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Monkey King: Nicky Harman on a new translation of an old favourite.
Of all the posts I’ve written for Asian Books Blog, this one has
to have been the most fun to write. Working out why a translation that’s really
funny is funny… what’s not to like? To be truthful, I would have found it hard
to write a more conventional review of Journey
to the West. I have never read the original and although I acquired the
three-volume translation by WJF Jenner many years ago, my second volume is
suspiciously clean and I clearly never opened the third at all. But in any case,
translator Julia Lovell, in her introduction, has done a much better job than I
could ever do, in explaining where this epic novel came from, and how, over the
centuries, it has been many things to many people.
Journey to the West was written (allegedly) by Wu Cheng’en in the sixteenth century and its hero, the sometimes eponymous Monkey, has enjoyed enduring popularity ever since. In addition to the stories in the Journey to the West, Monkey and his friends have featured in spin-off stories, cartoons, cartoon films, ballets, shadow plays, video games and much more, as you can see in the illustration above.
Tripitaka,
a pious Chinese monk, sets off to India in search of
precious Buddhist sutras, in the company of bodyguards Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy.
A brief extract from Lovell’s introduction gives a flavour of what is in
store:
In
the course of their travels, they encounter murderous Buddhists, perfidious
Taoists, expanses of rotten persimmons, and
monsters of all shapes and sizes (femmes fatales, rhinoceroses, iguanas,
scorpions). They are serially captured, tied up, lacquered, sautéed, steamed,
and impregnated, and come very close to being diced, boiled, liquidized,
pickled, cured, and seduced by various
fiends. Eventually, after eighty-one such calamities, the pilgrims reach
Thunderclap Monastery, the stronghold of the Buddha in India, and are rewarded
with armfuls of sutras and posts in the Buddha’s government of immortals.
Phew!
It doesn't seem much of a reward for all their travails.
Julia
Lovell’s new translation is about a quarter of the length of the original, including
all the chapters that bookend it, and selected chapters in between. ‘The novel zings with physical and verbal humor,’ she writes,
and the translation certainly does. Reading it made me wonder which of
the comedic effects can be matched to the original text, and which arise from
the translator’s creative use of English. Here is
what Lovell says about the translation process:
Literary translators have two responsibilities: to the original text and to readers of the target language. Whichever languages translators work between, satisfying both constituencies can be difficult, but when working between two literary cultures as remote chronologically and geographically as sixteenth-century China and the twenty-first-century Anglophone world, the challenges are redoubtable. Sometimes, a translator has to sacrifice technical, linguistic fidelity to be true to the overall tone of a text.
There is an abundance of humour in the original. Journey to the West is a fantasy novel,
but the monsters and demons live in a recognisably bureaucratic society: Buddha
has a government, sinecures are offered to Monkey, the demon king has ministers
and flunkeys. In this exchange from the beginning of the novel, Monkey’s future
is being decided (or so his divine superiors fondly imagine):
‘Majesty,’ the Spirit of Longevity from Venus ventured, ‘given that this monkey is a child of heaven and earth, of the sun and the moon, that he walks on two feet and has attained immortality, I propose that we treat him as we would a human. I humbly suggest you offer him an amnesty, summon him to Heaven and give him a government job. Once he’s inside the system he’ll have to behave. If he accepts, we can bamboozle him with sinecures; if he refuses, we can apprehend him. In any case, such a strategy will save us a military campaign and bring an unruly immortal to heel.’
(It has to be said that Lovell has reduced this paragraph with an unapologetic panache that Monkey would have applauded. 105 words, as against Jenner’s 160 words for the same paragraph. But, hey, ‘bamboozle him with sinecures’ says it all! Here is the Chinese, for anyone who wants to have a go at it.
