by Ilan Stavans
The show started as a CBS telecast play, not a musical, written by Wasserman, with Lee J. Cobb, Colleen Dewhurst, and Eli Wallach. It was broadcast on November 9, 1959, to an estimated audience of twenty million viewers, as part of a series sponsored by the DuPont chemical company. DuPont, however, didn’t like the name Man of La Mancha because it thought Americans wouldn’t know what La Mancha was, so the title was changed to I, Don Quixote. The script was then unsuccessfully optioned for a Broadway play. Producer Albert Marre (née Albert Eliot Moshinsky) finally suggested Wasserman turn it into a musical.
Poster for the 2002 documentary by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, on the filmic quest by Terry Gilliam to adapt Don Quixote.
The team originally commissioned poet W. H. Auden, a veteran of opera lyrics (among others, he wrote the libretto of Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan [1941]), to write the lyrics with his longtime friend and sometime lover Chester Kallman. But Auden and Wasserman didn’t see eye to eye. Wasserman wanted an idealistic Don Quixote, whereas Auden, in Wasserman’s account in The Impossible Musical: The “Man of La Mancha” Story (2003), believed the knight-errant “must repudiate his quest and warn others against like folly.” A version of Auden’s lyrics survives, such as this decidedly brazen portion about Dulcinea:
Look! Those noble knights of old
Were, when the whole truth is told,
All crooks.
Look at Dulcinea! Mutt!
She’s the common kitchen slut
She looks.
Rex Harrison was supposed to play the knight-errant, who is also Cervantes in the production. But he was busy, and the role went to Richard Kiley, who won a Tony Award in 1966 for his performance and was the first to sing “The Impossible Dream.” Every decade or so there is another Broadway revival. The movie adaptation of the musical, with Peter O’Toole, Sophia Loren, and Ian Richardson, and directed by Canadian filmmaker Arthur Hiller, was released in 1972.
The majority of people exposed to Man of La Mancha actually come to the novel through the film. And the song “The Impossible Dream” sticks like chewing gum. There is something innately American in this mantra: the self is at the core of all adventures, and each of us needs to protect our own self, make it flourish. Adversity prevails in the world. Still, to fight for one’s own dreams is to know their true worth.
Scores of musicians—from Elvis to Liberace, from Tom Jones and Julio Iglesias to Donna Summer—have performed “The Impossible Dream.” The most popular version is sung by Frank Sinatra, who, with a debonair delivery, makes you feel you should never renounce your own goals.
Poster for the 1965 musical, which, along with its Hollywood adaptation with Peter O’Toole, is arguably the entry door for many to Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
There is also someone who is famous for not singing the song—John Cleese. The Monty Python comedian was supposed to sing it in 1977 on The Muppet Show. Kermit the Frog introduces Cleese with fanfare, telling the audience that the actor will be singing “The Impossible Dream.” Cleese misses his cue, however, and says to Kermit, “I don’t do old show tunes.” Kermit tries again, and the next time the curtain goes up, Cleese is dressed as a warrior and standing beside a human-sized monster puppet. Cleese protests again, and the final time the curtain rises, Cleese is dressed as a maraca musician. Still, no song comes out. As he prepares to leave the stage, scores of Muppets surround him, repeating everything he says in song until they finally belt out some lines to “The Impossible Dream.”
In the infinite sequence of El Quijote’s reverberations through time, Cleese’s reluctance to perform the Broadway song might be a litmus test. One of the world’s most popular novels, itself an artifact of popular culture in Renaissance Spain, which, through the centuries, had become the property of a highbrow, sophisticated elite, had now returned to its roots. And, fittingly, in that very return it was, once again, the subject of ridicule.
THE UNITED STATES IN the twenty-first century is as quixotic as ever. For one thing, exceptionalism is ingrained in the nation’s spirit, both at home and in foreign policy. In spite of the gridlock in Washington, the country’s sense of its own uniqueness remains unchanged. Meanwhile, the Latino population of almost 60 million (out of a total of 320 million Americans) is already the largest minority and in some places a majority. Even though El Quijote was written in Spain, about which Hispanics have ambivalent feelings, they see it as their—our—own masterpiece, the one classic that has unquestionably shaped our culture.
Latinos were in the United States even before the nation became a nation in 1776, and they have been propagating a rich, diverse literary tradition that extends from Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, about the 1527 shipwreck he was involved in and his subsequent trek through Florida and other parts of the future country, to contemporary works by authors such as Oscar Hijuelos, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Junot Díaz. It should go without saying that Cervantes’s masterpiece is often a source of inspiration, as it surely was for María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, considered the first Hispanic author in the United States to write a novel in English. Her novel The Squatter and the Don (1885) is about land-ownership disputes in California after the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty of 1848. Less than a decade before her novel appeared, she adapted El Quijote for the stage. Her version is called Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts, Taken from Cervantes’ Novel of That Name. It was published and performed in San Francisco in 1876. Although it follows El Quijote quite closely, Ruiz de Burton stressed the comedic in her adaptation and, more importantly, introduced a strong political message, portraying the knight-errant and his squire as fighters against larger corporate abuse, a topic that appears in her fiction as well.
