DON QUIXOTE

by Miguel de Cervantes

Translated by John Ormsby

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

I: ABOUT THIS TRANSLATION

IT WAS with considerable reluctance that I abandoned in favour of

the present undertaking what had long been a favourite project: that

of a new edition of Shelton's "Don Quixote," which has now become a

somewhat scarce book. There are some- and I confess myself to be

one- for whom Shelton's racy old version, with all its defects, has

a charm that no modern translation, however skilful or correct,

could possess. Shelton had the inestimable advantage of belonging to

the same generation as Cervantes; "Don Quixote" had to him a

vitality that only a contemporary could feel; it cost him no

dramatic effort to see things as Cervantes saw them; there is no

anachronism in his language; he put the Spanish of Cervantes into

the English of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself most likely knew the

book; he may have carried it home with him in his saddle-bags to

Stratford on one of his last journeys, and under the mulberry tree

at New Place joined hands with a kindred genius in its pages.

But it was soon made plain to me that to hope for even a moderate

popularity for Shelton was vain. His fine old crusted English would,

no doubt, be relished by a minority, but it would be only by a

minority. His warmest admirers must admit that he is not a

satisfactory representative of Cervantes. His translation of the First

Part was very hastily made and was never revised by him. It has all

the freshness and vigour, but also a full measure of the faults, of

a hasty production. It is often very literal- barbarously literal

frequently- but just as often very loose. He had evidently a good

colloquial knowledge of Spanish, but apparently not much more. It

never seems to occur to him that the same translation of a word will

not suit in every case.

It is often said that we have no satisfactory translation of "Don

Quixote." To those who are familiar with the original, it savours of

truism or platitude to say so, for in truth there can be no thoroughly

satisfactory translation of "Don Quixote" into English or any other

language. It is not that the Spanish idioms are so utterly

unmanageable, or that the untranslatable words, numerous enough no

doubt, are so superabundant, but rather that the sententious terseness

to which the humour of the book owes its flavour is peculiar to

Spanish, and can at best be only distantly imitated in any other

tongue.

The history of our English translations of "Don Quixote" is

instructive. Shelton's, the first in any language, was made,

apparently, about 1608, but not published till 1612. This of course

was only the First Part. It has been asserted that the Second,

published in 1620, is not the work of Shelton, but there is nothing to

support the assertion save the fact that it has less spirit, less of

what we generally understand by "go," about it than the first, which

would be only natural if the first were the work of a young man

writing currente calamo, and the second that of a middle-aged man

writing for a bookseller. On the other hand, it is closer and more

literal, the style is the same, the very same translations, or

mistranslations, occur in it, and it is extremely unlikely that a

new translator would, by suppressing his name, have allowed Shelton to

carry off the credit.