Miguel de Cervantes

“ The farmer, seeing before him this figure in full armor brandishing a lance over his head, gave himself up for dead, and made answer meekly, "Sir Knight, this youth that I am chastising is my servant, employed by me to watch a flock of sheep that I have hard by, and he is so careless that I lose one every day, and when I punish him for his carelessness and knavery he says I do it out of niggardliness, to escape paying him the wages I owe him, and before God, and on my soul, he lies." ”

“ By my faith, this comes, not of any want of ability, but of too much indolence and too little knowledge of life. Do you want to know if I am telling the truth? Well, then, attend to me, and you will see how, in the opening and shutting of an eye, I sweep away all your difficulties, and supply all those deficiencies which you say check and discourage you from bringing before the world the story of your famous Don Quixote, the light and mirror of all knight-errantry. ”

“ I am by no means sure that I have done rightly in dropping Shelton's barbarous title of "Curious Impertinent" by which the novel in the First Part has been so long known. It is not a translation, and it is not English, but it has so long passed current as the title of the story that its original absurdity has been, so to speak, effaced by time and use. "Ingenious" is, no doubt, not an exact translation of "Ingenioso;" but even if an exact one could be found, I doubt it any end would be served by substituting it. No one is likely to attach the idea of ingenuity to Don Quixote. ”

“ By this he felt himself so inspirited that he would not have flinched if all the carriers in the world had assailed him. The comrades of the wounded perceiving the plight they were in began from a distance to shower stones on Don Quixote, who screened himself as best he could with his buckler, not daring to quit the trough and leave his armor unprotected. The landlord shouted to them to leave him alone, for he had already told them that he was mad, and as a madman he would not be accountable even if he killed them all. ”

“ So then, his armor being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet, his hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul. ”

“ By the irony of fate all or almost all we know of the greatest poet the world has ever seen is contained in documents the most prosaic the art of man can produce, and he who of all the men that ever lived soared highest above this earth is seen to us only as a long-headed man of business, as shrewd and methodical in money matters as the veriest Philistine among us. Of Cervantes we certainly know more than we do of Shakespeare, but of what we know the greater part is derived from sources of the same sort, from formal documents of one kind or another. ”

“ I continued, "I am determined that Señor Don Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha until Heaven provide some one to garnish him with all those things he stands in need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without them. ”

“ All this of course is intelligible, but not so that a sound Spanish scholar and critic like the late Vicente Salva should have said, that if Cervantes' "Don Quixote" were not in existence Avellaneda's would be the best novel in the language; which (not to speak of the absurdity of putting it before "Lazarillo de Tormes," "Guzman de Alfarache," Quevedo's "Gran Tacaño," Isla's "Fray Gerundio de Campazas") is like saying that if there were no sun, the moon would be the brightest body in the heavens. ”

“ It is not very likely that readers of the first class are less numerous now than they used to be, but it is no extravagant optimism to assume that there are many more of the other way of thinking than there were a century and a half ago.
But after all there is no real antagonism between the two classes; there is no reason why what pleases the one should not please the other, or why a translator who makes it his aim to treat "Don Quixote" with the respect due to a great classic, should not be as acceptable even to the careless reader as the one who treats it as a famous old jest-book. ”

“ Whoever he may have been, it is clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's school, for he had the impudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his criticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best critics and baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear on it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an invisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a mosquito in the dark. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The curate was tired and would not look into any more books, and so he decided that, "contents uncertified," all the rest should be burned; but just then the barber held open one, called "The Tears of Angelica."
"I should have shed tears myself," said the curate when he heard the title, "had I ordered that book to be burned, for its author was one of the famous poets of the world, not to say of Spain, and was very happy in the translation of some of Ovid's fables." ”

“ But for them, there can be no doubt, "Don Quixote" would have come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even if Cervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he would have left off with a promise of a Third Park, giving the further adventures of Don Quixote and humors of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It is plain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the pastoral romances as he had dealt with the books of chivalry, and but for Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. ”

“ For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no better spot in Spain than Alcalá de Henares in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town, something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcalá the traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. ”

“ Meanwhile one of the carriers who were in the inn thought fit to water his team, and it was necessary to remove Don Quixote's armor as it lay on the trough; but he seeing the other approach hailed him in a loud voice, "O thou, whoever thou art, rash knight that comest to lay hands on the armor of the most valorous errant that ever girt on sword, have a care what thou dost; touch it not unless thou wouldst lay down thy life as the penalty of thy rashness." ”

“ The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one place about families that have once been great and have tapered away until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. ”

“ With regard to fidelity to the letter, there is of course no hard and fast rule to be observed; a translator is bound to be literal as long as he can, but persistence in absolute literality, when it fails to convey the author's idea in the shape the author intended, is as great an offence against fidelity as the loosest paraphrase. As to fidelity to the spirit, perhaps the only rule is for the translator to sink his own individuality altogether, and content himself with reflecting his author truthfully. ”

“ But whether the remains of Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clew to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against his memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits, and left him to live in misery and die of want. ”

“ Take it home with you and read it, and you will see that what I have said is true." [19]
"As you will," said the barber; "but what are we to do with these little books that are left?"
"These must be, not chivalry, but poetry," said the curate; and opening one he saw it was the "Diana" of Jorge de Montemayor, and, supposing all the others to be of the same sort, "these," he said, "do not deserve to be burned like the others, for they neither do nor can do the mischief the books of chivalry have done, being books of entertainment that can hurt no one." ”

“ It is not easy to resist the temptation to linger over the story of Cervantes' captivity in Algiers, for in truth a more wonderful story has seldom been told. Alexandre Dumas could hardly have invented so marvellous a series of adventures, and certainly would have hesitated before he asked even romance readers to accept anything so improbable. Nevertheless, incredible as the tale may seem, there is evidence for every particular that scepticism itself will not venture to call in question. ”

“ Viardot, for example, has produced a "Don Quixote" that is delightfully smooth, easy reading; but the Castilian character has been smoothed away. He has forced Cervantes into a French mould, instead of moulding his French to the features of Cervantes. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to expect a Frenchman to efface himself and consent to play second fiddle under any circumstances; but to look for a translation true to the spirit from a translator who holds himself free to improve his author is, as a Spaniard would say, "to ask pears from the elm tree." ”

“ To bed with your worship at once, and we will contrive to cure you here without fetching that Hurgada. A curse I say once more, and a hundred times more, on those books of chivalry that have brought your worship to such a pass."
They carried him to bed at once, and after searching for his wounds could find none, but he said they were all bruises from having had a severe fall with his horse Rocinante when in combat with ten giants, the biggest and the boldest to be found on earth.
"So, so!" said the curate, "are there giants in the dance? ”

“ So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could; and all the while he rode so slowly and the sun mounted so rapidly and with such fervor that it was enough to melt his brains if he had any. Nearly all day he travelled without anything remarkable happening to him, at which he was in despair, for he was anxious to encounter some one at once upon whom to try the might of his strong arm. ”

“ To those who are familiar with the original, it savors 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 humor of the book owes its flavor is peculiar to Spanish, and can at best be only distantly imitated in any other tongue. ”