University of Virginia Library

The Authorship of Smollett's Don Quixote
by
Martin C. Battestin

In the two hundred years from its publication in 1755 to the appearance of Carmine Rocco Linsalata's monograph Smollett's Hoax in 1956, the version of Cervantes' Don Quixote that bears Smollett's name was the target of more damaging, not to say malignant, criticism than he could have bargained for--more, certainly, than the work deserves.[1] And nothing has been done in the past forty years to rescue Smollett's reputation, in this instance, from a formidable battery of charges ranging from plain ignorance to deceit and plagiarism. As a consequence of this criticism, for example, no less an authority than the British Library Catalogue (1975) prefaces the section on Smollett's translations with a caveat casting doubt on his authorship of the work.[2] Yet Smollett scholars have continued to deal with the problem not (as good therapists would advise) by talking about it, but by ignoring it: without a cautionary word, the work remains in all the standard sources simply "Smollett's translation."[3]

Three days after the work was published on 25 February 1755, the attacks began in earnest with an anonymous pamphlet entitled, Remarks on the Proposals lately published for a new translation of Don Quixote--the author, Colonel William Windham, basing his criticism on the specimen (consisting of the first Chapter) that Smollett had published a year earlier as a lure to subscribers. To Windham, the specimen plainly revealed Smollett's ignorance of the Spanish language and Spanish customs, as well as his "unpardonable" (p. 10) negligence in ignoring the two principal "helps" available to him: namely, the Royal "Madrid" Dictionary[4] and Charles Jarvis's more exact translation (1742). After heaping scorn on Smollett's rendering of the phrase "duelos y quebrantos" (the meal Don Quixote eats on Saturdays) as "gripes and grumblings" and the long, arch footnote in which

Smollett burlesques the pedantry of previous translators who had struggled to find an English equivalent for the expression, Windham compares Smollett's understanding of the original to that of a Frenchman who would render "a Welch rabbet" as "un lapin du païs de Galles." In the Royal Dictionary, he continues, Smollett would have found "Duelos y Quebrantos" defined, in Spanish, as "a name peculiar to La Mancha, signifying a kind of amlet made of eggs and brains of beasts" ( p. 11). Windham's criticisms may strike us as po-faced and trifling, but they are often just. For whatever reason (it was, as Windham grants, a "dear" set of volumes), Smollett chose to ignore the Royal Dictionary, preferring instead to rely on that of Captain John Stevens in Spanish and English.[5] In two other instances, indeed, he acknowledged, silently, the justice of Windham's censures by correcting the errors.[6]

On the evidence of the specimen, Windham doubted that Smollett's command of Spanish was adequate to the exacting task of translating Cervantes' masterpiece--a work whose linguistic range and richness is comparable in English only to the canon of Shakespeare. But he did not carry this complaint as far as Smollett's enemy, John Shebbeare would do, who in 1757 insisted that Smollett was "extemely ignorant" of the languages he pretended to translate, not Spanish only but French as well[7] (the latter accusation, it may be said, doing little for Shebbeare's credibility, for French is a language that Smollett certainly knew). It was Shebbeare who started the rumor that Smollett at the time he contracted to translate Don Quixote "did not understand Spanish": such, he claimed, was the objection put to the publisher, Andrew Millar, by a fellow Scot--to which Millar replied that Smollett "had been a full six Weeks to study that Language amongst the native Spaniards, at Brussels."[8] As I will suggest later, this anecdote, if true, can more easily be taken as evidence of Smollett's impressive facility with languages than as a symptom of his ignorance of Spanish.

The slurs of Windham and Shebbeare had little effect on the popularity of Smollett's Don Quixote, which, buoyed by Ralph Griffiths' praise in the Monthly Review,[9] continued to be preferred by most readers over every other English version until the end of the century: from 1755 to 1799 it was published in various editions and reprints no fewer than nineteen times, whereas the versions of his chief rivals, Jarvis and Motteux, were reissued during the

same period just four times each.[10] Not long after the turn of the century, however, the balance began shifting against him, the reputation of Smollett's translation declining to the point where, after 1858, it ceased to be reprinted for almost 130 years, until, in 1986, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a new (but very imperfect)[11] edition, with an Introduction by Carlos Fuentes.

The turning point in the fortunes of Smollett's work would seem to be the publication in 1791 of Lord Woodhouselee's Essay on the Principles of Translation. In an influential chapter on the "Difficulty of translating Don Quixote," Woodhouselee discusses and compares what he considers to be "the best Translations" of the novel, reaching the eccentric conclusion that Motteux's version is "by far the best we have yet seen."[12] Though Woodhouselee makes what I take to be the essential point when, with Smollett in mind, he doubts that it is "possible to conceive a writer more completely qualified to give a perfect translation" of Cervantes' masterpiece (p. 178), he declares his disappointment with Smollett's performance, expressing for the first time the criticism that would prove to be most damaging: Smollett, he states, was merely Jarvis's "copiest and improver" (p. 184); he gave us "little else than an improved edition" (pp. 181-82) of Jarvis's dull, but faithful, translation.

