Don Quijote: The History of that Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quijote de la Mancha

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Burton Raffel (Translator)

Overview

“Fluent, strong, and engagingly readable. The narrative skill is such that we are soon willing to believe that Raffel is Cervantes reborn and writing in English.” —Guy Davenport

Here are the adventures of that bumbling, infinitely compassionate knight, Don Quijote, and his shrewdly simple squire, Sancho Panza. Part parody and part cautionary tale, Don Quijote is one of the world’s great literary works. The award-winning translator Burton Raffel presents an accurate, consistent, and fluid translation modeled closely on the original Spanish. More than any of its predecessors, this masterful translation comes close to re-creating the inimitable style of Cervantes' prose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393315097
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/1996
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	752
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)
Lexile:	1630L (what's this?)

About the Author

Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Emeritus. He is the translator of many works, including Gargantua and Pantagruel (awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize), Père Goriot, Beowulf, and the five romances of Chrétien de Troyes.

Diana de Armas Wilson is Professor Emerita of English and Renaissnace Studies at the University of Denver. She is the author of Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s Persiles and Sigismunda; co-editor of Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes; and author of Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World.

Editorial Reviews

A translator of Horace, Balzac, Rabelais, and Salvador Espriu, as well as a theorist (The Art of Translating Prose, Pennsylvania State Univ. Pr., 1994), Raffel (Univ. of Southwest Louisiana) undertook the formidable task of translating Cervantes's masterpiece because he was uncomfortable recommending any of the existing translations. There are some real differences here. Raffel has junked the traditional transcription of Cide Hamete, the pseudoauthor, in favor of the less "colonialist" and more authentic Arabic, Sidi Hamid. Proper names that contain puns are explained within square brackets, and footnotes are kept to a minimum. A more vernacular style reigns: The blow on the neck and the stroke on the shoulder that dub Don Quijote a knight are, respectively, a "whack" and a "tap." The women at the inn, usually called "wenches," are "party-girls" or "whores." Sancho dreams that his "old lady" will someday be a queen and that his "kids" will be princes. In the proofs, "Castile" has been misspelled as "Castille," an oversight one would hope to see corrected in the final book. This is a lively alternative to the wide assortment of truly old-fashioned translations. Recommended.-Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.

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