Books: Wineskin into Giant

THE INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA (1,043 pp.)—By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; translated by Samuel Putnam—Viking ($10).

“It appears to me,” said Don Quixote, “that translating from one language into another . . . is like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side out: even though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that obscure the view and are not bright and smooth as when seen from the other side.”

In 3½ centuries, translators in more than 100 languages have proved how right the old knight was. English translations of Don Quixote have either been pieced together by literary archeologists who treat each word as a rare old bone, and with admirable patience assemble them into a dead monster; or have been cribbed by publishers’ hacks from French translations, with an eye on the dictionary and an ear to the gallery.

Even the best translation, John Ormsby’s version of 1885, is stiff, and the Peter Motteux translation of 1700, the only one in U.S. print for more than a decade, has been called “worse than worthless.” What Sainte-Beuve called “the Bible of humanity,” and Dostoevsky “the greatest utterance of the human mind,” often seems little more than a scrambled dictionary of archaic and occasionally gamy slang. A few pages of it are about all most readers can stand. As a result, the Knight of the Mournful Countenance is handed down by hearsay as nothing more than the original nut who tilted at windmills, and Miguel de Cervantes as a long-winded sort of Thorne Smith of the Renaissance.

Masterpiece by Mistake. Last week U.S. readers could discover what they had been missing. Samuel Putnam, a Renaissance specialist who has done the best translation of Rabelais, has reversed Cervantes’ vast tapestry into English without dropping more than a few stitches of detail and coloring.

In Putnam’s translation, Cervantes’ style proves in English to be what it is in Spanish: one of the easiest, surest and most varied ever set to paper. Cervantes did not use his poetic gifts as directly as Shakespeare did, yet in a lifelong struggle to shake his talents loose, he found a loving patience and a kind irony that made him at last the deepest, widest humorist who ever wrote.

As it turned out, Cervantes found himself—and the form that became the modern novel—quite by accident. He started out to write a piffling burlesque of the popular chivalric romances of his day; Don Quixote became a masterpiece almost by mistake.

Quest Within Quest. A Spanish squire named Alonso Quijana, “tall, lean, lanky, with cheeks that appeared to be kissing each other on the inside of his mouth, [and a] neck half a yard long and uncommonly brown,” goes clear out of his mind from reading tales of knight-errantry. Renaming himself Don Quixote, and his jag-jointed nag Rocinante (translation: formerly a hack), the madman enlists a local farmer, one Sancho Panza, as his squire. Breathing the name of his ladylove, Dulcinea del Toboso (in real life a husky farm girl named Aldonza Lorenzo that he has never said two words to), Don Quixote sets out in quest of adventures.

He finds them: a giant, when Don Quixote attacks, turns into a windmill, and lays the knight flat on his back; the next time the giant, when he slashes at him, turns into a row of wineskins and fills the inn with his blood; a hostile army, when the knight does battle with it, turns into a herd of sheep, and the shepherds stone him almost to death.

“This is the work of [a] magician!” cries the madman, and in that moment, almost before Cervantes appears to know it, Don Quixote’s comical quest becomes also the serious search for what is real behind the appearances of this world. The search leads him, at the end of Part One, to a cage in which, like a wild animal, he is shipped home.

Death in Defeat. Part One is carelessly constructed, uncertain of intention, saved from collapse only by the author’s endless wit and invention. Part Two, completed ten years later, shows Cervantes as absolute master of his matter, his manner and his man. Don Quixote makes a manifesto out of his guiding conviction: “Leave it to God, and everything will come out all right.” People begin to take him half seriously, but misadventures come thick & fast. “I perceive now that one must actually touch with his hands what appears to the eye if he is to avoid being deceived,” the knight mournfully admits. Yet hand and eye are not enough. When an enchanter turns a castle into a mere mill before his eyes, Don Quixote despairs: “God help us all, this world is nothing but schemes and plots, all working at cross-purposes. I can do no more.”

Fate grinds him small. The mighty Knight of the Lions (as he now calls himself) is laid up for a week by the claws of a pussy cat. He is paraded through Barcelona with a placard on his back:

THIS IS DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA. He is pummeled by his squire, and at last dumped off his horse in a put-up tourney and forced under oath to give up his quest. Beaten, Alonso Quijana admits that Don Quixote was mad. “In last year’s nests there are no birds this year,” he says, and dies of a broken spirit.

Cervantes wrote his masterpiece while in his 50s and 60s, sick to death of the dropsy, jailed as often as not on a recurring charge of embezzlement, harried with an incredible series of family troubles. He was at the bitter end of a bitter life, yet shortly after Don Quixote was done he wrote sweetly: “Goodbye to thanks, goodbye to compliments, goodbye to good friends. For I am dying.” Miguel de Cervantes died on April 23, 1616, the same day as William Shakespeare.

The Translator. The man who has at last brought Cervantes’ masterpiece to life in English spent 17 years directly on the job and a lifetime indirectly preparing for it. Samuel Putnam began translating in Latin class at Hoopeston, Ill. High School, was so good at it that he won a Latin scholarship to the University of Chicago. Ill health kept him from earning a degree but not from trying his writing hand at newspaper work.

On the side, he began translating Rabelais, went to France in 1926 for a look at the Rabelais country and stayed until 1933. While in Europe he published his Rabelais, plus some translations of Pirandello and Jean Cocteau, and edited the literary quarterly New Review.

Back in the U.S., Putnam joined the Communist Party, did a literary column for the Daily Worker, was an associate editor of the New Masses, kept on translating (Novelists Ignazio Silone, Georges Duhamel) and writing his own books (Paris Was Our Mistress, Marvelous Journey). He spent eight years with the party in “misguided humility” before he quit in 1944.

Of his rendering of Don Quixote, Putnam says: “I have striven to avoid . . . an antiquated style and vocabulary and . . . any modernism that would . . . savor of flippancy.” He is diffident about the result (“though I think I do these translations better as I grow older”), but need not be: it is one of the triumphs of the translator’s trade.