By the 1880s this criticism, together with the conviction that Smollett was incompetent to translate Cervantes' Spanish, became authoritative when it was reiterated by two eminent Cervantists who, in promoting their own translations, found it necessary to depreciate those that came before. In 1881 Alexander James Duffield accused Smollett of ignoring the original while following Jarvis "servilely"; his translation "is only redeemed from the weakness

of plagiarism by the occasional use of choice and special words, to which," Duffield at least allows, "all future translators must stand indebted."[13] In 1885 John Ormsby, author of the best of the new translations, dismissed Smollett's out of hand, asserting that it "has no value, being, indeed, little more than a rifacimento of Jervas's, made without any regard to the original."[14] In 1888 Henry Edward Watts, author of the third important translation of Don Quixote to appear in the decade, was no less severe. He conceded that "[t]he author of Humphrey [sic] Clinker was gifted with a genius not without affinity to that of Cervantes, but unfortunately he knew no Spanish." Watts, though he did not accuse Smollett of stealing from Jarvis, added a wilder surmise of his own, supposing he had "done his book out of the French . . ."; the book was, in any case, "altogether worthless."[15]

Though unsubstantiated, the opinions of Duffield, Ormsby, and Watts, all three able hispanists, carried weight in helping to sink the reputation of Smollett's translation; but it remained for Carmine Rocco Linsalata to mount the only attack on the work that need trouble us today. In his doctoral dissertation of 1949--and subsequently in a pair of articles and the monograph Smollett's Hoax based on the dissertation[16]--Linsalata subjected Smollett's translation to an anatomy that, he believed, proved empirically the work had been cribbed wholesale from Jarvis. The simplest explanation for the plagiarism was clear to him: "As for Smollett's knowledge of Spanish," he declared, "I am convinced he had none."[17] Indeed, Linsalata carried speculation still farther: he could not allow that Smollett himself was author of so shabby a production as this, preferring to suppose instead that he had jobbed it out in pieces to a "school" of hacks in his employ. To the translation that bears Smollett's name he allows just one, dubious, virtue: it is, he concludes, "a gem in the realm of fraudulent acts."[18]

We will return to Linslata's case against Smollett in a moment; but before we do, another--and easily the most extraordinary--episode in the long chronicle of abuse directed at Smollett's Don Quixote remains to be told. At the time Linsalata was accusing him of fraud, Smollett himself became the intended victim of one of the most audacious literary hoaxes of our time--a wonderfully impudent attempt to deprive him of any credit for the translation by adducing what purported to be the hardest evidence of all: nothing less than his own written confession. In 1948, as Linsalata toiled at

his dissertation in Austin, Texas, Professor Francesco Cordasco of Long Island University, New York, made a surprising announcement in the pages of Notes & Queries.[19] "[T]hrough the kindness of [his] kinsman, Don Miguel Madorma of Madrid," he had acquired "a considerable body" of the correspondence of Ricardo Wall, Spanish Ambassador to London from 1748 to October 1752, and the person to whom Smollett dedicated the translation. From this trove of letters, Cordasco published three which, he declared, "are of extreme importance for the revelation they make of the part Smollett played in the translation of Don Quixote which appeared in 1755 in London under his name, and which has enjoyed such [a] contentious claim since in the Smollett canon." These letters, he explained, were "precipitated by Smollett's efforts in the late 1750's to secure the Consulship at Madrid."

The earliest of the three (dated Casa Junqueira, Madrid, 2 September 1759) was Ricardo Wall's querulous reply to the Duchess of Hamilton, who had recommended Smollett for the consulship--an office, Wall assured her, for which he was not at all suited: for one thing, he was "not a person of importance & position"; for another, he had been in Wall's company just once at his London residence, and Wall had found him "unable to answer in the Language when I addressed questions," even though he was then "engaged in the Translation." As for the translation itself, Wall despised it. What is more, he had reason to believe it was not Smollett's work at all: "I had notice," he assured the Duchess, "when this work appeared that [Smollett] had not executed it; but it was the task of one Mr Pettigrew, whom I do not know." To this on 22 October 1759 Lady Hamilton replied that she had informed Smollett he would not be appointed to the consulship, and that he had confirmed Wall's suspicions: "I have tendered him [Smollett] regrets," she writes, "and he fully affirms poor knowledge of the Language, and accords Mr Pettigrew of Bone St the Translation inscribed to you." Cordasco's find was a fortunate one indeed, for the third and final letter removed any possibility of doubt about the truth of these revelations. From Chelsea on 16 November, Smollett himself wrote to Wall as follows:

Having thus effectually removed the translation from the Smollett canon once for all, Cordasco remained puzzled by one remaining problem: "Who was Isaiah Pettigrew of Bone Street? Enquiry and research," he regrets, "have proved futile thus far."

As well they might, for Isaiah Pettigrew never existed, nor was there ever a Bone Street in London before the nineteenth century.[20] The authenticity

of the three letters--and of two other "finds" of the same kind--was challenged by Lewis Knapp and Lillian de la Torre in their review of Cordasco's edition of Smollett's correspondence (1950). At their instance a committee of experts was formed to examine the evidence, the members being Allen T. Hazen, Frederick B. Adams, Jr., and Louis A. Landa. Professor Cordasco could furnish them with just one of the "original" letters, which was judged a forgery. Cordasco publicly accepted this verdict, declaring that he was now convinced all five letters were forgeries, but denying that he had forged them. He had been himself an innocent dupe in this--a "Smollett Hoax" of quite another stripe.[21]

By the middle decades of our century, Smollett's ghost might be pardoned for developing a persecution complex in the matter of the translation of Don Quixote. Though, thanks to the alertness of his guardians in the academy, the mischief of the forged letters has been nullified, Professor Linsalata's charges are less easily refuted.[22] These are as follows: (1) that the translation published under his name was in all probability the production not of Smollett himself, but of a "school" of hackney scribblers; (2) that Smollett knew no Spanish; and (3) that, in any case, the work is nothing more than a plagiarism or close paraphrase of Jarvis's version. What credence do these accusations deserve?

