Journey to the West (Complete Translation by Eva Lüdi Kong)
This is the first complete German translation of the epic, meticulously crafted over seventeen years by Swiss sinologist Eva Lüdi Kong and honored with the 2017 Leipzig Book Fair Translation Prize.
The complete German translation of Journey to the West by Swiss Sinologist Eva Lüdi Kong was released by Reclam Verlag in 2016, marking the first full translation of the hundred-chapter novel in the German-speaking world. Born in 1968, the translator pursued her studies in Zurich and Hangzhou, earning a Master's degree in Classical Chinese Literature from Zhejiang University. She spent seventeen years completing the translation and its accompanying annotations. The work is presented in two volumes within an open-faced slipcase, spanning over thirteen hundred pages of text. It includes extensive cultural notes and approximately one hundred woodcut illustrations sourced from early eighteenth-century editions, allowing German readers to glimpse the visual tradition of the original work. In 2017, the translation won the Translation Award at the Leipzig Book Fair, with the jury praising it for reshaping the Chinese classic in "fresh and spirited German." The publisher invested eighty thousand euros in production costs, and by the end of 2018, the work had undergone five reprints with over seven thousand copies sold, cementing its status as one of the most significant events in Chinese literature within the German publishing world in recent years.