/lit/ - Literature

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The thing with Smollett is that he’s from that a little more wild, a little more fun, if baffling, school of interpretation rather than translation. Its not that he mistook this and that word for others, but rather he made Quixote a work of his own, twisting sentences into a way that he thought would be funny/more fitting than going word for word.
For example, in the opening sentences of Chapter 1 that describes Don Quixote’s personality, he translates ”Amigo de la caza” into ”A regular nimrod”.
It really means ”a friend of the hunt (he was fond of hunting)”.

Rutherford is somewhere in between translating and interpreting and makes a good case for it in his introduction, his translation is great.
The morality, or whatever, of this can be discussed endlessly and in the end you will have a better time picking the one your gut tells you is the most fun/engaging to read. If you want a perfect translation, learn spanish. Cervantes’ spanish is not at all as different from the modern idiom as Shakespeare’s english is and i can read it perfectly after a year and a few months of spanish learning/speaking, only some vocabulary i have to look up.

Academic translations hardly allow any fun or real ”life” into the text, but i would suggest the Ormsby if you hate the idea of interpretation, but he renders a lively book rather stalely for purposes of professionalism.