Quixote and the windmills of translations
Translations are never to be trusted, and yet we need them.
Miguel de
Cervantes’ Don Quixote’s famous beginning words go like this in the
original Spanish:
En un lugar de La Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho
tiempo que vivía un hidalgo…
Twenty simple
words that, seemingly, would offer no problem to a translator. Twenty words of
common use, with a simple word order. But let us read some famous translations
into English and I suggest you be the judge:
Thomas Shelton “There lived not long ago since, in
a certain village of La Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, a gentleman…
Charles Jarvis: “In a village of La Mancha, in
Spain, there once lived one of those gentlemen…”
John Ormsby: “In a village of La Mancha, the
name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long ago since
one of those gentlemen…”
Samuel Putnam: “In a village of La Mancha the
name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of
those gentlemen…”
Clifford H. Galloway: “In one of the villages that dot
the Spanish plain of La Mancha –I have no desire to recall its name- there
lived not long ago an hidalgo…”
Richard Emery Roberts: “At a certain village in La
Mancha, there lived not long ago an hidalgo of the familiar type…”
Walter Starkie: “At a village of La Mancha, whose
name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those
gentlemen…”
Gerald J. Davis: “Not long ago, in a village of La
Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, there lived a country gentleman…”
Edith Grossman: “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a
place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago…”
Read
my full article entitled “Don Quixote against the windmills of translation: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/don-quixote-against-the-windmills-of-translations
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