1. Smollett's "Hack School"

As we have seen, Isaiah Pettigrew of Bone Street, Cordasco's candidate for the authorship of Smollett's Don Quixote, proved to be an insubstantial ghost--his name and local habitation returned to airy nothing by the exposure of the forged letters. Linsalata, however--convinced that Smollett knew no Spanish and therefore at a loss to explain the occurrence of passages in the translation that correct Jarvis's inaccuracies--solved the puzzle to his own satisfaction by attributing the work to an entire workshop of phantom scribblers whom he supposed to be in Smollett's employ.[23]

Given the contradiction between Smollett's alleged incompetence and the frequent felicities of the translation as he found it, Linsalata's hypothesis was perhaps not unreasonable --especially in light of the fact that Smollett, in the late 1750s, is known to have supported just such a band of hackney authors whose company amused him and whose small talents he put to use

in the various, often voluminous, literary projects he was engaged in: projects such as his Complete History of England in 11 volumes (1757-58) and its Continuation in 5 volumes (1760-65). It is Shebbeare again, Smollett's enemy, who first mentions his "hack school" in a mock-advertisement dated from Smollett's house in Chelsea, 26 November 1757: More reliable testimony of the scribbling satellites that circled round Smollett at this time comes from his friend Alexander Carlyle, who, in his autobiography, recalls meeting Smollett for dinner at Forrest's Coffeehouse, Chelsea, in 1758: This may well be the same circle of literary "myrmidons," as Carlyle calls them--they were five in number, all "curious characters"--whom Smollett himself would later immortalize in Humphry Clinker.[26]

There is, however, no evidence connecting Smollett with this club of hireling authors until well after publication of his Don Quixote early in 1755. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that he produced that work on his own. Since Smollett did not gather his authors around him until some time after he moved to Chelsea from the Strand in June of 1750, Linsalata (who mistakenly placed the move in 1752) assumed that "no serious work was done on Don Quixote" until after that date.[27] Smollett himself, however, points to a different period of composition. In advertisements for the translation that ran in the Public Advertiser during March 1754, he assured potential subscribers that "the Work was begun and the greatest Part actually finished four Years ago."[28] By this reckoning the bulk of the translation must have been written during the period from the latter months of 1748 to March 1750, before Smollett established himself in Chelsea. It was in June 1748 that he contracted to produce the work, and before the year was out he had made substantial progress on it. This seems a reasonable inference from the publisher's announcement in November 1748 that the translation was "Preparing for the PRESS"--an announcement repeated

nearly a year later, in September 1749.[29] Other business, undertaken because he needed money, prevented Smollett from keeping up the expeditious pace with which he began the work; and, since he had been paid in advance for it, there was no urgency about finishing.[30]

During the six years and more that passed between his contracting to do the translation and its publication, Smollett engaged himself in an astonishing number of other projects of every description: translations of Le Sage's Gil Blas (October 1748) and The Devil upon Crutches (1750), as well as Voltaire's Micromegas (1752); an opera Alceste (c. 1748-49), a tragedy The Regicide (1749), a comedy The Absent Man (1750); the novels Peregrine Pickle (1751) and Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753); a medical treatise On the External Use of Water (1752), as well as two volumes of Dr. William Smellie's Treatise on midwifery (1751, 1754) which Smollett prepared for the press. These productions, and much more besides, attest to the pressures of Smollett's straitened circumstances during this period. It is unlikely he had the money, even if we suppose he had the inclination, to farm out the translation of Don Quixote for others to make a hash of. Not until the spring of 1754, when he published his proposals to subscribers, did he have the incentive to put all else aside and finish the work. This is the situation he described to Dr. Macaulay in a letter of 11 December 1754:

The spectacle of Smollett's frenetic literary activity during this period accounts readily enough for the delay in completion of the translation, which obviously was not being carried forward by other hands. Smollett's own statements point to what actually happened. Having been paid in advance for the translation, he worked at it more or less steadily until, some time in 1750, he had completed "the greater Part" of it. Then, in need of money, he set the translation aside to undertake fresh projects; not until the summer of 1754 is there evidence of his resuming the work in earnest to fulfill the agreement with his publishers made six years earlier.

Two passages from Peregine Pickle (1751), chapters ci-cii, seem directly relevant to the theory of Smollett's "hack school." In the first, Smollett treats with scorn precisely the kind of figure Linsalata would make him out to be: the literary entrepreneur who resorts to the cynical expedient of producing books--and translations in particular--by job lot:

A few pages later in the narrative, Smollett introduces an author of a different character, though again a translator, whose case resembles his own soon after he declared his intention to translate Cervantes' masterpiece--an announcement that prompted rival booksellers to issue new editions of the competing translations by Jarvis and Motteux.[33]

Smollett, as we will see, had reason to resent the insinuation that he neither knew Spanish nor wrote the translation of Don Quixote that appeared under his name in 1755. That he was ready enough, in producing that work, to avail himself silently of a variety of printed sources will also become clear, and will surprise no one who is acquainted with authorial practice of the period. But by the standards of his day the work was his own, not that of a "hack school."[34] In 1763 Smollett obliged Richard Smith of New Jersey by sending him a brief account of his life. Prominent in what he called "a genuine List of my Productions" included in the letter is "A Translation of Don Quixote." Notable, too, is the indignation with which he denied the charge that was levelled at him in his own time and in ours: "I am much mortified to find it is believed in America that I have lent my name to Booksellers; that is a species of Prostitution of which I am altogether incapable."[35]

2. Smollett's Knowledge of Spanish

The charge that Smollett knew no Spanish can be laid to rest with some confidence. There is much evidence that he understood Spanish and had studied Don Quixote in the original.

