When I first started translating Journey to the West, I didn’t really think about what kind of narration I should use. (Rookie mistake? Probably.) It struck me recently that in the original text, the narrator is talking directly to the reader, as if we were all sitting around a fire listening to a story. The narrator will often begin a chapter summarizing the previous story points with something like, “Now after the Monkey King such and such, he…” and concludes chapters with “If you want to know what happened next, I’ll explain in the next chapter.”
I’m so unused to seeing this kind of narration in English (literary) storytelling that it took me two chapters to even realize what was going on. I’m much more familiar with this kind of narration in the context of visual media – as voiceover, or perhaps like in Disney’s Aladdin, where the supposed “narrator” introduces the story in the first song, Arabian Nights. But then the narrator disappears, and we are left to our own devices with the characters and their world. On the other hand, in Journey to the West, the narrator is always there, often introducing settings with long descriptions before the characters get to see them and interjecting here and there with phrases like “That monkey!”, “What a beautiful mountain!” and the like. The overall effect is that the narrator forms a wall between the reader and the story. We are not living in their world for the duration of the storytelling. We are there, in the narrator’s world, and the story happened long ago, in a faraway land.
Because I am so used to third-person narration as usually done in modern English novels, I have been leaving out these narrator interjections because they don’t match my narration style. But since the translation has been pretty direct overall, it doesn’t really feel like we’re living in the characters’ world either. The narration style I’ve been using isn’t quite modern English novel nor is it ancient Chinese storytelling, but rather somewhere in the middle. So now I’m rethinking things. What if I hard-committed to the original narration style? Would it even work in English? What would Journey to the West even feel like in a modern third-person style?
Let’s try it. For the duration of Chapter 3, I’m going to try for the storytelling narration style, and for Chapter 4, I’ll try for a more modern take on narration. We’ll see what works and what doesn’t 🙂
Etymology Adventures 