Best translation of Don Quixote? I plan on reading it first in English and again in Spanish. Say why you liked it...

Best translation of Don Quixote? I plan on reading it first in English and again in Spanish. Say why you liked it, so I can decide whether our values align.

Putnam. Nabokov approved.

Spanish is the best because it retains the original idioms and sentence constructions and it's writen the way it was meant to be read, for the people it was meant to

>for the people it was meant to
The people the book was meant for died a couple of centuries ago.

>implying people change
You misunderstand humanity
and underestimate Cervantes

Then the book was meant for everybody, not just the people who know Spanish.

I read the Signet and thoroughly enjoyed it. How I valued the book's translation, or the book itself? I'll choose the latter. The book builds, culminates in Book ii which is far better than Book i, when the Duke and Duchess get their hands on the celebrated duo and all the cruel joking begins to backfire. For it's when the Don and Sancho begin to succeed that the world becomes most indignant, and the love of their failure, the mean pleasure taken in it, becomes the outright hatred of their success. No novel is perhaps as cruel, or as ironic, while at the same time being as full, or as loving, as Don Quixote. And it was written decades before any Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was 41 when Don Quixote part 1 was published my friend

Putnam is the smoothest but Raffel's is the funniest.

Confusing Montaigne for Cervantes temporally. It's early here and off to work. My complete bad. Thanks.

Or vice verse

Borges disagrees

>>>implying people stay the same??
you misunderstand 'humanity'
what is it that doesn't change?

Grossman. The friendship between Sancho and Don Quixote, and the themes. The metafictional parts were funny and interesting but weren't my prime focus. I don't so much care for prose but Grossman is certainly no worse than the other big translators.

more like 450 boyo

Another for Grossman

>450 centuries ago

Borges a shit

Everything, just read some Greeks. Everyone acts the same as nowadays. Only cultural factors change

Yeah? Read Gilgamesh. Older, and just as similar to us now.

Not really that uncommon in literature. Joseph Conrad claims he thought Moncrieff was a better translator than Proust was a writer.

I'd stick with the original language if you can read it, otherwise you should opt for a faithful translation.

I personally read Grossman and absolutely loved it.

Hilary Putnam's daddy did a good job.

u know that's Hilary Putnam's daddy?

almost all of them are good

A portuguese translation of Don Quixote is better than a modern spanish version. But the original spanish is the best.

What about Penguin's version? It's translated by Rutherford.

kys. I mean it.

It's Don Quixote, one of the pillars of literature. It transcends translations. Don't be such a prosefag that you dally. Any translation will suffice. Anyone that disagrees is a pleb who only reads on a surface level (most of this board.)

what does that mean, "only reads on a surface level"?

Primarily caring about prose rather than the substance of a work. Ironic that you would ask this since it's implied in the post. Guess you have poor reading comprehension.

>this is what monolingual plebs actually believe

I speak three languages fluently, one of them being Spanish.

No, Borges felt the same way. It's what comes with being well-read and letting go of sophomoric ways of reading that are designed to let you speak about books that you didn't understand

is prose not the substance of a work?

>Best translation of Don Quixote?
Sort of like asking what chocolate flavor tastes most like vanilla.

It really depends on the book though. Cervantes' prose is seen by most critics as very mediocre, which makes translations work, because there's not that much lost. When a lot of the praise goes to the prose, translations are more likely to hurt it. Still, reading in translation is better than not reading it at all.

Fuck no.

how so?

Characters, themes, and yes -- plot, are all as or more important in a work than prose.

My nigga!

As a Spanish reader I would say that Cervantes prose is really neet and sober, the syntax he uses its not too messed up (the way Gongora's is) and I believe any translation will serve your purpose if you're going to read it in Spanish anyway.