Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/17

 Rh 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, of "suceso,", "trance,", "desmayarse," etc., 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.

In 1687 John Phillips, Milton's nephew, produced a "Don Quixote" "made English," he says, "according to the humour of our modern language." The origin of this attempt is plain enough. In 1656 that indecorous Oxford Don, Edmond Gayton, had produced his "Festivous Notes on Don Quixote," a string of jests, more or less dirty, on the incidents in the story, which seems to have been much relished; and in 1667 Sir Roger l'Estrange had published his version of Quevedo's "Visions" from the French of La Geneste, a book which the lively though decidedly coarse humor, cockney jokes and London slang, wherewith he liberally seasoned it, made a prodigious favorite with the Restoration public. It struck Phillips that, as Shelton was now rather antiquated, a "Don Quixote" treated in the same way might prove equally successful. He imitated L'Estrange as well as he could, but L'Estrange was a clever penman and a humorist after his fashion, while Phillips was only a dull buffoon. 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 flavor has entirely evaporated under the manipulation of the several hands. The flavor 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