Ormsby's Don Quixote

IF a new translation of Don Quixote should seem to any one a dispensable luxury, it may at least be said that of all luxuries a classic in a satisfactory edition is the most innocent, and among the most delightful. But Mr. Ormsby, in the first volume ¹ (which is all that has yet appeared) of his version, makes it clear — not only by the scholarly introduction, but by the way in which he has executed his task as interpreter — that a new translation may be a necessity. To most readers this admirable work will impart a luminous and well-proportioned conception of Cervantes and his great book, which could not so well have been derived from any source previously existing; and even to careful students of the author, we imagine that it must bring out certain points with a novel force, besides presenting, in a single brief and convenient view, all the best results of the most thorough research. In two instances, moreover, Mr. Ormsby appears to have brought to light significant items which have hitherto escaped notice. One is the fact, overlooked even by Ticknor, that of those who preceded Cervantes in the onslaught upon romances of chivalry, the latest was Fray Juan de Tolosa, who published in 1589 a religious treatise, Aranjuez del Alma, “to drive out of our Spain that dust-cloud of books of chivalries, as they call them (of knaveries, as I call them).” Don Quixote came out in 1605, and had apparently circulated in manuscript for some years before that date. The other item is that the poet Gongora, in his ballad on the Castle of San Cervantes at Toledo, in which he derides the ruined fortress with being no longer what it was in the days of its youth, meant to make a covert attack on the great discourager of romantic affectation. For, as Mr. Ormsby shows, so competent a writer as Ford — author of Murray’s Handbook for Spain and other works relating to the Peninsula — is wrong in supposing that this castle had nothing to do with the family of Cervantes. The name was really taken from the castle by the great-great-grandfather of Miguel Cervantes Saavedra. This was doubtless familiarly known in the time of the author, and therefore, Gongora, in shooting his light arrow of verse at the crumbling walls, could enjoy the malicious pleasure of knowing that it would fly beyond them and hit the aged and crippled creator of Don Quixote.

Respecting the merit of this new translation, it would be out of place to go into detail here; but it is worth while to notice the translator’s independence in opposing that commonplace of criticism which makes Don Quixote a model of Spanish prose. “ In truth,” says Mr. Ormsby, “ there is no work of note in the language that is less deserving of the title.” The narrative portions, to take nothing else, have a tendency towards euphuism; but Cervantes “ was a careless writer at all times,” and “ too often guilty of downright slovenliness.” The question of style is one which will be debated to the end of time, probably without resulting in any system that shall satisfy everybody. The truth seems to be that the ideal of a good style is as mutable and manifold as the temperament of writers, readers, and critics. It is of course our duty to trample upon offenses against grammar, and to cultivate a sense of linguistic rectitude. But seeing how the masters themselves sometimes make slips, we need not take a fetichistic view of the smaller literary proprieties, if we can once make sure that an author has the more vital qualities of style — unforced individuality, vividness, truth in some form, and a method adapted to his artistic purpose. Coleridge spoke of Cervantes’ “ exquisite flow and music of style; ” but Mr. Ormsby, in addition to the charges already quoted, accuses his author of a propensity to inversion of ideas, and a “ tendency to say the very opposite of what he meant to say.” He also declares that what may be called Cervantes’ own style, that in which he abandons “ fine writing,” is a simple, unaffected, colloquial style, “ not indeed a model of correctness, or distinguished by any special grace or elegance,” but “ a model of clear, terse, vigorous expression.”

In the same way that the Spaniard seems to derive part of his bodily nutriment from the rich sunlight of his country, he draws from the natural music of his language a splendor of sound which may easily mislead the Anglo-Saxon. A commonplace thought, a stanza of indifferent poetry, expressed in ordinary Spanish, gains a beauty from the fascination of which it is hard to free one’s self. We confess that to read a page of Don Quixote in the original gives us such pleasure in the mere inherent melody of the words that we should hardly care to interrupt it by analyzing the style; and it was this charm, perhaps, that carried Coleridge away. It needs a cool-headed critic like our translator to keep clear of error from this source ; but his remarks are, fortunately, confined to the Introduction. In the translation itself, while working with the nicest attention to faithful rendering, it is his remarkable merit that he gives us a text quite devoid of affectation, and uses an excellent style; possibly in this respect bettering the original, since his English is not open to the criticisms he makes upon the Spanish. He has been fortunate, too, in producing an effect of sonorous dignity which corresponds aptly to the Castilian ; and, as he points out, the well-sustained gravity of Cervantes is a thing which gives an added savor to the fun of the book, by making it appear in a measure unconscious. This delicate but essential characteristic has been almost wholly missed by previous translators. It is refreshing to contrast this stately yet easy and appreciative version with the natty self-confidence and bumptious humor of Motteux’s longcurrent work. Comparison with Mr. A. J. Duffield’s recent translation, pretentious, uncouth, ungrammatical, and weighed down with obsolete words, would be superfluous. Mr. Ormsby started with a plan of bringing out a new edition of Shelton; but, as he says, Shelton’s “ fine old crusted English ” would have appealed only to a minority of readers. It is much better that he has undertaken a translation of his own. By so doing he has been able to relieve readers of English from the many inaccuracies due to the ignorance or haste of earlier laborers in the field. Think of the incompetence which caused Shelton to render estrellado establo by leaving out the adjective, and led Jervas to write “illustrious stable” instead of — as it should be — “ star-lit stable ! ” Mr. Ormsby, moreover, if for no other reason, would deserve gratitude for having decided to replace the senseless and un-English title of The Curious Impertinent with Ill-Advised Curiosity.

