What’s the best translation of Don Quixote?

For a long time all I knew was what everyone knows by cultural osmosis: we are ridiculous when we tilt at windmills.

Published in 1620, Don Quixote is a foundational book in the history of Western literature. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has been translated more than a dozen times. Different translators had differing amounts of financial and literary success; some translations have aged well and others have been forgotten—or misremembered: the “Jarvis” translation was actually done by a man named Jervas whose name was printed incorrectly.

The translation by Smollett has a particularly interesting history: it did well in its time, but later Smollet was accused of plagiarism (of the Jervas/Jarvis translation), and/or using a team to do the work because he didn’t know Spanish. Someone wrote a book called Smollet’s Hoax, with data supporting the idea that his translation was not his own. A recent scholarly reprint exonerates him and upholds the unique and positive qualities of the work.

Apart from Jervas/Jarvis and Smollett, there have been translations by Thomas Shelton, John Phillips, Pierre Antoine Motteux, Alexander James Duffield, John Ormsby, Henry Edward Watts, Robinson Smith, Samuel Putnam, JM Cohen, Walter Starkie, Burton Raffel, John Rutherford, Edith Grossman, Tom Lathrop, and James H. Montgomery.

The Grossman translation is the trendy one; if you don’t want one that sounds modern, you’d be in good company picking the public domain Ormsby text.

For a heck of a lot more detail on all the translations—cover images, extracts for comparison, ISBNs, pagecounts, and links to relevant articles—visit We Love Translations: World Literature in English:

ยป What’s the best translation of Don Quixote?

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Don Quixote by Cervantes (translated by P.A. Motteux)

The language in this translation helped transport me to another time and place where I was entertained by all manner of well-meaning but misguided behavior. What made the silliness tolerable was that the narration doesn’t force the reader into the character’s perspective. I could sit back comfortably and laugh because the character is always over there, on a stage, so to speak. I like omniscient narrators; I don’t like unreliable narrators. Here’s what our omniscient narrator says about Don Quixote (page 14):
[H]e rode so softly, and the sun’s heat increased so fast, and was so violent, that it would have been sufficient to have melted his brains had he had any left.
The elevated language and long, flowing sentence, of which this is just the very tail end, left me unprepared for the apt insult lurking all the way at the end. When I read this joke, I knew I was going to enjoy the novel. I was utterly floored in the second half of the book to learn that the characters are aware that they have been written about. The idea of breaking the fourth wall is older than I would ever have guessed! The narrator goes to great lengths to insist that he is now narrating the ONE TRUE SEQUEL, never mind those bumbling copycats who had tried, between the publication of Part 1 and the publication of Part 2, to steal the author’s glory and book sales.

When and Why I Read Don Quixote

I was too tempted by the price! Bought it for 50% off SG$5.89. But according to the rules I've been trying to follow for a couple of years now, if I buy it, I can't just put it aside for another day. Last in, first out. Means I have to read it. So that's what I'm doing!

Genre: Classic Literature (Spain)
Date started / date finished: 05-Apr-20 to 18-May-20
Length: 768 pages
ISBN: 9781853260360
Originally published in: 1605/1615/1712/1993/2000/2008
Amazon link: Don Quixote