Simply considering the general question of Smollett's facility with languages, there is every probability he could have acquired a reasonable competence in Spanish in a relatively short time. As a boy he was taught Latin by John Love, headmaster of the Dumbarton grammar school and a man respected as a classical scholar and pedagogue. At Dumbarton not only the lectures but the dialogues between student and master were in Latin; indeed, if a boy slipped into the vernacular in class he could be whipped.[36] Smollett learned his lessons well. As an adult he read Claudian aloud, in Latin, to his friend William Huggins;[37] and during his travels in France he was capable of writing, entirely in Latin, a lengthy diagnosis of his ailments addressed to the eminent physician, Dr. Fizès, who, Smollett scornfully remarks, could answer him only in French.[38] That Smollett read French easily is clear not only from his translations of Le Sage, Fénelon and Voltaire, but also from the notes to his Don Quixote, for which he made extensive use of Louis Moréri's Grand dictionnaire historique, and also (and much more impressively) of M. de la Curne de Ste. Palaye's "Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie,"[39] in which many passages consist of quotations from medieval sources. From his correspondence with William Huggins, the translator of Ariosto and Dante, we also know that Smollett had a sufficient command of Italian to be able to read Francesco Berni's Orlando innamorato as well as Ariosto's Orlando furioso in the original: "Since I parted from you in the Country," Smollett wrote Huggins in November 1759, "I have read Berni and the orlando furioso in the Italian from one end to the other, and was indeed become a sort of a Knight errant in Imagination . . . ."[40] Later, anticipating his journey to Italy, he wrote William Hunter that he was "giving my whole attention to the Italian Language which I think I shall be able to speak tolerably in six months."[41]

Linguistic facility such as this, at least in the romance languages, did not seem particularly extraordinary to the educated class of Great Britain in the eighteenth century, most of whom attended schools where, as Fielding put it, a boy had Latin "inoculated into his Tail."[42] Fielding, for one, considered

this sort of aptitude for languages completely unremarkable. From Lisbon where he planned to write a history of Portugal, he wrote his half-brother John asking that he send him "a conversible Man," someone of learning and good humor, to be his companion and amanuensis: it would be an advantage, of course, if the man understood Portuguese or Spanish, "which," however, Fielding assured his brother, "if he doth not, he may easily, if he hath the Latin Grammatical Rudiments, learn . . . ."[43]

It is not unlikely, then, that Smollett could have acquired a competence in Spanish without great difficulty. But the case for his knowledge of the language needn't rest on probabilities alone. In letters to friends Smollett expressly stated his qualifications both to undertake the translation of Don Quixote and to serve as British consul at Madrid. In June 1748, before beginning the work, he wrote Alexander Carlyle: "I have contracted with two Booksellers to translate Don Quixote from the Spanish Language, which I have studied some time."[44] How long, one wonders, was "some time"? If Shebbeare's story is true that Smollett had studied Spanish in Brussels for six weeks, the period in question--to judge from what we know of his movements--would probably have been a time in the early 1740s. Later, in a letter of December 1762, Smollett informed John Home that "[i]n the last ministry" (probably in the autumn of 1759) he had "made some advances towards the Consulship of Madrid for which I thought myself in some respects qualified, as I understood the Spanish Language and was personally known to Mr. Wall, the minister of his catholic majesty."[45] That he did not mean to deceive his friends by pretending to knowledge he did not have is certain from the testimony of John Moore, one of Smollett's closest friends and the editor of his Works (1797). In his biographical sketch of Smollett, Moore takes up the question of his competence to undertake the translation of Don Quixote; his observations on the subject are eminently sane and to our purpose:

To the testimony of Smollett and his friend that he understood the language of Cervantes, we may add other clear signs from outside the text of the translation itself that he read Don Quixote in the original--read it perhaps with some difficulty, but read it nevertheless. Included in the list of books seized by the customs when Smollett landed at Boulogne to begin his travels in 1763 are two copies of Cervantes' masterpiece: one a translation of Don Quixote in four volumes (probably the second edition of his own version [1761]); the other, Don Quixote in the original Spanish. He also carried with him five dictionaries: in Greek, Latin, French, Italian--and in Spanish.[47] Incidental passages scattered throughout Smollett's writings also suggest that he was well acquainted with the language of Cervantes. He understood, for instance, the characteristics of Spanish pronunciation, and he could recall at will some of Cervantes' more colorful locutions in Don Quixote. In Italy on his travels Smollett commented on "the pronunciation of the Tuscans," which he found "disagreeably guttural: the letters C and G they pronounce with an aspiration, which hurts the ear of an Englishman; and is, I think, rather rougher than that of the X, in Spanish. It sounds as if the speaker had lost his palate."[48] In Adventures of an Atom the mob, "like the cow-heel in Don Quixote [II.iv.7; 2: 374-75][49] . . . seemed to cry, Comenme, comenme; Come eat me, come, eat me."[50] And, chiding his friend Huggins for complaining that he was oppressed with business, Smollett recalled one of Cervantes' favorite expressions ("tortas y pan pintado") that recurs in Don Quixote (e.g. I.iii.3; 1: 94): "You talk of the Pistrinum or Cart's Tail; that is, according to the Spanish Proverb, no more than panpintado, Cakes and Gingerbread to what I undergo"[51]--it is worth noting, moreover, that Smollett's translation of pan pintado is a closer English equivalent than any previous attempt (e.g. Jarvis: "tarts and cheese-cakes"), and was adopted by Putnam.

Later, we will consider what the translation itself reveals about Smollett's command of the language of Cervantes. For now it should be clear that, as he claimed, he had studied Spanish and was entirely capable of reading it.

