Translating Journey to the West in Europe: Arthur Waley’s Monkey and the Italian Lo Scimmiotto

This paper examines the early European reception of Journey to the West through Arthur Waley’s Monkey (1942) and Adriana Motti’s Italian Lo Scimmiotto (1960). Rather than treating these works as transparent vehicles of transmission, the study analyses them as successive acts of rewriting and mediation. Waley’s abridged English version, based on a selection of thirty chapters from the Chinese novel, foregrounded narrative continuity, humour, and the figure of Sun Wukong, while reducing the poetic and doctrinal density of the source text. Motti’s Italian translation, produced from Waley’s English rather than from the Chinese original, represents a further stage of indirect translation. Through selected parallel passages and lexical choices involving the title Lo Scimmiotto, Sun Wukong’s names and titles, and character names such as Porcellino and Sabbioso, the article shows how the Italian version reinforces the accessibility and domestication of the narrative for an Italian readership. The paper argues that these translations actively shaped the European image of Sun Wukong as a comic, mischievous, and memorable protagonist, partially detached from the full religious, poetic, and allegorical architecture of Xiyou ji.