Hi. You may have noticed that I took a break from posting between October and February. That’s due to a few reasons. First, I was focusing on finishing Season 1 of the podcast! If you were unaware, I started a podcast telling and discussing the story of Journey to the West in English. We relateContinue reading “There are deadlines… and then there are deadlines“
Category Archives: Translation Notes
New Podcast and Instagram
Hi 🙂 We started a podcast. It’s on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. We’re telling the story of Journey to the West and then discussing what surprises us or what we connect with based on our Chinese American and Taiwanese American experiences. I’m still feeling it out and there are a lot of improvements that canContinue reading “New Podcast and Instagram”
Miles and the Spider-Society as Wukong and the Heavenly army
In case you missed it, the Chinese Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse riffs off the battle between Wukong, the Colossal Spirit, and Nezha from Chapter 4. We have Miles as Wukong, Peter B. Parker as the Immortal of Colossal Spirit, Spider-Woman Jessica Drew as Nezha, and Gwen Stacy, Miguel O’Hara, Pavitr Prabhakar, and Hobie Brown asContinue reading “Miles and the Spider-Society as Wukong and the Heavenly army”
Leaving Havoc in Heaven and entering the Lull
We have officially completed the prologue Havoc in Heaven1 and are now entering what I’m calling The Lull, a five-chapter long series of events that sets up the actual “journey” in Journey to the West. The reason I’m calling it The Lull is because, let’s be honest, we just want to see monkey shenanigans, andContinue reading “Leaving Havoc in Heaven and entering the Lull”
Translating Poems in Chapter 7
I. Am. Exhausted. There are at least 14 poems or monologues in verse in this chapter. Now it’s not that there weren’t poems in previous chapters. There were. When we are introduced to Erlang, the description is in verse, for example. I had just made the choice to convert these poems to prose. But thereContinue reading “Translating Poems in Chapter 7”
JttW Headcanon: Lotus Lantern
The 1964 and 1998 Journey to the West cartoons weren’t my only experience with animated versions of these beloved characters. Other places they appeared include The Legend of Nezha series, a “prequel” telling of Nezha and Lord Li’s story before they ended up in Heaven trying to capture Sun Wukong, and Lotus Lantern, a “sequel”Continue reading “JttW Headcanon: Lotus Lantern”
JttW Literal Translation: The Imperial Stables
Don’t you love it when your reference text has a footnote calling the text “exceedingly difficult to translate”? I was depending on you, Prof. Yu! The poem that describes the heavenly horses depends heavily on both real and fake famous horses throughout Chinese history, and, for my translation, I threw most of it out. IContinue reading “JttW Literal Translation: The Imperial Stables”
JttW Literal Translation: What does Heaven look like?
Since I am taking a few more liberties translating Chapter 4 than I did previously, I thought it might be kind of fun to take a look at what a literal, direct translation of the description of Heaven in the Journey to the West looks like.1 So, maintaining as much of the original structure andContinue reading “JttW Literal Translation: What does Heaven look like?”
JttW Chapter 4: Translation? More like Adaptation.
I’m slowly realizing that “translating” Journey to the West into a modern novel style is much more like making an adaptation, and thus, is taking a lot longer than expected. At the same time, trying to stay faithful to the original is extremely limiting. For example, the original JttW almost never tells us what charactersContinue reading “JttW Chapter 4: Translation? More like Adaptation.”
Narration style in Journey to the West
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. TheContinue reading “Narration style in Journey to the West”
Etymology Adventures 