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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