A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of both parts of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel: The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, published in 1605, and Second Part of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, published in 1615. It was made directly from the Spanish. The legal pages that opened the first editions are translated too: the certificates of price and errata, the royal privileges, and the three approvals of 1615, one of which tells how some French gentlemen asked after Cervantes. They are set in smaller type.

The Spanish followed is a public-domain electronic text, with modernized accents and punctuation and a spelling only half modernized (agora, mesmo, ansí, priesa). That text does not say which scholarly edition it was transcribed from, and we have not been able to identify it. Where its readings differ from those of the common editions, the places are listed below. John Ormsby’s English version of 1885 was consulted only to settle the meaning where the Spanish is in doubt; none of his wording, and none of any other translator’s, is used here, with one exception, explained below.

Cervantes wrote 5,028 paragraphs, and each of them is one paragraph here; every poem keeps its number of lines. At eight places the electronic text broke a sentence in the middle and began a new paragraph; there the pieces are joined again, and where a line or two of a ballad stands inside the sentence, the lines are run in and divided by a slash. Verse that a speaker quotes and sets apart, by contrast, keeps its own paragraph. With the restored sonnet, the book has 5,018 paragraphs. Part One keeps the four divisions of 1605 (chapters I–VIII, IX–XIV, XV–XXVII, XXVIII–LII), because Cervantes breaks off his story at the end of the first and picks it up again “in the second part”; each division opens on a page of its own. Part Two runs from chapter I to chapter LXXIV without divisions, and chapter numbers start again in each part.

The hero’s name is spelled Quixote, as on the title pages of 1605 and 1615 and as English readers have known it since the seventeenth century; Quijote is the later Spanish spelling. His family of names follows the same old spelling, so that Cervantes’s play with them still shows: Quixada, Quexana, Quixano. Every other name keeps its modern Spanish form, with accents. Sancho’s donkey, el rucio, is “the gray”; the ínsula Sancho is promised is an “isle,” the word of the romances; el Caballero de la Triste Figura is “the Knight of the Sorry Figure,” because Sancho’s explanation of the name turns on how his master looks.

Spanish marks rank in its pronouns, and English cannot. Vuestra merced, the polite address of the day, is “your grace,” with the verb in the third person (“if your grace will listen”), and Sancho repeats it as often as the Spanish does; the familiar tú and the older vos are both “you,” and the difference shows in titles and in tone. No one says “thou.” Don Quixote has two voices. Before an adventure, to giants, knights, and ladies, and whenever Dulcinea is in question, he talks like his books, and only then does the English allow itself old words (“caitiff,” “beauteousness,” “flee not”). On other subjects, the Golden Age, arms and letters, the art of fiction, his advice to Sancho, and on his deathbed, he is a lucid and learned speaker of plain prose. Sancho is a countryman, not a dialect speaker: his speech lives in its proverbs, oaths, and digressions, not in its spelling.

The story comes to us through several hands: the “second author” who searches the archives of La Mancha, the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Morisco who translates him, and Cervantes himself in the prologues. Every “the history says,” “some will have it,” and “the translator says” is kept, and the translator’s asides belong to the novel, not to this edition.

Sancho’s proverbs are rendered as English proverbs with the Spanish picture kept (the vulture stays a vulture), and a proverb that comes back has the same English words each time. When Sancho garbles a learned word, the English garbles an English one in the same way; when he garbles a name, the garbled Spanish name stands (Malandrino for Mambrino, Feo Blas for Fierabrás, Berenjena for Benengeli), with a word or two of explanation in the text where the joke needs it.

One poem did not come from the Spanish. Among the verses of the academicians of Argamasilla at the end of Part One, the sonnet “By the Burlador to Sancho Panza” is missing from the electronic text, which gives only its heading. Its fourteen lines are supplied in new English after the sense of Ormsby’s version, so this sonnet alone reaches the reader through an English translation; a note at the place says so.

Where the Spanish followed here reads differently from the common editions, the common reading was usually translated, because the source reading makes no sense in context: the “indissoluble” knot of marriage in Part One, chapter XXVII (the source has disoluble); the critics in the dedication of 1605 who do not keep within the bounds of their ignorance (the source has continiéndose, the common text no conteniéndose); “twelve equals” in chapter XLIX; “legion” for región in chapter XLV; “invulnerable” for invenerable in chapter XXXVII; “to make it famous” for the garbled por Hepila famosa in chapter I. In Part Two, chapter XLIII, the source’s aumento (growth) is kept against the common cimiento (foundation).

Cervantes wrote fast, and the first edition is full of slips, some of which his own characters laugh at in Part Two: Sancho’s gray is stolen and then ridden again, Sancho’s wife has four or five names, Dorotea is once called Teodora. They are left as he wrote them, without comment.

Money and measures (maravedís, reales, ducats, leagues) stay as they were; the context carries their value. Latin and Italian phrases stay in italics, with English in parentheses. Lines the Spanish gives without a speaker are left without one. The spelling is American. There are six short translator’s notes, at the ends of their chapters; they explain only a fact the sentence cannot do without.