From so judicious a student it is natural that we should receive, in the Introduction, an essay temperate in tone, charmingly written, and full of interesting suggestions. A touch that lights up the very first page is his fancy that Shakespeare probably knew Shelton’s Don Quixote : “ he may have carried it home with him in his saddle-bags to Stratford on one of his last journeys, and under the mulberry-tree at New Place joined hands with a kindred genius in its pages.” The same fortunate imagination pictures the boy Cervantes looking on at the rude dramatic representations of Lope de Rueda in the plaza of Alcalá de Henares ; or — bright, eager, tawny-haired — “ peering into a bookshop where the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public ; ... or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply and plumes, with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to embellish the title-pages of their folios. . . . What fun it would be to see such a figure come charging into the plaza! How he ’d frighten the old women and scatter the turkeys ! If the boy was father to the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis of Don Quixote.” The element of incongruity, by the way, underlying the humor and purpose of Don Quixote, Mr. Ormsby thinks has been too little heeded by his interpreters ; especially, the illustrators. Gustave Doré, for example, instead of placing the armor, when the pseudoknight is watching it, on the rude stone trough proper to a Spanish inn-yard, pictures an elaborate fountain “ such as no arriero ever watered his mules at in the corral of any venta in Spain, and thereby misses the point aimed at by Cervantes.” We are further reminded of the distinction between the two Parts ; the first depending more upon farce, while the humor of the second is rather akin to comedy. Of the Second Part only five editions were printed, but the First Part ran through ten editions. For a long time Don Quixote was regarded as a queer, droll book, highly entertaining, but not entitled to much consideration. In later days there has occurred a curious reaction to the other extreme, among Spanish commentators ; so that, to judge from the large exegetical literature prompted by the book, one would suppose Cervantes to have been the most obscure, philosophical, and mystical of writers, who never had the slightest humorous intention. “ The craze of Don Quixote,” Mr. Ormsby says, “ seems in some instances to have communicated itself to his critics.”

This change of view is amusingly described ; but there is another side to it, because it continued or repeated in a certain way, long after the death of Cervantes, those misapprehensions, often included in the lot of eminent genius, which surrounded him during his life. Not only was the value of his great satire probably underestimated in his lifetime ; but the novel also incurred for him the enmity of almost all the literary class. Among literary men, as in

other professions, there grows up an arbitrary conception as to what it is fitting for members of the class to do; and perhaps a popularity achieved by broad humor struck the poets of the time as unprofessional. There are those to-day in the craft of authorship who look upon wide popularity with instinctive suspicion, as if it were beneath the dignity of letters. But another reason was that Cervantes’ work was directed against a taste important in fostering the success of some among his contemporaries. As if this antagonism were not enough, Cervantes never gave up the idea that he was a great dramatist, and that it was of more moment for him to write poems, pastorals, and romances than to complete Don Quixote. Of his twenty or thirty plays, none succeeded ; and yet he was not convinced. It seems, therefore, that whatever misapprehension others may have had about him was equaled by his own. But he did not complain, and Mr. Ormsby differs with his biographers in doubting that his life was unhappy. Cervantes suffered at the hands of real pirates in his young manhood, and in his later years from the metaphorical pirates who printed Don Quixote without paying,—a kind of freebooter we are familiar with in the United States. He was poor, hardworked, and disappointed in his fondest ambition as an author. But Ormsby thinks that his sanguine and cheerful temperament afforded an antidote to all this. It is easy enough for us to suppose so ; but, after all, cheerfulness does not quite take the place of gratified hopes. Cervantes’ life was not a tragedy ; but neither was it just what a gifted man would deliberately plan for himself, or accept as a fulfillment of his wishes. Still, he cannot have doubted his success in one of his purposes, which was — not to “smile Spain’s chivalry away,” but to laugh away the enervating taste for romances of chivalry. He came of a race of true knights-errant and warriors, and knew the difference between the real thing and the spurious representation. Here let it be said that Mr. Ormsby punctures another of Byron’s mistakes, in showing that the assertion concerning the Don, “ his virtue makes him mad,” is the exact opposite of the truth ; since it is the madness of the imaginative hidalgo that makes him virtuous.

Whatever Cervantes felt as to his own career, the world at least gets the compensation denied to him. And an edition such as this which Mr. Ormsby has so promisingly begun will help many a reader to appraise that compensation more justly. The sketch of Cervantes also brings the author nearer to us ; the author, who was “ one of the most lovable men the world has ever seen.” The notes, placed chiefly at the ends of chapters, are not made for the sake of arraying erudition ; and, being condensed and pertinent, are welcome. On the title-page appears a reproduction of the device on Juan de la Cuesta’s edition of 1608; and the mock commendatory verses, omitted by other translators except Shelton and Mr. Duffield, are restored to their place. Altogether, the volume is a gratifying earnest of those which are to follow.