3. Jarvis and the Question of Plagiarism.

The third charge against Smollett's Don Quixote--namely, that the work is a plagiarism of Jarvis's version--brings its place in the canon into question no less surely than if it had been written by committee, as Linsalata supposed. The charge originated in 1791 with Lord Woodhouselee, who called

the work "little else than an improved edition" of Jarvis, whose own version, though faithful to the literal sense of the original, he found "heavy and aukward."[52] Confirmed, as we earlier remarked, by Duffield and Ormsby in the next century, and more recently by Samuel Putnam,[53] this remains the orthodox verdict on both authors.

No one before Linsalata, however, was willing to undertake the drudgery of attempting to prove by collation the extent of Smollett's dependence on Jarvis[54]--or, indeed, of his dependence on other possible models in English and in French. By comparing a dozen selected passages from Smollett with the corresponding passages in the translations by Thomas Shelton (1612-20), John Philips (1687), Peter Motteux (1700), and John Stevens (1700)--and by similarly comparing twenty-eight short excerpts from Smollett and the French of Oudin-Rosset--Linsalata was satisfied he had sufficiently demonstrated the improbability that Smollett had followed any of these versions in producing his own.[55] What these collations actually reveal, however, is the dependence of Stevens on Shelton (whose work he revised) and the closeness of Smollett's phraseology to that of Stevens--the reason for this being that Jarvis, who served as Smollett's guide through the difficulties of Cervantes' Castillian, wrote with his own eye on Shelton. In this period, threading labyrinths to the source of a translation is, generally speaking, no simple task. The version called Motteux's, for example, was not written, but published, by him--the work itself being, as the title-page declares, a pastiche executed "by several Hands." There is reason, moreover, to doubt that the version published under the name of Charles "Jarvis" was in fact wholly written by Pope's friend, the portrait painter Charles Jervas (the name itself being garbled on the title-page): Jervas died in 1739, three years before the work was published in 1742; he was not, except for this one ambitious work, an author at all; and Pope, who knew him well, declared to Warburton that he had no Spanish.[56]

What concerns us, however, is not the authorship of the translation published under Jarvis's name, but the extent to which Smollett depended on it for his own. For the answer to this question, we are chiefly indebted to Linsalata, who alone has performed the task of comparing, page by page, the two versions of Cervantes' novel--a work of more than 400,000 words. The result of his collation, however, is more ambiguous than it appeared to either Linsalata or his champion, Professor Knowles, who believed that Linsalata had "demonstrate[d] beyond any reasonable doubt that the bulk of the Smollett translation was a poorly disguised theft from that of Jarvis."[57] The documentation to which Knowles refers consists of 472 parallel passages (ranging in size from two to sixty-two typewritten lines) which Linsalata divides into four distinct categories of literary theft: namely, to use his own terms, "plagiarism," "paraphrasing," "rewriting," and "inversion." In Smollett's Hoax (pp. 14-15) he illustrates these techniques with the following examples comparing the original with the versions of Jarvis and Smollett:

In making his case against the integrity of Smollett's translation, Linsalata presumably considered these seven parallel passages among the most definitive and damning of the 472 he culled in the course of collation. For this reason--and recalling the axiom that one can gauge the full measure of Hercules from the dimensions of his foot--I have reprinted them at length. What do they in fact reveal about Smollett's habits of literary appropriation--to borrow that useful term from Roger Lund's essay on the practice of Pope?[59] We can agree, I believe, that the claim that Smollett subjected Jarvis's text to four distinct "techniques" of appropriation is specious: at what point does plagiarism shade into paraphrase, and when does paraphrase become rewriting, or rewriting, inversion? Besides this unhelpful confusion of terms, not all the examples above will be seen to serve Linsalata's purpose: the last two passages show nothing more than Smollett freely rendering the sense of a line or two of the original--an aspect of the theory of translation in the period to which he explicitly subscribes in his preface. These same two passages, moreover, remind us that, whatever liberties a translator may allow himself in order to convey the spirit of the original, he is also concerned to render as faithfully as possible the sense of the work; and the range of synonymous locutions in his own language is limited. Is it surprising, therefore, that both Jarvis and Smollett should use identical words in translating, for example, "Heroica resolución del gran Filipo Tercero"? Except for Shelton, who was first to translate Don Quixote into any language, this simple constraint, inherent in the nature of the genre, has meant that every subsequent translator of the work will be heard to echo, from time to time, one or more of his predecessors. This being so, Smollett's decision to turn when in doubt to Jarvis, author of the most literally exact translation available to him,[60] may be seen as a virtue; it imparted an essential accuracy to his translation as he set about meeting the greater challenge of capturing the color and vitality of Cervantes' masterpiece.

Linsalata has adduced enough unquestionable evidence to demonstrate the extent of Smollett's dependence on Jarvis. Even so, far from justifying the claim that Smollett's translation was a hoax, that evidence just as surely points to Smollett's having written the great bulk of the work with his eye on Cervantes, not on Jarvis. Even if we grant the relevance to Linsalata's case of all 472 examples of Smollett's alleged borrowing from Jarvis--and besides that figure being inflated, as we have seen, it includes at least one example in which Smollett's rendering of the original has been shown to be more accurate than that of Jarvis[61]--it will appear that 86 per cent of the text did not yield passages to his purpose.[62] Indeed, the number of readers who have compared

the two versions without suspecting Smollett of plagiarism supports the view that the offending passages are relatively few and far between. Windham--though, to be sure, he had examined only the specimen of Smollett's translation and not the whole work--was so little inclined to make this particular complaint that he could "scarcely suppose [Smollett] ever could have seen" Jarvis's more accurate version; and Griffiths, the first actually to compare the rival versions of the same passage from the original, was in no doubt that Smollett's "genius (notwithstanding some things that appear to be rather inaccuracies than defects in judgment) comes nearest the great original."[63] Far more impressive is the verdict of Charles Duff, an able linguist and translator of numerous Spanish authors, including Quevedo. At the request of Smollett's biographer, Lewis Melville, Duff compared Smollett's translation with other "standard" translations and came to the following conclusion:

