Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/19

 Rh 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. Unlike Shelton, and indeed most translators, who are generally satisfied with the first dictionary meaning or have a stereotype translation for every word under all circumstances, he was alive to delicate distinctions of meaning, always an important matter in Spanish, but especially in the Spanish of Cervantes, and his notes show that he was a diligent student of the great Spanish Academy Dictionary, at least its earlier volumes; for he died in 1739, the year in which the last was printed. His notes show, besides, that he was a man of very considerable reading, particularly in the department of chivalry romance, and they in many instances anticipate Bowle, who generally has the credit of being the first "Quixote" annotator and commentator. 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.

The charge against it is that it is stiff, dry—"wooden" in a word,—and no one can deny that there is a foundation for it. But it may be pleaded for Jervas that a good deal of this rigidity is due to his abhorrence of the light, flippant, jocose style of his predecessors. He was one of the few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humor; it seemed to him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic abstinence from everything savoring of liveliness which is the characteristic of his translation. Could he have caught but ever so little of Swift's or Arbuthnot's style, he might have hit upon a via media that would have