First page of a cartoon adaptation of Don Quixote into Spanglish, by David Enriquez and Ilan Stavans.
Another crucial Chicano work influenced by El Quijote is Daniel Venegas’s episodic novel The Adventures of Don Chipote; or, A Sucker’s Tale (1928), which explores the life of poor immigrants in the United States after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. But the impact has also been strong among other Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans. Jesús Colón makes various references to Cervantes in his collection of vignettes, A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches (1961), about the arrival of Puerto Rican jíbaros, rural workers from the island, in New York City. A union organizer who was called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C., during the McCarthy era, Colón was a precursor to the Nuyorican Movement, an artistic explosion of activists, poets, novelists, and musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. His variety of Quijotismo looks at Puerto Ricans as a people marked by a powerful culture that is defined by idealism, whose desire to assimilate into the United States often pushes them to choose between materialism and remaining loyal to their dreams.
This is right: Cervantes’s novel is the banner, the pledge of allegiance, the constitution of Hispanic civilization, including the portion—the nation within the nation—living north of the Rio Grande.
10
FLEMISH TAPESTRIES
Rendered into some fifty languages (there are approximately five thousand languages in the world today), El Quijote is one of the most translated novels in history. Its length probably hinders it from translation to some extent, or it would surely surpass classics such as Alice in Wonderland (ninety-seven languages), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (sixty-five), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (fifty), and popular fiction like Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga (both sixty-seven). (Unsurprisingly, in terms of the number of translations into which a book has been rendered, the Bible is the undisputed winner.)
Spanish, of course, was Cervantes’s mother tongue. But, as previously mentioned, he lived temporarily in Naples, Italy, where he was stationed in the Infantería de Marina. And, on his way back to Spain, he was captured with his brother in the Mediterranean Sea and held captive in Algiers. He might at least have been acquainted wit
h Italian and Arabic and was maybe even fluent in those languages. As a member of the intellectual elite of his time, he also knew some basic Latin. Unquestionably, Cervantes’s existential sojourns and his lifelong learning sensitized him to the nuances of language.
This, and the folklore around Cide Hamete Benengeli’s lost palimpsest (a theme I explored in chapter 4, “A Modern Novel”), explains why El Quijote is built as a celebration not only of the act of reading but also of translation. The novel mentions authors like Cicero, Horace, and Torquato Tasso, as well as the works of Aristotle and La Chanson de Roland (circa 1040). And, of course, Don Quixote’s entire journey is based on his compulsive reading of chivalry novels by Amadis of Gaul and Tirant lo Blanc, among others, all of which were translated into Spanish from French, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan, not to mention Latin.
In addition to the commentary surrounding the translator of Benengeli’s work, translation becomes a topic of discussion in the novel’s Second Part, chapter LXII, as Don Quixote and Sancho reach Barcelona. Their wanderings finally take them to the print shop, the equivalent of a modern bookstore where authors and translators gather, as well as a place equipped with machines to print books. The two end up speaking there with a translator (from the Italian into the Spanish):
“I would venture to swear,” said Don Quixote, “that your worship is not known in the world, which always begrudges their reward to rare wits and praiseworthy labours. What talents lie wasted there! What genius thrust away into corners! What worth left neglected! Still it seems to me that translation from one language into another, if it be not from the queens of languages, the Greek and the Latin, is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side; and translation from easy languages argues neither ingenuity nor command of words, any more than transcribing or copying out one document from another. But I do not mean by this to draw the inference that no credit is to be allowed for the work of translating, for a man may employ himself in ways worse and less profitable to himself. This estimate does not include two famous translators, Doctor Cristobal de Figueroa, in his Pastor Fido, and Don Juan de Jauregui, in his Aminta, wherein by their felicity they leave it in doubt which is the translation and which the original. But tell me, are you printing this book at your own risk, or have you sold the copyright to some bookseller?”
“Like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side.” In Don Quixote’s view, translation diminishes rather than expounds meaning; instead of bringing light and clarity to a text, it darkens, it obfuscates. This is a rather pessimistic view for a book like El Quijote, which purports to be a translation—and a rather impromptu one, made by a morisco aljamiado—from the Arabic and which, ironically, has been accessed by the vast majority of its own readers in a language other than its original Spanish. Could it be that countless readers have only appreciated it from the wrong side?
THE TRANSLATORS OF El Quijote have been a rather motley gang. Officially, English isn’t the first language into which Cervantes’s novel was translated. César Oudin rendered the novella The Ill-Conceived Curiosity, featured in the First Part of El Quijote, into French in 1608, three years after it appeared in the original. Six years later, Oudin himself would translate the entire First Part. He followed it with a translation of the Second Part—thus completing a translation of the entire novel—in 1618.
France is notorious for having produced one of the most fraudulent of all translations, a truncated rendition by François Filleau de Saint-Martin. It was published in four volumes in 1677 under the title Histoire de l’admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche. Filleau de Saint-Martin deliberately sent the book to the printer without the last chapter because—mirabile dictum—he himself dreamed of writing a third part, composed of completely new adventures of the knight-errant and his squire, and maybe even a fourth.