Sixty years would pass before the Noonday Press took this hint, publishing in 1986 a reprint of the first edition with an Introduction by Carlos Fuentes. In his Foreword, Fuentes declared his preference for Smollett's Don Quixote over all other English versions. In this, he was not alone among readers whose native language is the language of Cervantes. Francisco Rodríguez Marín, perhaps the preeminent Cervantist of our century (whose edition of Don Quixote Linslata himself regards as authoritative), was of the same opinion. When told by Cordasco of David Hannay's opinion that Smollett was sufficiently in sympathy with his author to have produced a translation having "an original literary value of its own," Rodríguez Marín replied that "he heartily approved" that judgment: "of all English translations, he entertained a particular fondness for that of Smollett."[65]

4. Smollett and the Question of Originality.

The qualities that make Smollett's version of Don Quixote the most readable in our language are chiefly attributable, of course, to his own powers as a novelist and to his command of the full stylistic range of English discourse; he had a "genius," as his contemporaries would call it, unmatched by his competitors in this particular work of translation before or since. Smollett's voice is distinctive, and we hear it plainly throughout the work. In this sense the translation indeed is very much his own. And it is his own as well in a number of formal features that originated with him--such as the

introductory "Life of Cervantes," the official preliminaries to Part II of the novel, and many of the explanatory annotations to the text. At the same time, however, Smollett often depended for these innovations on a variety of sources, none of which he chose to acknowledge. It is time to consider more closely the question of Smollett's originality in the translation.

That Smollett had a sufficient understanding of Spanish to enable him to work directly from the original ought to have been clear all along from the fact that no translation before his own included the official preliminaries to Part II of the novel: immediately following Cervantes' Preface to the reader, these are the "Approbation" of the Licentiate Marques Torres; "The Ordinary Licence" of Doctor Gutierrez de Cetina; and the further "Approbation" of Joseph de Valdivielso. Only the first of these, the important Approbabtion of Marques Torres, was already available to Smollett in English, since it is quoted in full in Ozell's translation of Gregorio's Life of Cervantes (1738); even so, the version in Smollett's translation is entirely new. Moreover, in the second of the three preliminaries the variant spelling of the Ordinary's name --"Cetina" rather than "Centina"--serves to identify the particular edition of the original used by Smollett; for this spelling is found only in the edition of Don Quixote printed for Juan Mommarte at Brussels in 1662 and subsequently reissued by the Verdussens of Antwerp in 1673 and 1697.[66] It is worth noting that this text--though not equal in authority to the edition of Pedro Pineda (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1738)--was judged by Ormsby to be superior to all other Spanish editions published from 1637 to 1771.[67]

As for English sources, though Jarvis was Smollett's principal guide, it is clear from collation of editions available to him at the time of composition that he also consulted Ozell's revision of Motteux (in either the seventh [1743] or eighth [1749] edition), as well as Stevens' revision of Shelton (in either the first [1700] or second [1706] edition). Another source, second in importance only to Jarvis, was Stevens' Spanish-English Dictionary (1706 and 1726).[68] Without naming them, Smollett at the start of his narrative quotes all four of these works in an elaborate footnote (noticed, as we have

seen, by Windham) mocking the haplessness of "former translators" who struggled to find an English equivalent for "duelos y quebrantos" (Don Quixote's meal on Saturdays), his own no less hapless solution being "gripes and grumblings." That Smollett consulted these sources throughout the translation is clear from many passages in both the text itself and in his footnotes to the text; these passages, too numerous to list here, will be identified in the explanatory annotations to the forthcoming Georgia edition.

Smollett's "originality" in this work--in the particular sense in which that term seems appropriate here--can perhaps best be seen both in the "Life of Cervantes" prefixed to Part I of the novel and in the footnotes to the text. The "Life" was obviously written by Smollett, and at first glance it would appear to be the product of considerable impressive research into primary sources. In his footnotes Smollett cites works by the Spanish scholars Tomás Tamayo de Vargas (1588-1641), Don Nicolas Antonio (1617-84), author of Bibliotheca Hispania (Rome, 1672), and Fr. Diego de Haedo (d. 1608), author of Topographia e Historia general de Argel (Valladolid, 1612); and he appears as well to be acquainted with the entire canon of Cervantes. In truth, however, these were all sources cited by the two authors on whom Smollett entirely depended for the substantive detail of the "Life." Most important of these was Don Gregorio Mayáns y Siscár (1699-1781), keeper of the Royal Library at Madrid and Cervantes' first biographer. Gregorio's Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Briga-Real, 1737) was translated into English by John Ozell (1738), the translation being reissued subsequently as part of Jarvis's translation of Don Quixote (1742); it is clear from numerous correspondences in phrasing that Smollett's source was not the Spanish of Gregorio, but the English of Ozell.

That Gregorio's biography was a likely source for Smollett's "Life" has not gone unnoticed.[69] His other principal source, however, was obscure enough to have been overlooked not only by Gregorio, but also--as William Windham remarked before he had read Smollett's translation--"by all the writers which I have seen, that mention Cervantes...."[70] This was Joseph Morgan's Complete History of Algiers (1728-29) in which Smollett found an account of Cervantes' captivity in Algiers based on Haedo--a stroke of luck that enabled him to become the first of Cervantes' biographers to treat this interesting episode.[71] Smollett's "Life," then, must lay its claim to originality not on the facts it rehearses, but on its author's presentation and interpretation of the facts, an interpretation colored throughout by Smollett's strong personal sympathy with his subject.

