Don Quixote
My hat off to Edith Grossman. This was a feat of translation, easy on the mind's tongue, funny, moving. And by the by we learn so much about 16th century Spain...
This is a novel in two parts. 1. The novel itself - perhaps the world's first - although I'd have to look up the dates for the Tale of Genji.
2. The novel about an imposter who tried to steal Cervantes's thunder.
After all this time we read in such a different way from the way Cervantes's public read it, of course.
There's been a lot written about translations recently, sparked off by the new version of Madam Bovary. In the UK, Julian Barnes wrote an engrossing essay in The London Review of Books on the impossibility of ever making a definitive translation of anything, which is why a new one must be done for each generation.
Now I'm reading S by Slavenka Drakulic - in translation. As short and terse as Quixote is baggy, because novel writing by now is a historically practised skill. Read them both!
This is a novel in two parts. 1. The novel itself - perhaps the world's first - although I'd have to look up the dates for the Tale of Genji.
2. The novel about an imposter who tried to steal Cervantes's thunder.
After all this time we read in such a different way from the way Cervantes's public read it, of course.
There's been a lot written about translations recently, sparked off by the new version of Madam Bovary. In the UK, Julian Barnes wrote an engrossing essay in The London Review of Books on the impossibility of ever making a definitive translation of anything, which is why a new one must be done for each generation.
Now I'm reading S by Slavenka Drakulic - in translation. As short and terse as Quixote is baggy, because novel writing by now is a historically practised skill. Read them both!
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