Luedi Kong gives Monkey King epic the German treatment
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E-mail China Daily, November 9, 2016
Switzerland-born Eva Luedi Kong appeared with a glass bottle of Chinese wolfberry tea at her book launch at the Frankfurt Book Fair in late October.
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| Eva Luedi Kong has launched her German version of Journey to the West. The book also features illustrations restored by Zhang Xiaofeng, a professor of woodcut paintings at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. [Photo / China Daily] |
The first to render the complete text of Chinese literary classic Journey to the West into German, Luedi Kong has just completed her journey of bringing the Monkey King to a wider audience in the West, in an adventure spanning 16 years.
"The book is a wonderful example and ambassador of Chinese culture," she says.
"This is because besides tai chi exponents and believers in traditional Chinese medicine, there are not many people in the German-speaking world who know anything about the novel."
Designer Remo Albanesi was one of those who bought a copy of the book shortly after the launch.
Albanesi says he has a relative who is of Chinese descent and so he is interested in learning about Chinese classics.
"Many young people here know about the Dragon Ball, but nothing about this novel," he says, referring to the Japanese cartoon inspired by Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King.
Before Luedi Kong, there were picture books and selected translations. But her work is based on the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) version of the book, published by the Zhonghua Book Company.
When she started working on the project－and had translated the first 60 chapters of the 100 in the text－she did not have a contract with a publisher.
"It might not have been wise of me to do that, but I think it was finally worth the effort. The book unfolded a grand and profound world to me. It kind of reshaped me, too. And I just wanted to share that splendor with other German readers," she says.
Dieter Meier, editor of her publisher Reclam, says that he did not hesitate when Luedi Kong contacted them.
"I like this book very much and I was first introduced to it when watching the animated film Uproar in Heaven in Stuttgart many years ago. This sparked my interest in classical Chinese novels, and when living in Shanghai for six months in 2000, I read a French translation of Outlaws of the Marsh, which furthered my interest," says Meier.
Known for its "universal library" series, Reclam has packaged the Chinese story with a "popular and picturesque" book design with Sun Wukong and Chinese characters on the bright yellow cover.
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