by Ilan Stavans
Needless to say, forty days seems like a record—even impossible—time frame for such an ambitious endeavor, considering that the original (the First Part only) has a length of roughly 180,000 words. There is debate over whether Shelton was indeed the translator of the First Part, since stylistically the translations of the two parts are different. Among those questioning the second effort are Alexander J. Duffield, who himself translated the novel in 1881. (His own rendition is largely forgotten.)
Since Shelton’s version uses Tudor English, it is seldom read now, although it remains in print. It was quite popular for at least 150 years, serving as the model against which to compete. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, an early-twentieth-century British scholar of Spanish literature, Cervantes biographer, and fellow of the British Academy, as well as a member of the Real Academia Española, prepared an edition of the Shelton version in 1890. He considered Shelton to be “Lord of the golden Elizabethan speech.” Fitzmaurice-Kelly stated, he “manifests himself an exquisite in the noble style, an expert in the familiar and with such effect as no man has matched in England.”
Successive translators have been less generous with Shelton. This is understandable: to pitch the making of a new translation, not only to a potential publisher but also to a readership interested in fresh new versions, many translators begin by discrediting previous translations. Since Shelton is the first in line, he receives the toughest blows. Take Charles Jervas, a popular Irish portrait painter (his portraits of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope hang in London’s National Portrait Gallery), whose translation of El Quijote was published posthumously in 1742, three years after his death. His translation misspelled his name on the title page as “Jarvis,” a typo that stuck forever. As it happens, the “Jarvis version” was the most popular in eighteenth-century England. In his preface, Jarvis accuses Shelton of translating not from the original but from the Italian rendition by Lorenzo Franciosini. Yet Franciosini’s translation was not published until 1622, two years after Shelton released his own version of the Second Part.
Undeterred, Jarvis makes the following case:
In the ninth chapter of the third book of the first part, Sancho’s ass is stolen by Gines de Passamonte, while Sancho is asleep; and presently after, the author mounts him again in a very remarkable manner, sideways like a woman, a la mugeriega. This story being but imperfectly told, Franciosini took it for a gross oversight: he therefore alters it, indeed a little unhappily; for, in defect of the ass, he is forced to put Sancho’s wallets and provender upon Rozinante, though the wallets were stopt before by the inn-keeper, in the third chapter of the third book. This blundering amendment of the translator is literally followed by Shelton.
Again, in pursuance of this, Franciosini alters another passage in the eleventh chapter of the same book. Sancho says to his master, who had enjoined him absolute silence: If beasts could speak as they did in the days of Guisopete (I suppose he means Aesop) my case would not be quite so bad; for then I might commune with my ass, and say what I pleased to him. Here the Italian makes him “Commune with Rozinante”; and Shelton follows him with this addition, “Since my niggardly fortune has deprived me of my ass.”
Further along, Jarvis wonders if Cervantes made the mistake in order to make readers (including translators) stumble foolishly:
But what if Cervantes made this seeming slip on purpose for a bait to tempt his minor criticks; in the same manner as, in another place, he makes the princess of Micomicon land at Ossuna, which is no sea-port? As by that he introduced a fine piece of satire on an eminent Spanish historian of his time, who had described it as such in his history; so by this he might only take occasion to reflect on a parallel incident in Ariosto, where Brunelo, at the siege of Albraca, steals the horse from between the legs of Sacripante king of Circassia. It is the very defense he makes for it, in the fourth chapter of the second part, where, by the way, both the Italian and old English translators have preserved the excuse, though by their altering the text they have taken away the occasion of it.
In truth, it was the Italian translator Franciosini who consulted Shelton. But this wouldn’t have deterred Jarvis from discrediting his predecessors.
Taking a somewhat different approach is John Ormsby, a professional British translator who worked in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his long introduction, he discusses at length various early translation efforts. He simultaneously praises and attacks Shelton. On the one hand, he writes, “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 vigor, but 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.”
On the other hand, Ormsby sees Shelton for what he is: the first. That is, he inaugurated a tradition. He writes that 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 last statement is remarkable. It grants us an opportunity to meditate on various approaches to a classic. For Shelton, El Quijote was a popular contemporary book. Yet for Ormsby, as well as for anyone sufficiently distanced from the original publications in 1605 and 1615, it is a historical artifact. A translator of a contemporary work moves from one linguistic present to another. Ormsby, on the other hand, needed to travel from the past (early-seventeenth-century Spanish) to his present (late-nineteenth-century English). He needed to make his own reader feel Cervantes’s time without re-creating Shakespeare’s language. All this invites these questions: Could someone today produce a historical translation into English of El Quijote? Would it read like Shelton’s version, which Ormsby calls “a racy old version,” one that “with all its defects, has a charm that no modern translation, however skillful or correct, could possess?”
