Lucy Day Werts answers “Is this translation good?”

Jared Rosen asked this question about Don Quixote:

Is this translation good?

Lucy Day Werts .
This seems to be a question about John Rutherford's 2000 Penguin Classics translation.
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Any professionally published translation is going to be pretty…more.
This seems to be a question about John Rutherford's 2000 Penguin Classics translation.
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Any professionally published translation is going to be pretty good by some standard. However, literary critics and general readers of course have differing opinions about how a translation should sound. Moreover, generally accepted standards for what constitutes a "good" translation change over time, so older translations may fall out of favor... or even, in the strange case of Tobias Smollett, rise back into it.
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John Rutherford's translation has been praised, but not as widely or loudly as Edith Grossman's.
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There are between 11 and 13 in-print translations in total, depending on how you count, and all of them have their fans. To learn why people prefer the different versions, visit the extensive list at We Love Translations: World Literature in English. There are extracts so that you can compare how different translations sound, links to relevant articles, and info such as book cover images, ISBNs, and pagecounts.
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» What's the best translation of Don Quixote?
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