one cycle. Each cycle can be divided into twelve phases: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX,
X, XI and XII, the twelve branches. Each phase lasts 10,800 years” (Jenner, 1). In Jenner’s
translation, we learn of the twelve phases that created the universe and how each phase was
divided up. Afterwards, we learn about the birth of Sun Wukong and where he got his powers.
Sun Wukong has magic but he does not know how to use it, so he becomes a student to a
Taoist master, but because of his antics he was forced to leave and return to his home where the
other monkeys live. He realizes that for all his knowledge, he does not have immortality which
he desperately wants, so he goes and makes a nuisance of himself to multiple deities. According
to legend “He sneaks into the palace, steals the peaches of eternal life, the imperial wine, and the
elixir pills of immortality…” (ShenYun, How the Monkey King Came to Be). However, because
of his actions he is imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years, and when he’s released
he’s ordered to guard the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, and that is where his journey begins. In the
first chapter alone, Sun Wukong has learned magic, been to the realm where deities from major
Chinese religions live, been exiled for five hundred years under a mountain, and told to protect a
monk while retrieving sacred scripture from present-day India.
Jenner makes the translation full of detail and imagery, which is what Schleiermacher
believes is the job of the translator. According to Schleiermacher,
The translator must take it as his goal to furnish his reader with just such an image and
just such enjoyment as reading the work in the original language would have provided the
well educated man…even where he can take pleasure unhindered in the beauty of a work,
remains ever conscious of the differences between this language and his mother tongue.
(Schleiermacher, 51).

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When translating an epic saga such like Journey to the West, there will be details that will
be lost, especially going from East Asian pictographic-based languages into Western languages.
When Wu Cheng En wrote the story down, he wrote it in a way that would be familiar to him at
the time. Now, the Chinese translations would be just as different as the translations into other
languages. With Schleiermacher, translators must keep in mind the differences between the
original language and the language they are translating the work into. Because Journey to the
West has been translated into so many different languages, readers already know that there are
differences they cannot grasp. While readers can educate themselves about Chinese culture and
history during the Ming and Tang dynasties, the translated work may not convey the idea clearly
which may make it hard for the reader to understand what the author intended. However, there
are translators that try to stay as close to the original as possible, and Jenner tries to make his
translation a word-for-word translation rather than a sense-for-sense as Shelley Fu does in her
translation.
Shelley Fu’s book “Ho Yi The Archer and Other Classic Chinese Tales” gives a very
simplified version of Journey to the West, and retells the tale as a fable with a moral ending that
children must learn. Unlike Jenner, who gave his titles long names and a poem at the beginning
to show that the mountain where Sun Wukong comes from has not yet been created, she starts
off by talking about the birth of Sun Wukong. According to Fu’s version, Sun Wukong had been
a monkey king who disregarded the followings of his first teacher who taught him all he knew of
magic and celestial law. He then made a nuisance of himself with the Chinese deities and as a
result he was imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years. However, his teacher caught
him showing off his new powers to his other students and informed him “I have misjudged you. I
thought you were pure of heart, but obviously you are only a vain little monkey. You can’t stay

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here” (Fu, 50). Sun Wukong at this time is human in monkey form and is full of disobedience,
vanity, and pride. During that time, his penance was to learn that “The truly great have no need
for ambition or pride” (Fu, 65). However, this was only the first part of his lesson. After he met
the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, Sun Wukong gradually learned “the qualities of gentleness and
kindness. He slowly learned not to be vain or needlessly cruel” (Fu, 72). At the end, the moral of
Fu’s version of the story for Sun Wukong is that we have the freedom to serve who we chose.
According to Fu’s translation, Sun tells Buddha “I want to serve you BECAUSE I am free” and
that Sun Wukong had “at last achieved perfect enlightenment” (Fu, 74). Fu’s version is more like
a parable, where there’s a story and a moral. In the story of the Monkey King, it is his journey of
spiritual enlightenment and his reward of being able to choose who to serve.
Unlike Jenner, Fu’s translation of the story is not a real translation but instead a retelling
of the story for children. Instead of talking about Wu Cheng En, the historical period where the
tale took place, or any of the other characters, she chooses to focus on Sun Wukong and his
journey. She writes “Shun Wu Koong’s journey to India is more trying as a spiritual journey than
a physical one. He becomes an Everyman, or pilgrim, whose struggles symbolize common man’s
striving toward spiritual perfection. His transformation also can be taken to symbolize the change
for the better of the Chinese people as they embraced Buddhism” (Fu, 76). At the end of her
note, Fu writes a saying from Tzo Ch’iu Ming, who says “No virtue is greater than reforming
one’s faults” (Fu, 75). Sun Wukong changes from an everyday person to one who has achieved
what all Buddhist practitioners’ achieve-spiritual enlightenment.
Walter Benjamin writes “The translator’s task is to find the intention toward the language
into which the work is to be translated, on the basis of which an echo of the original is awakened
in it” (Benjamin, 78). According to Benjamin, translators must keep the idea that the author

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intended to convey through his work to his audience. Schleiermacher and Benjamin explain that
the job of the translator is to be as close and accurate to the original as possible in order to create
the imagery the original author intended. If translators forget that intention and leave out the
originality of the text, then there is no point in translating the text because the audience will not
understand what they are trying to convey to their readers.
Journey to the West has been around for centuries and has been translated into multiple
languages around the world. Translation theory for a classic such as this is tricky, because the
translator has to keep in mind what the imperial court of China was like during that particular
time period as well as keep the originality Wu gave his characters in mind. There are some ideas
and words that sound better in the original language and can’t be translated easily, as long as
translators convey the idea and meaning to their audience from different languages, then they
have done their job.

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