Vol. 17 No. 15 · 3 August 1995
pages 14-15 | 3588 words
Crazy Don
Michael Wood
- The History of that Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, translated by Burton Raffel
Norton, 802 pp, $14.95, September 1995, ISBN 0 393 03719 3
Not only one of the (many) unread classics, Don Quixote is a book almost no one seems to have any intention of reading. People don’t feel bad about ignoring it, don’t need to pretend they’ve read it, don’t say they’ve always been meaning to take it to the beach. I hope I’m wrong about the novel’s actual readership, for the sake of several publishers and many readers who would immensely enjoy the book if they got to it, but I don’t think I’m wrong about the way things look.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 17 · 7 September 1995
From Endre Marton
Michael Wood’s essay on translations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (LRB, 3 August) brought back memories of some seventy years ago when as a teenager I read this masterpiece translated into Hungarian, my mother tongue. Professor Wood writes about ‘the great challenge’ in translating Cervantes and mentions, as an example, the opening of the first chapter. Translated literally, as he says, the sentence should be in English: ‘In a place in Mancha whose name I do not want to recall’. Though I’m aware that very few, if any, of your readers understand the difficult language of Magyars, I venture to quote this beginning in Hungarian: ‘La Mancha egyik falujában amelynek nevét nem akarom emliteni’. Well, the Hungarian translation should please Professor Wood. In English it reads: ‘In a village of La Mancha whose name I do not want to mention’. Striking similarity, isn’t it? The two-volume Don Quixote was among the few books I could bring out from Hungary after the 1956 Revolution. Now, having read Professor Wood’s excellent piece, I am especially happy I did.
Endre Marton
Chevy Chase, Maryland
