Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote’s famous beginning words go like this in the original Spanish:
En un lugar de La Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo…
Twenty simple words that, seemingly, would offer no problem to a translator. Twenty words of common use, with a simple word order. Possibly the “no ha mucho” could be replaced by the modern “no hace mucho”… the rest is not convoluted or intricate; the syntax is understandable, the meaning plain. However, nine different translators give us nine unlike translations of those 20 words; 18 really because we must deduct La Mancha, which has no translation.
Now read the different versions and judge for yourself:
Thomas Shelton “There lived not long ago since, in a certain village of La Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, a gentleman…
Charles Jarvis: “In a village of La Mancha, in Spain, there once lived one of those gentlemen…”
John Ormsby: “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long ago since one of those gentlemen…”
Samuel Putnam: “In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen…”
Clifford H. Galloway: “In one of the villages that dot the Spanish plain of La Mancha –I have no desire to recall its name- there lived not long ago an hidalgo…”
Richard Emery Roberts: “At a certain village in La Mancha, there lived not long ago an hidalgo of the familiar type…”
Walter Starkie: “At a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those gentlemen…”
Gerald J. Davis: “Not long ago, in a village of La Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, there lived a country gentleman…”
Edith Grossman: “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago…”
(source: By Delfin CarbonellPublished June 25, 2013Fox News Latino)
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