Yu’s The Monkey and the Monk (2006)

The real translation, at a fifth of the length.

You can have the scholarship without the season — the same translator, choosing which chapters carry the whole.

You want Yu's translation and Yu's scholarship, and you have looked at the four-volume set and been honest with yourself.

What it keeps and what it changes

Keeps: Yu’s translation and his framing of what the novel is arguing about, in the chapters he judged load-bearing.
Changes: the length, and the completeness. The book’s own subtitle is “An Abridgment of The Journey to the West”; it does not hide what it is.

Whose story is it?

the pilgrimage’s, compressed — the monk survives the cut with more of his character intact than most retellings leave him.

How much time does it ask?

528 pages.

University of Chicago Press, 528 pages — Yu’s own abridgment of his four-volume translation.

Where to find it

Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org →

Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon ↗ · Kindle — Amazon ↗

Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby ↗ · Find at your library — WorldCat ↗

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More ways west: The Anthony C. Yu Translation, revised (2012) · Julia Lovell’s Monkey King (2021) · Arthur Waley’s Monkey (Grove Press, 1958)