Don Quixote

"I read this translation when I was a kid, 16 or 17 years old. I was so excited by the book, and so moved by it – it had me in tears. When I was young I thought Don Quixote was the greatest tragedy I had ever read. But as I get older I find it funnier and funnier. I think my sensitive skin toughened up as I grew older. That translation is one of the reasons why I specialised in Spanish and became involved in all of this. Right. As a graduate student and an academic for many years, I read Don Quixote in Spanish over and over again – at least 10 times. But I never read any other translation except for Putnam’s. I haven’t looked at it since I was a teenager. The point of it is not necessarily how well Putnam translated Don Quixote . The point is that this book moved me very deeply at a time in my life when I was making career decisions. For that reason it is a very important book to me. Just imagine how I felt when I started to translate it! If readers are overwhelmed, I was terrified. It’s not called the greatest novel ever written for nothing. A few years ago they did a poll of 100 writers around the world, asking what the greatest book was that had ever been written, and Don Quixote was the winner. I think the second novel was Madame Bovary , but it was trailing far behind. The overwhelming favourite was Quixote . Exactly. First of all, it’s inevitable that there are so many translations because no two translators translate in the same way. With every translation you have a new version of the book. I think it can be very enlightening to a reader to read more than one translation. It’s compelling to think about why a translator makes a particular choice in phrasing, and compare it with another translator’s choice. That can be revelatory as regards the original novel. On the other hand, as much as I love translation I think if you read the original language, there’s no point in reading the book in any other language. If you read Russian there’s no point in not reading War and Peace in Russian, no matter how wonderful the English translation may be. Everyone should read the original language where they can. Cervantes is a brilliant writer, and if you read Spanish you shouldn’t deny yourself the pleasure of direct contact with him. Probably. This is an issue I face when I deal with older pieces of writing – 16th century poetry, for example, or Don Quixote . If I were to not use my current idiom, what language would I use? A fake 16th century English? Would I try to imitate Spenser in The Faerie Queene ? Or Shakespeare ? Whom do I imitate in order to write in 16th century English? It’s a ridiculous question, and the obvious answer is that it makes no sense. When a writer writes, no matter when she or he lived, most of the time that author is writing in contemporary, living language. I think the translation should reflect that. Of course, talking about contemporary language doesn’t mean using slang or street language. But in Don Quixote , for example, was I supposed to use the second person singular “thee” and” thou” forms? Apart from some Quakers we haven’t used that in English for 300 years. So how could I make it old-fashioned? In my Quixote the only time I do anything like that is when Don Quixote goes off on a rant and starts imitating the language of the novels of chivalry. Then I make a conscious effort to write antique-sounding language."

"Who knows? Because he was a genuine genius, this complete and utter one-off. The story of Cervantes is as insane as the story of Don Quixote . Again, it’s super-reductive to say that the book mirrors the life of the author. But the fact is that Cervantes was a soldier in the tercios in Flanders. He was captured by Barbary pirates and a galley slave for five years. Cervantes’s life was absolutely extraordinary and quite representative, I think, of the madness that was Spain at the beginning of the 17th century. Spain was the first global empire. The country was united and suddenly had more money than anybody could imagine. They had the Catholic faith—and troublesome minorities who they treated badly and expelled in pogroms. Then the money started to trickle away because nobody was managing it properly…I think the insanity of Don Quixote comes from the insanity of the situation. One of the things I love about Don Quixote is the constructed intertextuality of it. It’s meant to be a translation from the Arabic. The first part is the narrator saying, ‘I found this manuscript in the market in Toledo alongside all sorts of other things. It was written in Arabic by Benengeli’ (which means ‘aubergine’). At the time, everybody was trying to kill Moorish culture, but Don Quixote is a chronicle written purportedly by a Moor. This mixture of everything that was 17th-century Spain I just find completely fascinating. Then you get to the Don himself: the fact that books make you mad, the perpetual, fruitless search. In Spanish literature you had the pícaro —a bad guy who is trying to con everybody. Sancho Panza has a bit of that. Don Quixote takes elements from the picaresque tradition, but he can’t even kid anyone. Shame and misfortune heap upon him because he exists in this totally parallel world of his own making. But he really, really believes in it, and his moral compass is so strong… It’s very readable. The literary or philosophic aspects of it are completely hilarious and they fit with the narrative. It’s hilarious and poignant and all of those things. It takes you on this wonderful journey of the emotions. I understand why some people read it as a book about insanity or mental illness. I get it. I think it can be whatever you want it to be. The other thing I love about Don Quixote is that while I did study Spanish and I’m married to somebody who grew up in Spain, I’m British and I find the way our two cultures blend really interesting. They are really quite different and stand quite in opposition to each other. Don Quixote was written at the same time as King Lear . England was on the up in literary and global terms. Those reflections of Shakespeare’s are incredibly expansive in every sense of the word—telling the tale in English for the world. While Spain was completely on the way down. Like Don Quixote , it was getting more provincial and going down its own rabbit hole… Yes, absolutely. Tilting at windmills, the man from La Mancha, quixotic. We have a real relationship with it. And it’s really inspired people. English literature has been massively influenced by Don Quixote ."