The Anthony C. Yu Translation, revised (2012)
All hundred chapters, and every footnote you didn’t know you wanted.
Journey to the West is a work of literature with a religious argument inside it, and only the complete translation lets you see either one whole.
You want the actual novel, all hundred chapters of it, and you would rather be told what the Daoist alchemy in chapter nineteen is doing than skate past it.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: everything — all hundred chapters, the poems that punctuate them, and an apparatus that explains what the Buddhism and the Daoism are actually doing.
Changes: nothing it can help. The revision modernises the romanisation to Hanyu Pinyin and sharpens the prose; the scholarship gets deeper, not lighter.
Keeps everything — the full text, the interpolated poems that most abridgments cut first, and an apparatus that treats the book as literature with a religious argument inside it rather than as a children's adventure. The revision modernises the romanisation to Hanyu Pinyin, expands the introduction, and tightens the translation itself; what it does not do is get shorter.
Whose story is it?
the whole party’s, at the length the novel gives them — which means Tripitaka is a real and often infuriating character rather than a plot token.
How much time does it ask?
Four volumes, 1,896 pages in print — a season, not an evening.
Four volumes from the University of Chicago Press: 576, 432, 440 and 448 pages.
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 ↗
Common questions
How long is the complete Journey to the West?
Anthony C. Yu's revised translation runs to four volumes and 1,896 pages: 576, 432, 440 and 448. It is a season of reading, not a weekend, and it is the only English version that carries all hundred chapters with the scholarship attached.
Which Journey to the West translation is the most complete?
Yu's, in four volumes from the University of Chicago Press. The revised edition modernises the romanisation to Hanyu Pinyin and expands the notes. Waley's Monkey and Lovell's Monkey King are both abridgments, and Yu published his own one-volume abridgment as The Monkey and the Monk.
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More ways west: Julia Lovell’s Monkey King (2021) · Arthur Waley’s Monkey (Grove Press, 1958) · Yu’s The Monkey and the Monk (2006)