How much do I lose by reading John Ormsby's translation?

And is Spanish worth learning for just one book?

What languages do you know? People say it's hard to understand even to native spaniards but that's bullshit, if you have notes (because you'll need them anyway if you want to understand the puns), a translation to check when necessary, and aren't afraid of spending much more time than you would reading something in english, it's easy enough to understand

>What languages do you know?
Russian and English.

I'm confused and don't know which rendition to settle on, Ormsby's or Grossman's?

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>just one book

wew

You lose 100% of the translations you don't read
--Wayne Gretzky

Objectively any translation is worse than the original.

Grossman's is pretty good

Baudelaire's translations of Poe are better than the original. Fight me

Poe was a mediocre hack.

Woah nice popular opinion.
This might be true i haven't read them. Poe was a goth god.

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If im reading the english edition, what translation should I get?

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Edith Grossman's, Edith Grossman's, Edith Grossman's, &c &c &c

Spanish is as good as French as a literary language

BUMPPPP

But you are still reading Baudelaire and not Poe.

is motteux good?

desu I think Don Quixote is one of those books where the translation isn't that important. I haven't read the original, but I've read many translations and they were all satisfactory when it comes to prose. The most important part of the books, the characters of DQ and Sancho themsolves, always shine.

>I haven't read the original,
>but
stopped reading right there

you aren't any closer to Cervantes in Spanish than you are in English

How so?

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There are some word plays, but in general as it goes for prose: of course it's better in the original, but the translation just occasionally loses essential things (unlike poetry, where you always lose the essentials imo).

But then again, the hispanistic literature may be one of the richest of all, also due to the full south american continent, so why not learn spanish, not only for Quijote but for all of those great works?

10% loss

Shit-tone of lowbrow books don't automatically make your language rich literary-wise. The best tongues in terms of literature are these: French, English, Russian - the rest are far less so.

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in high school I took up to AP spanish then stopped. could i read don quixote in spanish with a dictionary and a lot of patience?

my guess is no but it seems like people who duolingo their way to proficiency in a language wouldn't be able to read originals either

confirmed for never having read borges or cortazar, not to mention bolaños

>English
Fuck off angloshitter, Spanish has way more good books than muh joyce and muh pynchon.
Cervantes, Unamuno, Borges and Bolaño are way superior to your shitty anglo savages.

I find spanish a very boring tongue tho.
Tho I can read it...

spanish is real fun

#
Boring? Why? I bet so is your English since you can't so much as write properly.

Those are confirmed lowbrow writers.

>Spanish has way more good books than muh joyce and muh pynchon.
You seem to be pretty well rounded in English literature as that's indeed about all we have.

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Not for that book

For what then? Spanish language literature is extremely poor and SPICy.

>mfw I'm a native portuguese speaker
>mfw can understand spanish easily without any sort of formal study of the language

I feel bad for english speaker peasants who have to spend 2~3 years to learn spanish.

>2~3 years to learn spanish.
It's an ongoing process, and you can't expect someone to be good in just 3 years.

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>Borges
>Cortázar
>Bolaño
>García Marquéz
>Vargas Llosa
>Rulfo
>Sábato
>Quevedo
>Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
>Bioy Casares

Etc, etc. Just learn Spanish, m8. It's easy as fuck.

3 years for a language as easy as Spanish is enough to become near-native. That's assuming you actually know how to study languages and don't try to learn by taking college courses or something.

>>Borges spic
>>Cortázar spic
>>Bolaño spic
>>García Marquéz spic, commie, ardent supporter of a mass murderer
The rest are perhaps lowbrow spics too, but their names I see for the first time.

You idiot, there's no way you could cram all that vocab into your hand in just 3 years and be fluent at the native level withal.

Head*

3 years is an enormous amount of time, and if you actually study two or three hours a day instead of 30 minutes every Friday before going out to get drunk and find a used-goods whore to fuck, you would be near-native in way less than three years.

t. trilingual

Unless you're like super gifted, I doubt you could ever reach near-native level.

Only if "super gifted" means having an IQ above 120 (and let's be honest, anyone with an IQ less than that is basically an animal).

Anyways, I'm yet to see such a unique person.

Wow, you retard. Everyone you named is great.

Three years is plenty of time to learn Spanish well enough to read novels or poetry with a dictionary on hand. Speech production is the biggest challenge.

No they are not. The reason you think this is because you're stupid. Go read some French Classics, doggone bonehead.

Checked

quintote check

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wowow
And it has the classiest most dignified insults, unlike the vulgarity of the other 99.99% of posts

Not him, but I enjoy both. It's not like reading Rimbaud detracts from reading Borges.

You just seem like a buttblasted Yuro /pol/tard, which is ironic, since Yuros loved Borges to death, for example.

>Rimbaud
Trash.

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checked

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Grossman

bump faggots

Spanish is my first language and I love it, but you're wrong.