太白长庚星俯伏启奏道：’上圣三界中，凡有九窍 者，皆可修仙。奈此猴乃天地育成之体，日月孕就之身，他也顶天履地，服露餐霞； 今既修成仙道，有降龙伏虎之能，与人何以异哉?臣启陛下，可念生化之慈恩，降 一道招安圣旨，把他宣来上界，授他一个大小官职，与他籍名在箓，拘束此间；若 受天命，后再升赏；若违天命，就此擒拿。一则不动众劳师，二则收仙有道也。’ )
And more divine bureaucracy: ‘Monkey told them what had happened in his dream and how he had persuaded the kings of the underworld to cross all their names off the ledger of death, at which news his subjects kowtowed with ecstatic gratitude. And from that point on, most mountain monkeys never got old, for the Underworld no longer had their names and addresses. …
Precisely what is in the Chinese (自此，山猴多有不老者，以阴司无名故也), just with ‘and addresses’ added.
Journey to the
West
uses a judicious mixture of register (and bathos), both in the original and in
the translation. Here is Monkey being (unusually for him) respectful and formal
– and the Patriarch cutting to the chase:
‘Monkey was overcome with regret. ‘I have been away from home for twenty years. Though I yearn to see my former subjects again, I hate to leave you before I have repaid your kindness to me.’ ‘Forget it,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Just don’t drag me into any of your messes.’
Which happens to be exactly what the original says: ‘ 祖师道：’…你只是不惹祸不牵带我就罢了！’
On the other hand, quite a lot of the comedy in Lovell’s translation exploits the comic potential of English, rather than that of the Chinese. Monkey muses and fulminates. Tripitaka needles and wheedles, when he’s not blubbing in terror. The monkeys shriek and chatter. There are delicious dashes of alliteration. In chapter 15, Monkey calls the horse-eating dragon a ‘Lawless loach!’ Alliteration does not work in the same way in Chinese, so this is the translator’s voice, but entirely in the spirit of the original.
I was particularly taken with the anachronisms[1]. They are superlatively funny. I was hard-put to choose from so many examples but here is a sample:
‘Lucky Monkey!’ The crowd of disciples giggled. ‘If you master
this, you can get a job as an express courier. You’ll always be able to make a
living.’ (This is actually only a small departure from the original, which has
the job as an army or government messenger).
‘Once Monkey had explained his latest marvel, the crowd of monkeys
spent the rest of the day playing with their new toys.’
‘Heaven runs a cashless economy.’ And so on…
Sometimes, the Dragon and Monkey sound like Jeeves and Wooster --
not entirely contemporary but instantly recognisable:
‘Now that I’ve adopted this magic staff, I feel rather under-dressed. If you could rustle up some armor to go with it, I’d be much obliged.’
‘I’m most dreadfully sorry, but I don’t have anything suitable.’
‘I don’t want to be a bother to someone else. I’ll sit it out here till you come up with the goods.’
‘I suggest you try another ocean. You might have more luck there.’
Elsewhere, the dialogue is bang up-to-date:
‘Are you
forgetting who rescued you from that stone casket beneath the Mountain of Two
Frontiers? You owe me, Monkey! Get me something to eat before this pestilential
mountain finishes me off.’
And here are Monkey and Pigsy as the sparring duo:
Witnessing this at a distance, Tripitaka was speechless with horror.
‘Oh, well-played, Monkey!’ chortled Pigsy. ‘Three murders and it’s not even
lunchtime.’
Julia Lovell’s translation is a delight and a tour de force. I hope that in taking a translator’s tweezers to it, I have managed to convey some of my admiration for its creativity and joie de vivre.
If you want to read around the subject, here are some more links
to entertain you:
Minjie
Chen in Monkey Craze! examines iterations of Monkey in the
modern period.
A Certain Je Ne
Sais Quoi, by Sean Bye looks at the art of changing connotations and
registers in translation
And on the journey by the real Xuanzang/Tripitaka, Chasing The Monk's Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, by Mishi Saran, reviewed on Asian Books Blog here
