Spanish Literature: With the centenary of Bloomsday anticipating by only a year the quatercentenary of the publication in 1605 of Don Quixote, Part One - the very book which is generally credited with having set the modern novel on its merry, meandering way - it is a delight to review Edith Grossman's new rendering into English of Cervantes's comic masterpiece.
Undertaking such a translation is no mean feat, as John Rutherford pointed out in his own English translation for Penguin in 2000. His attempt was number 13, and in an introduction to the text he draws attention to both the Romantic tradition, in which Don Quixote is "no figure of fun but a noble hero fighting for his lofty ideas", and the earlier cavalier tradition, in which translators freely transformed, edited, and even added to the original according to their particular taste and sensibility. The art of literary translation, as Rutherford concludes, is akin to tilting at windmills, but worth it for all that.
Grossman is an accomplished translator of contemporary Latin-American fiction and it is appropriate that she should turn her hand to the master whose acknowledged influence pervades the works of "Boom" novelists such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, not to mention that adoptive Latin American, Juan Goytisolo, and post- colonialist writers such as Salman Rushdie and Tariq Ali.
Of course, none of these 21st-century upstarts reads Cervantes properly - or so the purists would have it. Seeing the Quixote as having anticipated postmodernist perspectivism and its deconstruction of master narratives in favour of a fragmented, "atomised" view of the world - to borrow the title of Michel Houellebecq's recent novel - they tend to enlist Cervantes in the service of their own particular concerns. But wasn't that rather what Cervantes was doing in his beguiling parody of chivalric romance? It is true, as several illustrious Cervantists have noted, that our current era has a tendency to forget that the Quixote is a funny book - and a very funny one at that. But this is an aspect of the original which no reader of Grossman's translation can possibly ignore.
Grossman has a light touch and an easy style. At times she opts for the more discursive, less punchy option, though this is quite in keeping with the rambling nature of the original. In tackling the famous "scrutiny" of Don Quixote's library, in chapter six of part one, for example, Rutherford elegantly and succinctly opens the chapter with "The priest asked the niece for the keys of the room where the books, the authors of the mischief, were kept . . ."
Grossman is more expansive: "The priest asked the niece for the keys to the room that contained the books responsible for the harm that had been done . . ." Rutherford's translation of the famous title which the half-witted Sancho Panza gives to his master, the "Knight of the Sorry Face", is certainly accurate in its avoidance - deliberate, as he explains in his introduction - of the Romantic tendency to elevate the knight to the status of tragic hero, but it is rather abrupt. Grossman's "Knight of the Sorrowful Face" may, with the pretensions of "sorrowful" rather than "sorry", fall into the trap Rutherford signals, but it reveals her more fluid style of writing.
This is, though, mere splitting of hairs, for these comparisons simply demonstrate the inherent difficulty of translation, which is less the mechanical transposition of a text than a creative interpretation of it. Don Quixote himself compares translation to looking at a tapestry from the back, suggesting that it highlights the linguistic, cultural, and temporal features which form part of the warp and weave of a work of art.
One of the greatest challenges for translators is to convey an impression of the foreignness of the original whilst maintaining a sense of intimacy between the author and reader of a text. Grossman achieves this admirably. Returning to that all-important "scrutiny" scene - the source of postmodernist readings of Cervantes as the creator of the self-conscious novel which simultaneously offers a story and a commentary on how to write stories - Grossman resorts to judicious footnotes to explain the numerous references Cervantes makes to romances of chivalry. These would have been obvious to a 17th-century reader but are lost on a contemporary mind. Since an appreciation of their significance is essential for a grasp of the central joke of the Quixote itself - the knight goes mad because he believes all he reads in silly, if diverting, books - the notes supplement, rather than disrupt, the reading process.
Notes can also be a useful source of variant translations to bring home Cervantes' parodic humour with minimal deformation of his original. So, for instance, Grossman explains that the name of the Emperor Alifanfarón, an invention of Don Quixote's, means something like "Alibombast" but leaves the original version in the text.
This brief example illustrates the sensitivity to both Spanish and English characteristic of a faithful, highly readable rendering of the West's most famous novel.