In the footnotes to the translation this same pattern obtains: Smollett's practice is to abridge and paraphrase a variety of sources, always without acknowledgment. In Smollett's Hoax, Linsalata charged that no fewer than seventy-one of Jarvis's notes were "copied" by Smollett--or rather by Smollett's

phantom "journeymen."[72] But besides ignoring Smollett's constant way of improving on Jarvis's prose by reducing his prolix and leaden phrasing to an elegant conciseness, Linsalata, by focussing exclusively on Jarvis in his search for Smollett's sources, failed to see that in a third of his examples Smollett drew either on a source he and Jarvis were independently following, or on a source unknown to Jarvis. In twenty-four of the seventy-one parallels cited, Smollett's debts were to others besides Jarvis, as follows: to John Stevens' Spanish-English Dictionary--thirteen examples; to the commentary of earlier translators, especially Stevens' revision of Shelton and Ozell's revision of Motteux--seven examples; to sources not consulted by Jarvis, namely, Louis Moréri's Grand dictionnaire historique and André Félibien's Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et moderne--two examples. Jarvis was certainly an important source for Smollett in annotating Don Quixote, but he was one among many. Of the 187 footnotes in the first edition (1755), forty-seven were based on Jarvis; of the sixteen further footnotes Smollett added to the second edition (1761), only one reveals Jarvis's influence--and in that one Smollett, following Jarvis, regrettably altered his own preferable translation for the worse.[73]

In its final form, Smollett's translation includes, as commentary on the text of the novel, 203 footnotes. These are chiefly of five kinds. (1) The great majority explain problematic Spanish words, proverbs, and idiomatic expressions and offer reasons for Smollett's rendering them as he does. For guidance in solving these specifically textual and linguistic difficulties, Smollett relied principally on Stevens' Dictionary--and, of course, on the examples of his predecessors. (2) Of the other notes, twenty-three, most of them new and based on Smollett's close reading of the text, call attention to inconsistencies in Cervantes' plot and characterization. (3) Twenty-one notes, comprising about one tenth of the total, comment on the customs of ancient chivalry: all these, though representing a unique contribution of Smollett's translation, he abridged without acknowledgment from the French of Ste. Palaye's "Mémoires sur l'ancienne chevalerie," published in Mémoires de littérature, tirés des registres de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, depuis l'année M.DCCXLIV, jusques compris l'année M.DCCXLVI, volume 20 (Paris, 1753). Of a similar kind is another note on the customs of Roman Catholic "disciplinants" (II.ii.15; 2: 204 n.) which Smollett abridged from Blainville's Travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Other Parts of Europe, translated by William Guthrie and others, 3 volumes (1743-45). (4) For information on certain historical figures to whom Cervantes alludes,

Smollett turned four times to Moréri's Grand dictionnaire historique;[74] and once, for a colorful anecdote concerning the wealthy Foucker brothers of Augsburg (II.ii.6; 2: 144 n.), he looked to Félebien's Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes (Paris, 1696). (5) Finally, no fewer than five of the notes Smollett added to the second edition were doubtless inspired by his new-found friendship with William Huggins, translator of Ariosto: in one way or another, these all concern the Orlando romances--Boiardo's and Berni's Orlando innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando furioso.

Among the triumphs of Smollett's translation is his skillful rendering of Cervantes' poetry. Through the long narrative of his hero's adventures Cervantes scattered some forty poems. These are written on a variety of subjects evoking a range of mood from the pathetic to the ludicrous, and they differ widely in length and form. Indeed, with regard to its formal features the verse is often metrically irregular and dependent for its musical effects on assonant rhymes--features difficult to duplicate in English at any time, and in the age of Pope unthinkable. In this respect, as in the translation as a whole, Smollett succeeded remarkably well in suggesting the qualities of the original without attempting to reproduce them literally: for example, he renders the goatherd Antonio's doric "ditty" to Olalla in seventeen numbered quatrains in an irregular meter alternating between eight and nine syllables (I.ii.3; 1: 56-58); for Chrysostom's "Song of Despair" he chose ten numbered twelve-line stanzas, each rhyming ababcdcdefef (I.ii.[6]; 1: 72-74); for Cardenio's lament, three numbered stanzas of five couplets, metrically very complex--in each, lines 1, 3, 5, 7-10 are tetrameter, lines 2 and 4 dimeter, and line 6 trimeter (I.iii.13; 1: 183); the bogus ghost of Merlin addresses the horrified hero and his squire in forty-nine lugubrious lines of blank verse (II.iii.3; 2: 221-22). And Don Quixote's two comic attempts to sing his imaginary mistress's virtues are, in the first instance, confined to three stanzas of nine lines, in which her name in the refrain "Dulcinea | del Toboso" is made to rhyme with "be a", "defray a" and "to play a" (I.iii.12; 1: 175-76); his later song on the same subject consists of sixteen couplets in lame feet of seven syllables (II.iii.14; 2: 282-83).

These examples suggest the care Smollett took to convey the spirit of his great original in the idioms and literary conventions of his own language. In a footnote to the first of these poems, he made clear that he took this responsibility seriously. It is important, I believe, to the question of Smollett's authorship of the translation that he should focus his remarks (though without naming him) on Jarvis; for Smollett well knew that Jarvis's translation, even by Ozell's admission, had already established itself as the most literally exact of previous versions of Don Quixote. Smollett's criticism, supported by his own literal translation of the verses in question, suggests the confidence with which he was prepared to challenge his rival's claims to a superior understanding

of both Cervantes' language and the subtleties of his narrative. Commenting on Stanza XI of the goatherd's song, Smollett writes:

What, finally, does Smollett's rendering of Cervantes' narrative reveal about the qualities of the translation? The answer to the basic question of his competence in Spanish is not, certainly, as unambiguously negative as we have been led to believe. Though Smollett at times misread the text, in a surprising number of instances he is actually more accurate than any of his predecessors.

