Reframing the narrative of magic wind in Arthur Waley's translation of *Journey to the West*: another look at the abridged translation

The paper investigates how Arthur Waley’s abridged translation Monkey reframes the narrativity of the ‘magic wind’ in Journey to the West. It situates Journey as a syncretic Ming-dynasty classic blending Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, mythology, satire, and vernacular drama, and outlines the complex reception and retranslation history for Western audiences. While prior studies emphasize Waley’s readability and domestication, the narrative consequences of abridgment—especially on supernatural elements like wind—remain underexplored. The study asks: What is the narrativity of magic wind in the source text? How does Waley’s abridgment reframe these narratives? And how does this reframing reshape the overall narrative style and cultural-religious signaling for target readers.

The review maps two complementary paradigms. The structuralist paradigm distinguishes story (events, agents) and discourse (arrangement, representation), highlighting genre conventions of Chinese God-and-Evil-Spirit novels where supernatural settings, named characters, and spatial cues (mountains, rivers, winds) function as foreshadowing and prophecy. Prior narratology focuses largely on character evolution (e.g., Monkey’s Buddhist conversion), allegorical readings (Five Elements, Yin–Yang), and naming strategies of minor demons, leaving elements like ‘wind’ under-examined. The social (socio-narrative) paradigm, drawing on Somers and Baker, treats translation as (re)framing, emphasizing ideological embedding, selective appropriation, and labeling. Literary cases (e.g., Christianized rewritings) demonstrate how translators reshape ontological, public, conceptual, and meta-narratives. The paper argues for integrating these paradigms to analyze both verbal-narrative techniques (flashforward, tone) and socio-ideological reframing in Waley’s Monkey.

The authors propose an eclectic model combining structuralist narratology and social narrative theory, with narrativity as the central analytic unit and focus on reframing strategies and effects. They perform a corpus-based close reading of Journey, first identifying 996 occurrences of 风 (wind) and narrowing to 228 narratively relevant instances (excluding ‘mortal wind’ and idiomatic/metaphoric uses). They categorize functions across story and discourse levels: destruction, transportation, transformation, flashforward, and mixed mode (transportation + flashforward). Quantitative distributions are tabulated. They then compare these to Waley’s abridged Monkey to assess shifts in frequency and function, visualized via a radar graph. To probe cultural specificity, they use CUC ParaConc to search occurrences of 巽 (xun; trigram associated with wind and southeast) across the Chinese–English parallel corpus, assessing Waley’s renderings (omissions, transliterations) against full translations by Yu and Jenner. They further analyze labeling choices (e.g., generalized vs. specific wind labels), information compression, and systematic omission of verse/couplets where wind functions often reside, using illustrative examples from multiple chapters.

- Source-text narrativity of magic wind (from 228 analyzed instances): Destruction (22), Transportation (89), Transformation (37), Flashforward (67), Mixed mode (12). Magic wind functions as portent, vehicle of supernatural speed/power, and tangible entity linked to transformations; wind properties can foreshadow rider identity. - In Waley’s abridged Monkey, these functions are markedly reduced: Destruction (2), Transportation (15), Transformation (4), Flashforward (8), Mixed mode (3). Destruction and transformation are especially diminished; many battle, pursuit, and escape sequences involving wind are cut. - Selective appropriation: Waley retains structural skeleton and selects episodes that foreground pilgrims rescuing lands (e.g., Crow-Cock Kingdom; Cart-Slow Kingdom; River that Leads to Heaven), resonating with Western mythic motifs and wartime heroism, but downplays religious fusion and culture-specific conceptual narratives (e.g., Samādhi, Eight Trigrams, Yin–Yang, mutual production and conquest). - Cultural specificity: For 巽 (xun), of 19 source instances, Waley shows 9 no-translation due to episode omission, 2 transliterations without explanation (Sun), and 8 omissions, avoiding directional/trigram references that carry conceptual and meta-narrative meanings. - Transformation narrativity: Of 37 transformation cases, only 4 are retained in Waley; Monkey’s weapon’s wind-linked transformations (occurring 11 times in the source) are mostly removed, weakening Monkey’s ontological narrative of demon-subjugation. - Labeling and delabelling: Waley generalizes specific wind labels (e.g., rendering 最风 as ‘a wind’ rather than ‘the Mighty Wind’), compresses information (omitting repeated wind-to-escape transformations), and consistently omits wind content in couplets and narrative poetry, eroding wind’s flashforward and causal emplotment functions. - Temporal/spatial reframing: Produced during WWII, the translation’s emphasis on courage, optimism, and salvation narratives aligns with contemporary British readership needs, increasing readability and global resonance at the expense of meta- and conceptual narratives.

Findings show that Waley’s abridgment systematically reframes the narrativity of magic wind through three strategies. First, temporal/spatial reframing embeds Monkey within WWII-era British sensibilities, amplifying heroism and hope and selecting episodes with clear moral victories. Second, selective appropriation preserves the plot skeleton but omits many wind-centric destructive/transformative episodes and culturally dense materials (Samādhi, Eight Trigrams, Yin–Yang), reducing conceptual and meta-narratives of religious syncretism integral to the source. Third, labeling shifts (generalization, information compression, and omission in verse/couplets) dilute wind’s role as a flashforward and as a marker of supernatural identity and agency. Collectively, these produce a target-text narrative that is more secular, action-forward, and globally legible, yet less a cultural mosaic. This addresses the research questions by demonstrating how abridgment reshapes narrativity and reveals the ideological priorities guiding Waley’s mediation.

The study contributes an integrated structuralist–social narrative model to analyze how abridged translation reframes narrativity in a literary classic. It maps the multi-functional narrativity of magic wind in Journey and shows that Waley’s Monkey significantly diminishes destruction and transformation functions, generalizes labels, and omits culturally embedded conceptual/meta-narratives, thereby altering character ontologies and foreshadowing mechanisms. The work highlights the translator’s role in shaping target-culture reception beyond textual fidelity. Future research could extend this model to other supernatural elements (e.g., clouds, mists, fires), compare additional full and abridged translations across languages, and examine paratexts and adaptations (film/TV/anime) to trace how reframing evolves across media.

Given the 100-chapter length and dense interweaving of themes, the analysis narrows to the magic wind and may appear selective; reliance on textual frequency counts and exemplars risks overlooking some contextual nuances. The focus on one abridged translation (Waley) versus two full translations (Yu, Jenner) centers English-language reception and may not capture broader multilingual reframing patterns. Omission of some verse analyses due to abridgment and formatting constraints further limits comprehensive coverage.