The Key to Journey to the West (A Guide by Eva Lüdi Kong)
A comprehensive companion volume to the German translation of Journey to the West, gathering the novel's literary origins and centuries of critical commentary.
The Key to Journey to the West (Der Schlüssel zur "Reise in den Westen") was compiled by the Swiss Sinologist Eva Lüdi Kong and published in 2019 by the German publisher Reclam Verlag. It serves as a companion piece to her complete translation of Journey to the West, which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2016. Spanning approximately two hundred and forty pages, the volume is structured as a hybrid between academic research and a reader's guide. The first part of the book gathers the prehistory and ancestral materials of the novel, including excerpts from Xuanzang's Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, biographies of Xuanzang written by his disciples, outlines from Song and Yuan dynasty vernacular stories, fragments of play scripts from the pleasure quarters, and various legends and anomalies concerning monkey monsters and dragon gods. The second part provides translations and introductions to important prefaces, postscripts, and critical commentaries on Journey to the West from the late Ming and Qing dynasties through to the modern era, with a particular emphasis on the annotations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars who revealed the work's deeper allegorical meanings. This book allows German readers to systematically understand how this classic evolved from historical fact into a literary myth, and to examine its philosophical and religious connotations from the perspective of traditional Chinese exegesis.