W.H. AUDEN, who had not done so himself, denied that anyone had ever read Don Quixote through. I have to boast that I have read it five times – in Shelton’s, Motteux’s, J. M. Cohen’s and now Smollett’s translations. The fifth (properly third) reading was in the original Castilian, a language I started to learn when stationed in Gibraltar.

There is no substitute for reading a great classic in anything but the original, but Don Quixote is one of the two works that seem, though foreign, to be part of our own literary heritage. The other is Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is probably better (meaning more Rabelaisian) in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s version than in the original that the French no longer read, finding its archaic quality difficult. There is the matter also of the modern Gallic mind taking less kindly to Rabelais – unless diluted in the Asterix cartoons – than to Descartes. Rabelais is ours. Don Quixote is very nearly ours.

Thomas Shelton’s translation came out as early as 1616, the year of Cervantes’s (and Shakespeare’s) death. The work was thus known as early as it well could be in England. I have a private fantasy that Shakespeare knew it, or at least of it, by being among the King’s Men when the British peace delegation went to Valladolid in the spring of 1605. Cervantes was there, and also, as in a Macy’s Thanksgiving procession, the Don himself and Sancho prancing in the bullring. Shakespeare could have been there, acting in a tarted-up production of The Spanish Tragedy. The two might have met, conversing in the Arabic Cervantes learned as a slave and Shakespeare as companion to the Earl of Southampton on a trip to Tangier. It is a pleasant idea, and I offer it free to anyone who wishes to fictionalise about it.

Shelton uses the language Shakespeare himself knew, and his translation is vigorous, though not always accurate. Motteux’s version is eighteenth century and belongs to the age when the Cervantes influence was strong in the post-Richardsonian novel: it should be good but it is not. It is a little bland, though mostly accurate. The Cohen translation is scholarly but lacks panache, though it is better than Motteux.

It seems to me that the best we have is by Smollett, a Cervantesque novelist himself and possessed of a large dour vigour. We do not usually associate him with Hispanic scholarship, but the fact that he dedicated the work to Don Ricardo Wall, ‘Principal Secretary of State to His Most Catholic Majesty, Lieutenant General of the Armies of Spain, Commendary of Penauzende in the Order of St Jago, &c&c,’ implies linguistic confidence, though we may wonder how native was the Castilian of a man called Wall.

‘En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, vivia un hidalgo…’ So, as I remember, the story begins. Smollett starts:

In a certain corner of la Mancha the name of which I do not choose to remember, there lately lived one of those country gentlemen, who adorn their halls with a rusty lance and worm-eaten target, and ride forth on the skeleton of a horse, to course with a sort of starved greyhound.

That, I think, will do very well. Smollett gives us footnotes. ‘Salpicon… is no other than cold beef sliced, and eaten with oil, vinegar and pepper.’ Duelos y quebrantos, which has always given translators trouble, he knows to be literally gripes and grumblings (rendered by Motteux as ‘griefs and groans’) but Smollett – with that concern with his own and other people’s stomachs which characterise his travel book and was justified by his profession of ship’s surgeon – knows it means more. It means a dish of cucumbers, greens and pease-porridge. ‘Such eatables… generate and expel wind’ and so ‘pains and breakings’ is a fitter translation, though only in the context of a footnote. In the text, ‘gripes and grumblings’ sounds better.

The professional novelist in Smollett is quick to spot errors and inconsistencies in his master. Signor Quixada’s housekeeper complains that the hidalgo has been absent six days on his first quest, but Smollett rightly corrects her: ‘The author seems to have committed a small oversight in this paragraph; for the knight had not been gone above two days and one night, which he spent in watching his armour.’ When he translates over-freely, he is scrupulous in pointing this out. Sancho says: ‘The best and wholesomest thing we can do, will be to jog back again to our own habitation, now while the harvest is going on, to take care of our crops, and leave off sauntering from post to pillar, and falling out of the frying-pan into the fire, as the saying is.’ What Sancho really says is ‘sauntering from Ceca to Mecca.’ The Moors, as Smollett obligingly tells us, used to make pilgrimages to both places; Ceca was a Muslim shrine in Cordova.

Smollett is remarkably scholarly and conscientious; it is the Scot in him. He is better informed on knight errantry than Don Quixote himself. There is little poetry in the learned Smelfungus, as Sterne unkindly called him, but when he translates Cervantes’s verse it is into good Augustan homespun, no worse than Dr Johnson’s.

I have always cried at the death of Don Quixote, in whatever translation and even with the cello glissando (the best translation of them all perhaps) with which Richard Strauss ends his symphonic poem. Smollett is tough and little inclined to sentimentality (he was an anti-Richardsonian) but he manages pathos as well as action. He is not as funny as Shelton, but he finds room for Scots irony. The narrative reads wonderfully. You will, in reading this book, be as close to Cervantes as you can get without Spanish.

Carlos Fuentes tells us what a great novelist Cervantes is, which we knew already. Smollett hardly requires his sponsorship. The original copperplates by Hayman, ‘engraved by the best ARTISTS’, are all here. The translation has been out of print for a hundred years. Look on your shelves to see if you have a ‘Don Quixote.’ If not, go out and buy Smollett’s.

It is a good thing to start another bad year with a reminder that the world is always bad, and that it was the job of knights errants to render it a little less bad. The term Quixote was once pejorative, but now any generous act seems quixotic. The mad comic knight has become a patron saint of sanity.

 

Observer, 19 January 1986
Review of The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha by
Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett
(London: André Deutsch, 1986)