The Journey to the West is one of the most popular story worlds in East Asia. One of the most widely referenced versions of The Journey comes from a Chinese novel Xiyou ji (西遊記, K. Sŏyugi) written at the end of the 16th century. It tells the story of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, who protects the Buddhist monk Tripitaka during his odyssey from China to the Western Heaven in search of the real Buddhist scriptures. Tripitaka is modelled after Xuanzang (c. 602-664), probably the most famous among the Chinese monks who travelled to India ‘in search of the dharma’. The story world of The Journey owes its popularity in large part to the uncountable versions that exist from various times, cultures, and media. One of the most popular versions today might be the Japanese manga Dragonball. The Monkey King also appears as Wukong in the popular video game Fortnite, and the Japanese TV show adaptation Monkey from the 1970s not only reached cult status in the UK and Australia but was also broadcasted in South America. In this study we imagine that all these different versions of The Journey together, regardless of temporal, spatial or medial differences, form a pool which I call the “story world of The Journey”.
Many scholars believe that the transnational circulation of a story like The Journey starts with the written translation of the “original”. Sŏ Hyeǔn, for example, argues that The Journey was first translated into Korean before it could spread in Korea in the form of various adaptations (Sŏ Hyeǔn, 2015). This paper questions this assumption and imagines the transnational spread of The Journey beyond written translations. I do not want to deny the importance of written translations, but I argue that especially in the case of The Journey visual translations played a significant role for the transnational spread of the story world. As we will see below visual translations sometimes even preceded written translations.
This paper explores the transnational spread of The Journey in East Asia by focusing on its circulation in Korea. One of the aims of this study is to free The Journey from the narrow spatiotemporal frame according to which it is often reduced to a Chinese novel written at the end of the 16th century. Therefore, I consciously refer to the story as The Journey and avoid using transcriptions of the title as “Xiyou ji” (Chin.), “Saiyūki” (Jap.), “Tây du ký” (Viet.) or “Sǒyugi” (Kor.). I intentionally use the abbreviated English title The Journey to emphasize that the story persists without regard to the boundaries of periodization and national literatures. By exploring visual versions from outside of China dating across several centuries, I hope to emphasize not only the transnationality, but also the transtemporality and transmediality of The Journey. Although an investigation of all variations of The Journey around the world would be an interesting project, the time and resources required for such a project are prohibitive. Here, I will exclusively focus on visual Korean versions of The Journey.
Previous studies of The Journey in Korea tend to rely on the old categories from reception studies, which portray Korea as the “receiver” in a rather passive way and emphasize the 16th century novel as the “original” of The Journey. Accordingly, Korean versions of The Journey have tended to be evaluated as confirmation of the extraordinary accomplishments of the alleged original. Major studies of the reception of The Journey in Korea include whole books, chapters or articles by Yi Chaesu (1969), Chǒng Kyubok (1972), Yi Sangik (1992), Isobe Akira (1995), Min Kwandong (2006), Song Chǒnghwa (2010) and Sǒ Hyeǔn (2015). My own research here has benefitted greatly from these studies and would not have been possible without them. These studies, however, all focus on written translations or references and regard the Chinese novel from the 16th century as the “original” of The Journey. I focus on three visual translations of The Journey and argue that The Journey already circulated in Korea long before the 16th century.
Specifically, I analyze relief images on the pagoda of the Kyǒngch’ǒn Temple from the 14th century, wall paintings in the Maitreya Hall of T’ongdo Temple from the 18th century and the TV animation Narara syup’ŏbodŭ, or Fly Superboard from the 1990s. I chose these three examples that all translate The Journey visually, because they stem from different centuries, use different media and transfer The Journey into different “webs of meaning”. This diversity lends itself to an exploration of the general features of visual translations. What do the three visual translations of The Journey have in common despite their diversity? How does their visuality influence the translation process?
I will first provide a short introduction to the story world of The Journey, before moving onto the theoretical concept of visual translation and consider how it can be applied as a methodological tool to examine the three visual translations of The Journey. Finally, the analysis of the three translations itself will help us to better understand how visual translation contributed to the transnational spread of The Journey.