Julia Lovell's Journey to the West and the Power of Women in Translation

When I first picked up Julia Lovell's Monkey King: Journey to the West, there was a huge smile on my face. Not just because the beautiful cover design but also the sharp, punchy, and - most of all - fun. And that's exactly why Lovell's translation matters.

Lovell, a professor, historian, and sinologist, has done something rare: she made Journey to the West not just readable, but irresistible. And in doing so, she’s shown us why female translators are essential not just to world literature—but to how we experience it.

Journey to the West | 西遊記

Written in the 16th century by Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West is one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels. Spanning 100 chapters, it tells a fictionalized and fantastical account of the pilgrimage of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India in the 7th century to collect sacred Buddhist texts.

While the novel retains the basic arc of Xuanzang’s journey, it embellishes it with magic, monsters, and myth—drawing from folk tales, Taoist alchemy, and the author’s wildly inventive imagination.

Over the centuries, Journey to the West has inspired countless adaptations—shadow plays, traditional Chinese opera, films, comics, animations, and more. Even Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse–style reinterpretations have drawn from its genre-bending, character-driven storytelling. The Monkey King himself—Sun Wukong—has become an icon, morphing across mediums with ease.

Most recently, we saw him reemerge in the stunning action RPG Black Myth: Wukong, developed by Chinese indie studio Game Science. The game exploded onto the global scene in 2024, becoming a worldwide hit, and brought the Monkey King to a whole new audience—Western gamers included.

And just in time, we have a new English version of the story. Julia Lovell’s Monkey King meets this moment beautifully.

A Journey Told Anew

Julia Lovell didn’t just translate Journey to the West word for word. She selected 36 of the most lively, ridiculous, and charming chapters (from a much longer original), and retold them with narrative fire. Thus this English translated version is a condensed, electrified retelling that moves fast, hits hard, and retains the soul of the classic.

Her Monkey is witty, wild, and fully alive in English. She doesn’t shy away from humor: whether it’s calling demons “bone-crunching fiends” or letting Monkey’s insults sing with fresh rhythm (“lawless loach!” is a favorite). She leans into the story’s messiness and magic—and she makes space for joy.

Some critics have noted that she smooths out long poems or skips detours. But that’s exactly the point. Lovell isn’t trying to be a gatekeeper of the canon. She’s trying to open the door. So many doors as she is not just trying when she is translating but also writing.

Julia Lovell: Translator, Historian, Cultural Bridge

Julia Lovell isn’t just a translator—she’s a historian, writer, and sinologist who has spent her career opening doors between China and the English-speaking world.

Some of her most acclaimed books include:

• 🌊 The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China

  • A gripping cultural history of a conflict that shaped modern China—and its views of the West.

• 🌍 Maoism: A Global History (winner of the 2019 Cundill Prize)

  • A wide-ranging exploration of how Maoist ideology influenced not just China, but insurgencies, movements, and revolutions across the globe.

• 🏛 The Politics of Cultural Capital

  • A deep dive into how modern Chinese literature was weaponized to serve nationalist goals.

    
    

In all of her work, Lovell insists on nuance. She doesn’t flatten Chinese history for a Western gaze. Instead, she challenges, contextualizes, and, most importantly, translates with integrity—not just language, but cultural complexity.

Her writing has helped countless Western readers rethink what they thought they knew about China—from revolution to myth, from colonial trauma to timeless tales.

Honor Female Translators

For a long time, the world of literary translation—especially when it comes to epic texts—has been shaped by a particular gaze: often white, male, and academic. And that matters.

Because when men translate the stories that have shaped civilizations—like Homer’s Odyssey, or Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West—they don’t just carry over the language. They carry over assumptions. They decide what sounds noble, what sounds sexual, what sounds weak, and what sounds wise.

This is exactly why it’s vital that more women translate these epics. Because translation is not neutral. It’s a creative act, full of interpretation, instinct, and worldview.

Take Emily Wilson, for example—the first woman in history to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English. In her now-famous 2017 translation, Wilson made waves not just for her elegant verse, but for the way she reframed femininity in the text. Where earlier translators euphemized or erased difficult truths (like sexual violence), Wilson was frank, clear-eyed, and unafraid to name exploitation. Where male translators called enslaved women “maids” or “girls,” Wilson used the word slaves. Her version felt sharper, more honest—and more deeply human.

As Wilson told the New York Times Magazine, "All translation is interpretation. I'm not putting in things that aren't there. I'm shining a light on the parts that pervious translators left in darkness."

Julia Lovell’s Monkey King does something similar.

While she doesn’t rewrite Journey to the West through a feminist lens, her sensibility as a woman reshapes the energy of the story. She brings out its comedy, its contradictions, its deeply emotional core. She doesn’t let the narrative settle into male heroism—she lets it breathe in all its wild, fractured, human glory.

The Male Gaze in Journey to the West

Let’s be honest: Journey to the West is not kind to women.

Many of the antagonists Xuanzang and his disciples encounter are female-coded demon spirits—half-human, half-animal beings who want, obsessively, to possess the monk. Characters like the White Bone Spirit or the Scorpion Demoness are framed as monstrous in their longing, dangerous in their desire. They’re “honey traps,” lonely and unloved, manipulative and pathetic.

The message is painfully clear - female desire is dangerous. Female grief is grotesque. And women who want too much must be punished.

This isn’t just folklore. It reflects deep patriarchal logic in Chinese and East Asian cultures—where female agency is treated as threat, and feminine hunger is framed as monstrous.

What Lovell’s version does—quietly, but powerfully—is make these dynamics visible. Her choices in tone, pacing, and character allow readers to see what has always been there: the imbalance. The irony. The coded fear of femininity.

Her Xuanzang isn’t simply a pious figure dodging temptation—he’s fragile, anxious, sometimes almost absurd in his avoidance of desire. Lovell doesn’t erase the misogyny of the original text. But she does invite us to read it differently.

And that’s what great female translators do.

They don’t just carry the story across languages. They challenge the gaze. They open the door to new readings They let the reader ask new questions.

Translation as Feminist Practice

Whether it's Emily Wilson’s Odyssey or Julia Lovell’s Monkey King, women translators are reshaping how we read the world’s great epics.

They don’t just make the text readable. They make it matter.

Lovell’s Monkey King isn’t just fun, or fast, or clever. It’s a work of cultural re-imagination—one that reminds us how much power there is in who gets to tell the story. And how different the story becomes when a woman holds the pen.

So let’s honor female translators—not only as laborers, but as artists, critics, and co-creators of the world’s greatest stories.