[The History of Don Quixote Vol. I Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra]@TWC D-Link bookThe History of Don Quixote Vol. I Complete PART I, Complete 11/74
Except in the tales and Don Quixote's speeches, the translator who uses the simplest and plainest everyday language will almost always be the one who approaches nearest to the original. Seeing that the story of "Don Quixote" and all its characters and incidents have now been for more than two centuries and a half familiar as household words in English mouths, it seems to me that the old familiar names and phrases should not be changed without good reason.
Of course a translator who holds that "Don Quixote" should receive the treatment a great classic deserves, will feel himself bound by the injunction laid upon the Morisco in Chap.
IX not to omit or add anything. II: ABOUT CERVANTES AND DON QUIXOTE Four generations had laughed over "Don Quixote" before it occurred to anyone to ask, who and what manner of man was this Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra whose name is on the title-page; and it was too late for a satisfactory answer to the question when it was proposed to add a life of the author to the London edition published at Lord Carteret's instance in 1738.
All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by that time disappeared.
Any floating traditions that may once have existed, transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died out, and of other record there was none; for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against which the nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced no Shakespeare or Cervantes.
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