Don Quixote
Don Quixote was a novel published in 1605, since then both the Spanish and English languages have changed and evolved. Reading the original Don Quixote involves heavy use of the Spanish dictionary in order to understand the vocabulary used in the sixteen hundreds.
The translation by John Ormsby: Don Quixote (1885) gave me the feeling of a word by word translation, so precise that it started with “In a village of La Mancha” and included the word “Olla”. The structure of the sentence and the word olla did not make sense grammatically.
The second translation by Samuel Putnam, Don Quixote (1949) was smoother to the eye. However, it still showed features of literal translation in the opening sentence and the age description of the Quixote, his niece and the housekeeper.
John Rutherford and Edith Grossman publish their translations of Don Quixote the same year (2003). John is British and Edith is American so their approach to the translation made them quite different but both easy to read and understand. In my opinion Edith mastered a way to use words that resemble the original word in Spanish, making her work much more appealing.
Your argument here is rather curious. You find fault with Ormsby for his ” a word by word translation, so precise”. But then, you praise the translator whose work you seem to admire most, Edith Grossman, for using “words that resemble the original word in Spanish.” Why is Grossman right to follow the Spanish, while Ormsby is wrong to do so?
EAllen — December 30, 2013 @ 8:24 pm