Is Waley's Monkey complete?

No — it translates roughly 30 of the 100 chapters. It keeps the comedy and drops most of the verse and allegory.

Which translation has all 100 chapters?

Jenner's (1982–86) and Yu's (1977–83, revised 2012). Both are complete; Jenner is the plainer read, Yu the annotated one.

Which is easiest to read?

Waley's Monkey — it was written to be read like a novel, and most readers finish it in a few sittings.

Ink-wash painting of four pilgrims crossing a stone bridge among karst peaks and cloud, on the road west.

Reading note II · The translations

Which English translation of Journey to the West should you read?

西遊記英譯

Three answers, because the English Journey to the West is three different books. A witty abridgement a novelist made in wartime, a complete plain telling from Beijing, and a complete annotated edition from Chicago — and the choice between them is really a choice of what you want the book to be.

For a first taste: Arthur Waley, Monkey (1942) — about thirty of the hundred chapters, the comedy kept and the scripture trimmed. The doorway most English readers walked through.
For the whole story: W. J. F. Jenner, Journey to the West (1982–86) — all 100 chapters, plainly told, long available in Beijing reprints.
For the scholarship: Anthony C. Yu, The Journey to the West (1977–83, revised 2012) — all 100 chapters with the poems, the notes and the source essays.

The three, side by side 三種

Translator	What it is	What it keeps, what it drops
Arthur Waley, Monkey (1942)	An abridgement of roughly 30 chapters	The comedy entire, and Waley's own wit; drops most of the verse, the allegory and the later pilgrims'-share of the plot.
W. J. F. Jenner (1982–86)	Complete, 100 chapters, four volumes	The whole story in clean modern English; the poems are carried but slimmed, and the apparatus is minimal.
Anthony C. Yu (1977–83, rev. 2012)	Complete, 100 chapters, four volumes	Everything: verse, doctrinal notes, source essays, and the argument that the allegory is the novel.

How to choose 選法

If you want to meet the monkey and decide later, read Waley — a couple of sittings, and the invention of the English title Monkey is itself part of the book's afterlife. If you have decided and want the road, all hundred chapters, the demons in order, read Jenner: it is the honest full text at its most frictionless. If you want to know why a given episode is shaped the way it is — what the scripture is, what the numbers mean, which chapter titles are doctrinal jokes — read Yu, whose edition is as much a study of the novel as a translation of it.

One honest caution: Waley's Monkey is the one most other English references quote, so readers who start there keep meeting their own first book everywhere. That is an argument for starting there; it is also an argument for knowing it is only the first thirty of a hundred chapters.

The characterisations of the three translations follow the publication histories summarized in the source below; the choosing paragraph is this site's.

Where these figures come from 出處

English Wikipedia, “Journey to the West” — the translation history and the three editions (read 6 Oct 2026)