Don Quixote - Part I - Page 3/400

In 1687 John Phillips, Milton's nephew, produced a "Don Quixote" "made

English," he says, "according to the humour of our modern language." His

"Quixote" is not so much a translation as a travesty, and a travesty that

for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in

the literature of that day.

Ned Ward's "Life and Notable Adventures of Don Quixote, merrily

translated into Hudibrastic Verse" (1700), can scarcely be reckoned a

translation, but it serves to show the light in which "Don Quixote" was

regarded at the time.

A further illustration may be found in the version published in 1712 by

Peter Motteux, who had then recently combined tea-dealing with

literature. It is described as "translated from the original by several

hands," but if so all Spanish flavour has entirely evaporated under the

manipulation of the several hands. The flavour that it has, on the other

hand, is distinctly Franco-cockney. 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.

To attempt to improve the humour of "Don Quixote" 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.

It had the effect, however, of bringing out a translation undertaken and

executed in a very different spirit, that of Charles Jervas, the portrait

painter, and friend of Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. Jervas has been

allowed little credit for his work, indeed it may be said none, for it is

known to the world in general as Jarvis's. It was not published until

after his death, and the printers gave the name according to the current

pronunciation of the day. It has been the most freely used and the most

freely abused of all the translations. It has seen far more editions than

any other, it is admitted on all hands to be by far the most faithful,

and yet nobody seems to have a good word to say for it or for its author.

Jervas no doubt prejudiced readers against himself in his preface, where

among many true words about Shelton, Stevens, and Motteux, he rashly and

unjustly charges Shelton with having translated not from the Spanish, but

from the Italian version of Franciosini, which did not appear until ten

years after Shelton's first volume. A suspicion of incompetence, too,

seems to have attached to him because he was by profession a painter and

a mediocre one (though he has given us the best portrait we have of

Swift), and this may have been strengthened by Pope's remark that he

"translated 'Don Quixote' without understanding Spanish." He has been

also charged with borrowing from Shelton, whom he disparaged. It is true

that in a few difficult or obscure passages he has followed Shelton, and

gone astray with him; but for one case of this sort, there are fifty

where he is right and Shelton wrong. As for Pope's dictum, anyone who

examines Jervas's version carefully, side by side with the original, will

see that he was a sound Spanish scholar, incomparably a better one than

Shelton, except perhaps in mere colloquial Spanish. He was, in fact, an

honest, faithful, and painstaking translator, and he has left a version

which, whatever its shortcomings may be, is singularly free from errors

and mistranslations.