When I was first deciding to read Don Quixote, I wrote a cheeky little article, About to Read Don Quixote. In it, I compared the first sentence of the prologue of the first book. And I compared how six translators had handled it. That article still gets a lot of traffic, and I feel bad about it, because it is so silly. Also: it leaves out my absolute favorite translation. And that is based on having read at least large sections of pretty much all of the translations. (There are two fairly recent ones that I’ve never even seen.)
At some point in the first book, Sancho coins a name for Don Quixote: “el Caballero de la triste figura.” This means “the Knight of the sad figure.” But most modern translators take “figure” to mean “face.” In the book, Don Quixote likes this moniker very much. It goes along with the silly convention of chivalric romances that knights are love sick and wandering around doing great deeds to impress the objects of their affection. Don Quixote, of course, is an old man. Cervantes was 58 when he wrote the first part, and so I’ve always assumed the character was meant to be the same age. So it is particularly funny: a love sick 58 year old.
As I was reading my favorite translation by John Rutherford, I was struck that he translated it in a way no one else had: the knight of the sorry face. That goes right along with Rutherford’s approach to the novel. Don Quixote was a laugh riot for people of his time, and Rutherford was determined to squeeze every drop of humor out of the book. This is why it’s my favorite translation. When I pick up Samuel Putnam’s translation, I don’t usually laugh. I do with Rutherford. And “sorry face” is just brilliant.
But is it an accurate translation? Well, that I will leave to greater minds than mine. The question is more what exactly we want from a translation. The second book of Don Quixote was published 400 years ago this year. The Spanish in it is archaic. I don’t spend much time with it, and yet I commonly find words that simply aren’t in a modern Spanish dictionary. But as a reader, do you really want a translation that most accurately conveys the words? I think you want a translation that accurately conveys the experience. I certainly think that if Cervantes were alive today, he would choose Rutherford’s translation over all the others.
But still, since I went to the trouble of going through all my English translations of Don Quixote, I figured I would provide a table of how each edition of the book translated Don Quixote’s sorry face:
| Year | Translator | “triste figura” |
|---|---|---|
| 1620 | Shelton | “rueful countenance”[1] |
| 1700 | Motteux | “woeful figure” |
| 1742 | Jervas | “sorrowful figure” |
| 1755 | Smollett | “rueful countenance” |
| 1885 | Ormsby | “rueful countenance” |
| 1949 | Putnam | “mournful countenance” |
| 1950 | Cohen | “sad countenance” |
| 1957 | Starkie | “rueful figure” |
| 1996 | Raffel | “sad face” |
| 2003 | Rutherford | “sorry face” |
| 2005 | Grossman | “sorrowful face” |
I am required to add at this point, what I tell anyone who asks: the best translation to read is whichever one happens to be around. I used to say, “Except Motteux.” But I don’t even say that anymore. It’s a great book that you should read — not because it will enrich you, but because you will enjoy it.
[1] I’m not certain of this. I don’t have a clean copy of Shelton, but rather one of the many revisions of him. I’m skeptical that he would have picked up on the implication of it being his face.
What we are opposed to, or what I am opposed to — guess I should speak for myself — is growth where all the benefits are captured by those at the top. Imperfections in economic institutions along with changes in the rules of the game pushed forward by those with political influence have caused those at the top to be rewarded in excess of their contribution to economic output, while those at the bottom have gotten less than their contribution. It’s not “taking” to increase taxes at the top and return income to those who actually earned it, to the real makers who toil each day at jobs they’d rather not do to support their families. It’s a daily struggle for many, a struggle that would be eased if they simply earned an amount equivalent to their contributions. That’s why it’s so “politically unattractive,” people explicitly or implicitly understand they have been, for lack of a better word, screwed by the system. The blame is sometimes misplaced, but that doesn’t change the nature of the problem. They don’t want “free stuff,” they want what they deserve, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.
On Tuesday, I saw what might seem like a very boring article over at Reuters, 
Although I believe that I possess a special level of cluelessness on this matter, I think that men are pretty ignorant when it comes to human biology. There is a realization that comes to all us boys around the age of 5 that the girls have some kind of secret knowledge that they are not sharing with us. That never goes away. In fact, it only gets worse. At puberty, we all get very stupid. The men pretend they are tough and the women pretend they are weak, and the mating rituals begin. But still: the women are hiding something from the men — but only because we men can’t understand it.
We will end this week of Japanese punk with a very early band, The Stalin. They formed in 1979, and put out their first EP in 1981, 
On this day in 1995,