SHELTON, IN ANY CASE, is not the only guinea pig. Another member of the gang, Peter Anthony Motteux, also called Pierre Antoine Motteux, famous for delivering El Quijote with a Cockney accent, is also a favorite target. His translation, released in four volumes starting in 1700, is probably the most frequently reprinted, often in revised form. This is bizarre, given how untrustworthy it is. Worse even, it does not appear to have been really his.
Again, biographical information on Motteux is scarce. A playwright, editor (he was in charge of The Gentleman’s Journal between 1692 and 1694), and translator, he completed Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Motteux was born in Normandy. That is, French was his first tongue. He arrived in England in 1685, at the age of twenty-two. Fifteen years later, he published The History of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Can a person only a decade and a half into a life in a new language convey the nuances of a foreign literary text in his adopted tongue?
Motteux seems to have consulted the Spanish editions. He also had at his side the English versions by Shelton and John Phillips, the latter a nephew of John Milton and another translator of scores of French books as well as El Quijote. In addition, Motteux used several versions of El Quijote in French and Italian. The use of these variants enabled him to contrast different approaches. Given all this information, the statement on the cover of Motteux’s rendition is mind-blowing: “translated from the original by several hands.” It provokes numerous questions: Did he hire others to do the job? How was his army of translators composed? Did they know each other? Did they collaborate? What kind of editing was done to homogenize the material? By whom? Or was he simply
giving credit to the many sources he had consulted? History doesn’t offer an answer to these questions.
Samuel Putnam, an American translator, called Phillip’s rendition “the worst ever made,” one that “cannot even be called a translation.” Ormsby agreed:
Anyone who compares it carefully with the original will have little doubt that it is a concoction from Shelton and the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked out by borrowings from Phillips, whose mode of treatment it adopts. It is, to be sure, more decent and decorous, but it treats “Don Quixote” in the same fashion as a comic book that cannot be made too comic.
What is unquestionable is that the work feels discombobulated. Using sly irony, it often makes fun of the knight-errant and his squire. It is condescending, not to say demeaning. His portraiture of women verges on the obscene. And the translation displays some Cockney jargon. This is the beginning of the First Part, chapter XVI, which takes place as the knight-errant, beaten up, arrives with his squire at the inn. Motteux’s women come to the fore:
The innkeeper, seeing Don Quixote lying quite athwart the ass, asked Sancho what ailed him. Sancho answered, it was nothing, only his master had got a fall from the top of a rock to the bottom, and he bruised his sides a little. The innkeeper had a wife very different from the common sort of hostesses, for she was a charitable nature, and very compassionate of her neighbor’s affliction: which made her immediately take care of Don Quixote, and call her daughter (a good handsome girl) to set her helping hand to his cure. One of the servants in the inn was an Asturian wrench, a broadfaced, flat-handed, saddle-nosed dowry, blind of one eye, and the other almost out. However, the activity of her body supplied all other defects. She was not above three feet high from her heels to her head; and her shoulders, which somewhat loaded her, as having too much flesh upon them, made her look downwards oftener than she could have wished. This charming original likewise assisted the mistress and the daughter; and, with the latter, helped to make the Knight’s bed, and a sorry one it was; the room where it stood was an old gambling cock-loft, which by manifold signs seemed to have been, in the days of yore, a repository of chopped straw.
Ormsby is right: to improve the humor of El Quijote by “an infusion of cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux’s operators did, is not merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of the uncritical way in which ‘Don Quixote’ is generally read that this worse than worthless translation—worthless as failing to represent, worse than worthless as misrepresenting—should have been favoured as it has been.”
Obviously, as the rowdy gang of English translators of Cervantes became more professionalized, their disapproval of previous renditions was exacerbated. The lack of rigor drove some of them nuts.
Despite its flaws, Motteux’s translation made El Quijote extraordinarily popular in eighteenth-century London. For instance, Samuel Johnson, ever a hero of mine, once stated, “Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and The Pilgrim’s Progress?” And Lord Byron was a devout admirer of El Quijote (as well as of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso [1516]), and either made reference or else borrowed from it profusely. For instance, Byron discussed Cervantes in Don Juan, Canto Thirteen, from the middle of stanza VIII to the end of stanza XI:
I should be very willing to redress
Men’s wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes,
Had not Cervantes, in that too true tale
Of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
Of all tales ’t is the saddest—and more sad,
Because it makes us smile: his hero’s right,
And still pursues the right;—to curb the bad
His only object, and ’gainst odds to fight
His guerdon: ’t is his virtue makes him mad!
