Essay on the Principles of Translation (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1797 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XII. Difficulty of translating Don DEGREESuixote, from its Idiomatic Phraseology.--Of the be/I Trans ations of that Romance.--Comparison of the Translation by Motteux with that by Smollet. f I "here is perhaps no book to which it is more difficult to do perfect justice in a translation than the Don Quixote ef Cervantes. This difficulty arises-from the extreme frequency of its idiomatic phrases. As the Spaniflt language is in itself highly idiomatical, even the narraL 1 tive tive part of the book is on that account difficult; but the colloquial part is studiously filled with idioms, as one of the principal characters continually expresses himself in proverbs. Of this work there have been many English translations, executed, as may be supposed, with various degrees of merit. The two best of these, in my opinion, are the translations of Motteux and Smollet, both of them writers eminently well qualified for the task they undertook. It will not be foreign to the purpose of this Essay, if I shall here make a short comparative estimate of the merit of these translations *. * The translation published by Motteux bears, in the title-page, that it is the work of several hands; but as of these Mr Motteux was the principal, and revised and corrected the parts that were translated by others, which indeed we have no means of discriminating from his own, I (hall, in the following comparison, speak of him as the author of the whole work. Smollet Smollet inherited from nature a strong sense of ridicule, a great fund of original humour, and a happy versatility of talent, by which he could accommodate his style to almost every species of writing. He could adopt alternately the solemn, the lively, the sarcastic, the burlesque, and the vulgar. To these..