Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/16

 vi 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. With him "discreto"—a chameleon of a word in its way of taking various meanings according to circumstances—is always "discreet," "admirar" is always "admire," "sucesos" always "successes" (which it seldom means), "honesto" always "honest" (which it never means), "suspenso" always "suspended;" "desmayarse," to swoon or faint, is always "to dismay" (one lady is a "mutable and dismayed traitress," when "fickle and fainting" is meant, and another "made shew of dismaying" when she "seemed ready to faint"); "trance," a crisis or emergency, is always simply "trance;" "disparates" always "fopperies," which, however, if not a translation, is an illustration of the meaning, for it is indeed nonsense. These are merely a few samples taken at hap-hazard, but they will suffice to show how Shelton translated, and why his "Don Quixote," veritable treasure as it is to the Cervantist and to the lover of old books and old English, cannot be accepted as an adequate translation.

It is often said that we have no satisfactory translation of "Don Quixote." To those who are familiar with the original, it savors 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 humor of the book owes its flavor 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,