Given that the latest Killings Culture Club podcast is on Don Quixote, I thought it would be timely to comment on its latest translations into English: John Rutherford’s 2001 Penguin Classics edition, and Edith Grossman’s 2003 HarperCollins/Vintage edition. The best way to do this is by looking at the details, at the choices the translators made in their use of language, so, here goes.

Rutherford’s use of contractions gives a more conversational tone; Grossman’s avoidance of them gives her version a higher register, but at times means the rhythm of her sentences labour under a certain stiffness (compare Rutherford’s ‘But this doesn’t matter much, as far as our story’s concerned’ to Grossman’s ‘But this does not matter very much to our story’). The different registers are also visible in the translators’ word choices: Rutherford often opts for Anglo-Saxon phrasal verbs, Grossman for the Latinate equivalents: compare ‘ate up three-quarters of his income’ to ‘consumed three-fourths of his income’.

Rutherford tends to privilege the effect on the reader; Grossman, the source text: ‘mozo de campo y plaza‘ is translated by Grossman as ‘man-of-all-work’ and by Rutherford as ‘jack of all trades’. Literally, Grossman is closer to the meaning (someone who does all the work, as opposed to someone capable of doing all the work), but Rutherford presents a cleaner-sounding English.

And now, what is for me the clincher: Rutherford privileges the work’s humour, which isn’t just an instance of him looking towards the translation’s readers; at the same time he is conveying Cervantes’ ironic intentions. For example, ‘Tenía en su casa una ama que pasaba de los cuarenta, y una sobrina que no llegaba a los veinte’ is rendered ‘He maintained a housekeeper the wrong side of forty, a niece the right side of twenty’. ‘The wrong/right side of’ isn’t present in the original but Rutherford uses it to emphasise the comic tone of the text, which is partly achieved through the rhythm of ‘pasaba‘ (passed) and ‘llegaba’ (arrived at), direct translations of which lose the rhyme and thus the drawing of the attention towards the comparison, i.e. Grossman’s ‘He had a housekeeper past forty, a niece not yet twenty’. Repeating ‘side’ remedies this.

Rutherford often seizes upon chances to introduce strong rhythms to his sentences, which also aid in conveying the source text’s sense of irony. Cervantes writes, ‘Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero’, which Grossman translates as ‘An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb’. Interestingly, the introduction of the phrase ‘more often’ suggests that the meats are not stewed together, which is perhaps an act of cultural adaptation, given that in the Anglo context, combining meats in a stew isn’t a common practice. Yet the overall meaning is the same and no details are added. Rutherford, on the other hand, adds the words ‘shin’ and ‘leg’ in order to create a strong, almost sing-song rhythm of alternating hard and soft stresses in the final part of his sentence: ‘A midday stew with rather more shin of beef than leg of lamb’. Sing-songy, isn’t it? See how he adds a jolly, tongue-in-check element through the rhythm he creates? And so much of meaning is in form, so it’s important to carry this across.

So, you know my personal choice. Both are excellent, though, and the appearance of Grossman’s was responsible for a renewed interest in the tome among readers in, at least, the USA. But I also wanted to mention a lovely detail. Grossman’s translation is followed by Rutherford’s; they’re both of the opening sentence:

Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and an ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

In a village in La Mancha, the name of which I cannot quite recall, there lived not long ago one of those country gentleman or hidalgos who keeps a lance in a rack, an ancient leather shield, a scrawny hack and a greyhound for coursing.

As pointed out by writer Gregorio Martínez in ‘Don Quijote y el galgo fantasma’, published in Perú.21 on 23 April 2006, that greyhound is an invention of translations into English. According to him, in the Spanish of Cervantes (and this may be controversial), the phrase ‘galgo corredor‘ is adjectival: Cervantes is describing the horse as greyhound-like, i.e. skinny. So in being carried into English, Quixote has acquired another companion.