Journey to the West download the new version for apple

Spenser's allegory was a lot more accessible, partly because I knew more about the sources, partly because he was sort of thudding about it. I read the Spenser when I was 15, as a result of having read the parody of same in one of the De Camp & Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter fantasies and tracking back. Both were from about the same era, on opposite sides of the planet, both offered an adventure tale on a substrate of religious and other metaphor and allegory.

One of the comparisons made in that long intro was with Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queene, which I thought illuminating. For quicker orientation for those unfamiliar with much Chinese history or literature, Wikipedia can also help out. Now I want to go find an expansion of that, because, really, it sounds like a spectacular adventure in its own right, without any need for supernatural helpers. It includes most usefully a short bio of the real 7th Century Tang monk on whose decades-long trip to India to gather and bring back to China Buddhist scriptures so much folklore, religious and social allegory, wonder tales, and more have accreted over the ensuing centuries. The translator starts with a 90-page intro written in high academic, parts of which I judge worth having plowed through.

The translator's English prose is smooth and clever, and he does an elegant job on the many interspersed poems, as well. Some of the footnotes are also pretty amusing in their own right, particularly when the translator vents his despair at translating the Chinese puns and wordplay in the original. Besides the instant large print available on my tablet, the footnotes system (and boy, does this need its footnotes and annotations) is brilliant: just click on the little blue number, and the footnote appears as a handy popup, departing at the next click. So rather than rereading to refresh my failing memory, I poked around Amazon and found this. I had read, some years ago, the now-classic abridged translation by Arthur Waley titled Monkey, which gives the gist of the tale, but I was curious about what all had been left out. I also see by my Netflix that there is a new Chinese movie of The Journey by the same director who gifted us with the also deeply gonzo Kung Fu Hustle. I was led back to this by revisiting, this month, an anime/manga version from the early 00s of the adventure, Saiyuki by Kazyua Minekura, which may not even be the most gonzo version ever, though I suspect it's up there. The star rating system is really not appropriate for classic books of this sort, read for curiosity and education as much as pleasure, but have a somewhat random 4.

Journey to the West download the new version for apple