It was with considerable reluctance that I abandoned
in favour of the present undertaking what had long
been a favourite project: that of a new edition
of Shelton’s “Don Quixote,” which
has now become a somewhat scarce book. 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. Shakespeare himself
most likely knew the book; he may have carried it
home with him in his saddle-bags to Stratford on one
of his last journeys, and under the mulberry tree
at New Place joined hands with a kindred genius in
its pages.
But it was soon made plain to me that to hope for
even a moderate popularity for Shelton was vain.
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 vigour,
but also 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.
It is often said that we have no satisfactory translation
of “Don Quixote.” To those who are
familiar with the original, it savours 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 humour of the book owes its
flavour is peculiar to Spanish, and can at best be
only distantly imitated in any other tongue.
The history of our English translations of “Don
Quixote” is instructive. Shelton’s,
the first in any language, was made, apparently, about
1608, but not published till 1612. This of course
was only the First Part. It has been asserted
that the Second, published in 1620, is not the work
of Shelton, but there is nothing to support the assertion
save the fact that it has less spirit, less of what
we generally understand by “go,” about
it than the first, which would be only natural if the
first were the work of a young man writing currente
calamo, and the second that of a middle-aged man writing
for a bookseller. On the other hand, it is closer
and more literal, the style is the same, the very same
translations, or mistranslations, occur in it, and
it is extremely unlikely that a new translator would,
by suppressing his name, have allowed Shelton to carry
off the credit.
