Seeing as this is only a problem in a few instances however I can't help but think the abridgement would have been better off with a hundred or so pages more. Instead of aiming for a seamless experience Yu puts in a footnote whenever the book refers to an event that isn't in the abridged version, and there is even one chapter that starts off in the middle of a conflict between the main character and one of his followers while the previous chapter where this conflict arose is merely summarized in a footnote. In my opinion a good abridgement is one that shortens the length of a novel while making sure the reader never feels like he's missing parts of the story and that is where this version fails to satisfy. Yu's abridged version on the other hand is a decent compromise between reading Waley's version and reading the complete version - but it's not perfect. Yu's complete version is over two thousand pages long and you might not want to invest that heavily in a work you still don't know if you'll enjoy. Waley treats the story as pure entertainment and isn't sensitive to the religious allegory that permeates the whole work. Waley's version is simply too heavily abridged and leaves out all of the verse and much of the dialogue. The big question when reading this story in an English translation is whether to read Arthur Waley's heavily abridged version "Monkey", Anthony Yu's complete four-volume translation "The Journey to the West" or his abridgement of the same work titled "The Monkey and the Monk", which is the one I landed on. It was first published in the 16th century and the authorship is still disputed. The Journey to the West is a fictionalized account of the Chinese Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang's journey to Central Asia and India to collect Buddhist texts, and is considered one of China's four great literary classics.
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