Vol. 8 No. 3 · 20 February 1986
pages 15-17 | 4323 words
Andante Capriccioso
Karl Miller
- The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett
Deutsch, 846 pp, £15.00, January 1986, ISBN 0 233 97840 2
The fame of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza became known to the work in which they appear. In discussing itself as it goes along, the work examines the question of their fame, and in the second of its two parts it even takes avoiding action in respect of its own apocryha. Their fame has lasted from that day – the first years of the 17th century – to this. Quixote, his squire, his adventures and enchanters, still matter; they are one of the legends of the romantic modern world.
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[1] The Letters of Robert Burns, edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson. Second edition, edited by G. Ross Roy, 2 vols, Oxford, 493 and 521 pp., £45 each, 19 December 1985, 0 19 812478 3 and 0 19 812321 3. For the reference to Smollett see Vol. I, p. 296.
[2] Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot, translated by Michael Henry, with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Hall. Penguin, 261 pp., £3.95, 30 January, 014 044472 6.
[3] The Duchess’s Diary: Faber, 127 pp., £8.95 and £2.95, January 1985, 0 571 13441 6.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 7 · 17 April 1986
From Donald Greene
SIR: Calling attention to some ghastly misprints in a recent edition of the Smollettian translation of Don Quixote – there has been some controversy over how much Smollett actually had to do with it – Karl Miller (LRB, February 20) attributes them to the fact that ‘the 18th century’s f’s for s’s is a trap.’ Does Mr Miller really think that 18th-century (and earlier) European printers used the letter f in place of the letter s? A glance at any piece of earlier printing will reveal that f, as in modern typography, has a crossbar extending on both sides of the upright, whereas ‘long s’, used at the beginning and in the middle of words, has only a vestige of one, on the left side only. The two characters are no harder to tell apart than, say, a modern lower-case r and t. It seems astonishing that the editors of an expensive modern edition of an 18th-century text (not to mention a reviewer of it) are so unfamiliar with the original as to be unaware of this elementary distinction, which the eyes of readers for more than three centuries were accustomed to. Incidentally, the title of Smollett’s last novel is not Humphrey Clinker but Humphry Clinker.
Donald Greene
University of Southern California,
From Editor, ‘London Review’
What I meant to convey, in rapid fashion, was that the 18th-century letter which may be misread as a modern f was so misread by the modern publisher in question, and I do not feel mortified by Donald Greene’s lecture on the subject. I thought I ought to point out what I took to be a recurrent error in the edition, since I had not seen it noticed elsewhere. Such is Greene’s wish to display a hostile superiority at every turn that he seems less exercised by the error than by its correction. As it happens, the theme of my article was errors of one kind of another, some fortunate, some not, and I seize this opportunity to put right a slip of the pen which has escaped Greene’s eagle eye: at one point I referred to Humphrey Clinker (sic) when I meant Launcelot Greaves. It is in the latter work of Smollett’s that a bystander speaks of having seen Hamlet ‘acted in Drury Lane’.
Editor, ‘London Review’