But his adventures form a sorry sight;—
A sorrier still is the great moral taught
By that real Epic unto all who have thought
Redressing injury, revenging wrong,
To aid the damsel and destroy the caitiff;
Opposing singly the united strong,
From foreign yoke to free the helpless native:—
Alas! must noblest views, like an old song,
Be for mere Fancy’s sport a theme creative,
A jest, a riddle, Fame through thin and thick sought!
And Socrates himself but Wisdom’s Quixote?
Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away;
A single laugh demolished the right arm
Of his own country;—seldom since that day
Has Spain had heroes. While Romance could charm,
The World gave ground before her bright array;
And therefore have his volumes done such harm,
That all their glory, as a composition,
Was dearly purchased by his land’s perdition.
While Byron saw the book as the end of an era, others among his contemporaries saw in it the beginning of a new one, full of possibility. By mid-century, Charlotte Lennox fashioned a woman’s adaptation called The Female Quixote: or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752), which to some is a defining text in the history of the British novel. The heroine is an insatiable reader of French romance novels who loses the sense of the world by believing her life must be defined by adventure, at one point even throwing herself into the Thames in order to escape some horsemen she is sure are haunting her. She speaks of fiction as “more true” than reality. Ultimately, she gives up her quixotic dreams when she agrees to marry her cousin.
In what is perhaps the highest tribute, Laurence Sterne, known as the father of experimental fiction, modeled the character of Uncle Toby in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) after Cervantes’s knight-errant. As a whole, Sterne’s novel is an embrace of the aesthetic affinities of El Quijote: a humorous, self-referential narrative that is concerned with poetry and philosophical questions about life in general (John Locke and the Metaphysical poets are constantly being invoked), all while the reader is being reminded, time and again, that fiction is a conceit, an artifice—not an escape from reality but an anchor in it.
The connection between Cervantes and Sterne, who read El Quijote in Motteux’s rendition, has been eloquently explored by Milan Kundera. In his essay “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes” (part of The Art of the Novel [1986]), he writes that Sterne is playful, just like Cervantes, in that he poses lasting philosophical questions while recognizing that philosophy no longer has the answer and that literature—the novel as a literary genre, in particular—is an artifact where ambiguity and the lack of certainty are offered as more suitable answers to the sensibility of modern readers. That, in his view, is how Sterne assimilates Cervantes’s legacy—that is, he recognizes that the world doesn’t have “a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters).” With the popularity of Motteux’s version, and as a result of the desire of other translators to improve on his discombobulated narrative, El Quijote was rendered into English a total of four times in the same century. The most controversial of these translations was by Tobias Smollett, the celebrated Scottish author of such novels as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748). Though Carlos Fuentes naively called the Smollett version “the homage of a novelist to a novelist,” it has been marred by accusations of impostorship since its release in 1755.
In the translator’s note written in the third person, Smollett claims his aim was to maintain that “ludicrous solemnity and self-importance by which the inimitable Cervantes has distinguished the character of Don Quixote, without raising him to the insipid rank of a dry philosopher, or debasing him to the melancholy circumstances and unentertaining caprice of an ordinary madman; and to preserve the native humor of Sancho, from degenerating into mere proverbial phlegm, or affected buffoonery.” Smollett adds that the translation
“endeavored to retain the spirit and ideas, without servilely adhering to the literal expression, of the original; from which, however, he has not so far deviated, as to destroy the formality of idiom, so peculiar to the Spaniards, and so essential to the character of the work.”
That last remark might have been an act of defense avant la lettre. In an evasive, unsigned review (by Ralph Griffiths) of Smollett’s translation that appeared in The Monthly Review in Seplember 1755, the reviewer quietly yet insistently compaers the Jarvis and Smollett translations. That he offers no strong opinion on this matter is bizarre since the primary accusation targeted at Smollett is that he copied Jarvis’s work without attribution. Perhaps the reviewer was Smollett’s friend, or at the very least his acquaintance. There could have been some sense of debt involved. In any case, successive critics have gone further.
The scholar Carmine Rocco Linsalata of Stanford University devoted an entire 1956 study to what he calls “the hoax.” In his view, Smollett’s translation “is a gem in the realm of fraudulent acts.” Analyzing parallel passages from Cervantes, Jarvis, and Smollett, he finds them strikingly similar, if not identical. Second, he compares Smollett to several other previous translators: Shelton, Phillips, Motteux, and Stevens. And, crucially, he spots numerous mistranslations of numbers by Smollett that, damningly, were also mistranslated previously, such as, in the First Part, chapter X, cuatro o cinco becoming “three or four,” and in chapter VIII, los primeros días emerging as “the first two days”; and in the Second Part, chapter II, docientas resulting in “a thousand,” and in XX, dos becoming “a dozen.” He uncovers the fact that other arbitrary translations and errors committed by Jarvis were repeated by Smollett, and that Smollett copied Jarvis’s footnotes.