Journey to the West (and Tolkien).

[elwen]

Lately I've been thinking again of reading Journey to the West. Since I'm long past the point where I could even understand an elementary-level abridgment in Chinese, my options are to read it in English or in Japanese. I have a three-volume set in Japanese, I think translated to about middle school level, but looking at the beginning of the supposedly "most faithful" version in English, it appears that it leaves out quite a bit, too. But I'm not really sure I want to read an unabridged translation. As much as I go for things as close to the original as possible most of the time, it sounds (from reviews) and seems (from excerpts) quite tedious.

One review complained about the copious amounts of poetry. He added:

You can't just automatically skip over all the poems, as you might do with Tolkien, either.

*facepalm*

Okay, so I couldn't make it through the epics in Lays of Beleriand either, but I read and adore all of the poetry in LotR. But those have the advantage of being in the lyrical original.

Well, I think I might start with one of the abridged versions and then move up. 9_9

Comments

[freeradical42.livejournal.com]

It's readers like this who have convinced me to remove all instances of original poetry or songs from my own novel.

Goes something like this:
Me: "So I'm not sure about the song. It's supposed to be a Beatles Song fractured by centuries of oral tradition, but it feels cheesy."
Reader: "Oh I skipped it because it was a song. I'm sure it's good though."

Great.

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I like poetry, and even poetry that tell stories. But I think it often doesn't work mixed into prose because the audience is primarily a prose-reading audience, and you will inevitably lose large numbers of them.

I wonder if that's how people react to songfic. Hmm...