Chapter 6 Monkey’s Peregrinations in the West: An Archival Study of Publishers’ Reception of Arthur Waley’s Translation of the Xiyouji
In: History RetoldSearch for other papers by Lintao Qi in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
Arthur Waley’s Monkey, abridged from the Chinese original, is arguably the best-known English translation of the Xiyouji. Reviews of Monkey and the prizes it won for Waley have been rightly cited to paint a picture of the predominantly positive reception of the translation, but the recent academic attention to archival materials in translation studies suggests that reception studies of literary works could be further expanded and refined. The availability of materials such as the translator’s correspondence and the publisher’s archives reveals a much more sophisticated picture of the reception of Monkey by previously neglected agents. By scrutinising the archival materials of Monkey’s original publisher, Allen and Unwin, between the 1940s and 1960s, this paper unravels that the reception of Waley’s Monkey is multi-layered, dynamic, and socio-historically conditioned. Ultimately, no reception study of any translated text would be complete without taking “private” archives into consideration.