Title page of the 1678 French translation by Francois Filleau de Saint-Martin, which added an apocryphal final chapter.
Indeed, once his work as a translator was finished, Filleau de Saint-Martin wrote—in French—a version in which Don Quixote regains his use of reason and anoints his squire Sancho Panza a knight. Then, the couple sets out to continue their quest to mend the world. The sequence of events becomes muddy, not only in terms of the action but also because of the choice of narrative voice. One of their rendezvous is retold by a French dame and includes among its protagonists two more women, Silvia and Sainville.
Italians have a saying, tradutore, tradittore, meaning all translators are traitors. Rather than perceiving his task as simply bringing a text from the original to the target language, the French translator understood it more creatively, to the point of competing with Cervantes, or at least completing what in his view Cervantes had left unfinished. In any case, ironically, the French translator died before coming to the end of the sequel, which was then finished by Robert Challe, his pupil and a renowned literary figure at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. At the end of the story, Don Quixote dies after drinking water from a well he believed to be the Fountain of Forgetting.
At any rate, there are more translations of El Quijote into English than into any other language. In fact, other than the Bible, no book has been translated into Shakespeare’s tongue as often. Here is the list of English translators, with the date of publication of their work in parenthesis:
Thomas Shelton (1612)
John Phillips (1687)
Peter Anthony Motteux (1700–1703)
John Stevens (1700)
Charles Jervas (1742)
Tobias Smollett (1755)
George Kelley (1769)
T. T. Shore (1864)
Alexander J. Duffield (1881)
John Ormsby (1885)
Henry Edward Watts (1888)
Robinson Smith (1910)
Samuel Putnam (1949)
J. M. Cohen (1950)
Walter Starkie (1954)
Burton Raffel (1995)
John Rutherford (2000)
Edith Grossman (2003)
Tom Lathrop (2005)
James H. Montgomery (2009)
In the face of such plentitude, the question arises: what language is richer in quixotic endeavors, Spanish or English? Spanish obviously owns the one and only sacred text. And its very sacredness deems it inalterable. For Cervantistas, changing even a dot or a conjugation in El Quijote is anathema. Attempts at modernizing it are often met with controversy. In English, on the other hand, the permutations are infinite. Each translator gives free range to his or her talent, creating a narrative that is also defined by the way the language is used in that particular historical moment.
I once set myself the task, during one full year, of reading all English translations available to that point. It was a fascinating (if also exhausting) undertaking. In doing so, one witnesses the changes of the English language through time, from its Elizabethan variety in the early seventeenth century to the one we use today, four hundred years later. The linguistic transformation becomes obvious against this historical procession: spelling and conjugations have changed; verb choices are different; and while articles and pronouns appear to be the most stable, they too have undergone a change in function.
Four of the English translators are American; the rest are British. One was a mailman; another was a painter. Several were professors. A number of them, including J. M. Cohen and Burton Raffel, were specialists in European languages, rendering into English works by Horace, Columbus, Montaigne, Teresa de Ávila, Rabelais, and Pasternak, as well as the Nibelungenlied. Walter Starkie, an Irish Hispanist who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, knew Romany, the language of the gypsies, and was an authority on them. He was a worldwide traveler (Time magazine, in a profile, described him as a modern-day gypsy). His godfather was John Pentland Mahaffy, Oscar Wilde’s tutor.
More than one
rendition reads as a hodgepodge of earlier translations into English, although only one translator gets the credit. And, in what seems like a hoax worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster movie, it is often repeated that one of the translators didn’t speak a single word of Spanish. But I should start at the beginning. About Thomas Shelton, the first on the list—the trendsetter—little is known. It appears that he was a personal letter carrier in London. He also served as a mailman in Dublin for the improbably named Sir William FitzWilliam, an English official in Ireland in the late sixteenth century. Later on, he was employed by Thomas Howard, who was the Earl of Walden, later Earl of Suffolk. Nothing remains of his work as a translator except his rendition of El Quijote, entitled The Historie of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don-Quixote of the Mancha. Shelton completed the translation of the First Part in 1607 but didn’t publish it—perhaps because he struggled to find a printer to bring it out—until 1612. He didn’t use the Spanish original, published by Juan de la Cuesta, as his source. Instead, Shelton had in front of him the pirated edition of the Spanish one made in Brussels in 1607. For the Second Part, he did use the legitimate Madrid edition. His translation appeared in 1620.
In the dedication to the First Part—to his patron, the Earl of Suffolk—he states that he “translated some five or six yeares agoe, The Historie of Don-Quixote, out of the Spanish tongue, into the English . . . in the space of forty daies: being therunto more than half enforced, through the importunitie of a very deere friend, that was desirous to understand the subject.” It is known that Shelton approached the king of Spain on his patron’s behalf and that the patron’s wife, Catherine, Lady Suffolk, received an annual payment of one thousand pounds a year from the Spanish royals, although it is unclear why. Suspicions abound that Shelton and Lady Suffolk were involved in espionage. There is speculation as well that on his trips to Madrid, Shelton met Cervantes, but none of these hypotheses have been proved true.