Tripitaka, the Xuanzang of Chinese Buddhist Lore, pales to Monkey (Sun Wukong), as of course any respectable holy man naturally will tend to do. Monkey, in most ways the main character of the four pilgrims to the West, can be likened to that of Faust, comparatively speaking. (At least the mispronounciation is mostly-though not completely-consistent.) But for my part, it's so utterly distracting that I'm not sure I'll make it much further into the recording.Ĭlassic Abridged Translation of Journey to the West If you know nothing about the story or any regional history or geography going in, and have never heard Chinese spoken before, this MIGHT not bother you. But nobody even seems to have told the poor guy that "T'ang" (as in the famous dynasty when the story is set) isn't pronounced "Tee-ang." Every transliterated word that possibly could be is hilariously mangled. But good grief, for a fourteen-hour audio book they REALLY couldn't afford to take ten or twenty minutes first to coach the reader on how to pronounce the Chinese names in the text? Unlike one other reviewer, I don't at all object to the plummy accents-it's Waley, it fits-and I absolutely don't expect perfect pronunciation of foreign words. Waley's abridged translation of this great early novel is a classic itself by this point, and it's a lot of fun to read-Waley was a terrific English prose stylist as well as a scholar and never takes the text too seriously for his audience to enjoy it. Great translation, but reader struggles distractingly with names
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