Far from following Jarvis "servilely," as Duffield put it, Smollett's errors are often owing to a misplaced confidence in his own command of Spanish. Perhaps the most egregious example is his rendering of the expression "en dos paletos," which, as all his predecessors understood, means simply "briefly, instantly": apparently mistaking pelotas (balls) for paletas (trowels or painters' palettes), Smollett unwisely tried to make literal sense of the phrase, twice translating it as "in the twinkling of two balls" (II.iii.19; 2: 319) and "in the turning of two balls" (II.iv.8; 2: 388). Other examples are less hilarious, but no less to the point.

• (I.iv.14; 1: 315) The Captive relates that as he talked with her father, "salio de la casa del jardin la bella Zorayda, la qual ya avia mucho que me avia visto" ("the lovely Zoraida came out of the garden house. She had caught sight of me some while before" [Putnam]). Smollett alone found this passage confusing: "the fair Zorayda came out into the garden. She had already perceived me from a window of the house . . . ." Jarvis has: "the fair Zoraida, who had espied me some time before, came out of the house."
• (II.i.1; 2: 9) The page whom Smollett describes as "yellow-haired" is in fact "beardless" (barbiluzio), as all Smollett's pedecessors have it. In this he may have been misled by Stevens: "Barbil úzio, one that has a red beard"; "Lúzio [from lúcio] . . . bright, shining or transparent."
• (II.ii.10; 2: 170) When Don Quixote uses the proverbial expression, "quando la colera sale de madre, no tiene la lengua padre," Smollett alone renders it, "When choler once is born, the tongue all curb doth scorn," providing in a footnote what he takes to be the literal sense: "When choler quits the mother, the tongue has then no father." In this, however, though he gained a rhyme ("born/scorn"), he missed the meaning. The idiom, "salír de mádre," denotes a river's overflowing its banks (Stevens: Salír). Jarvis has, "when choler overflows its dam," which ingeniously preserves the double meaning of madre.
• (II.ii.11; 2: 174) Sancho speaks sarcastically of the hardships of his lot as Don

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  Quixote's squire, using the expression, "en vuestra mano estàescudillar" (literally, "the ladling [of the stew] is in your own hand"). Both Jarvis and Shelton understood the metaphor, Jarvis translating the phrase lamely, but accurately enough: "it is in your own power to dish up the mess"; Smollett makes nonsense of it: "the saddle is in your own hand."
• (II.iii.15; 2: 292) In bringing a scene of Sancho's indignation to a quiet close, the narrator says, "andese la paz en el corro." Smollett, apparently confusing carréra (career) with corro (company), renders the phrase, "peace attend him in his career"; Jarvis has "peace be with him and company."
• (II.iv.7; 2: 372) When Don Quixote and his squire sit down to a meal, the narrator ironically remarks that Sancho holds back, "su Señor hiziesse la salva"--a reference to the custom of the nobility's employing "tasters" who sample their food to be sure it is safe to eat. Stevens (s.v. Sálva) glossed the expression hazér la salva, and Jarvis, following Shelton, got it right: "his master should first be his taster." Smollett, however, disregarding these helps, missed the irony: Sancho "waited . . . until his master should begin."

Smollett's translation is not free from errors such as these--errors, it is worth noting, which would not have occurred if he had been tracking Jarvis as closely as we have assumed. Much more remarkable, however, are the number of passages in which he caught the sense of the original more convincingly than Jarvis and other translators. Besides his telling criticism of Jarvis's rendering of the goatherd's song, already cited, consider the following examples:

• (I.i.2; 1: 10) When Don Quixote calls him "Señor Castellano," the landlord thinks he means one of "los sanos de Castilla." Smollett alone understood the allusion: "Mine host imagining that he called him Castellano*, because he looked like a hypocritical rogue," commenting in his note: "Sano de Castella, signifies a crafty knave." He was presumably indebted to Stevens: "Sáno . . . Sáno de Castilla, in cant, a dissembling thief." Jarvis echoes all previous translators in rendering the passage: "The host thought he called him Castellano because he took him for an honest Castilian," commenting: "Castellano in Spanish signifies both a governour of a castle, and a native of Castile."
• (I.i.8; 1: 42) The Biscainer, blustering threats at Don Quixote, inverts a proverbial phrase: "el agua quan presto veràs que al gato llevas." Smollett paraphrased this in a Somerset dialect simulating the Biscainer's rude speech: "'che will soon zee which be the better man*'", and, in a footnote probably indebted to Stevens (Gáto), became the first translator to gloss the passage: "The literal meaning of the Spanish is, Thou shalt soon see who is to carry the cat to the water; or rather, in the corrupted Biscayan phrase, 'The water how soon thou wilt see, that thou carriest to the cat." Jarvis, following Motteux and Ozell, has simply, "I will make no more of thee than a cat does of a mouse."
• (I.ii.4; 1: 61) Referring to Chrysostom, a young man of unimpeachable character and sole heir of his father who has died, Pedro the goatherd calls him "Señor desoluto" of all his father's wealth. Smollett translates this "desolate lord and master"; all previous translators, as well as Ormsby and Watts, have "dissolute"--an adjective entirely inappropriate in context and unlikely in the old spelling of the Spanish, dissoluto rather than the modern disoluto (see Stevens and the Royal Dictionary [1732]). Putnam silently translates it "absolute," desoluto being a barbarism for absoluto (see C. Fernandez Gomes, Vocabulario de Cervantes [Madrid, 1962]). But Smollett's "desolate" desoluto suggesting desolar (Stevens: "Desolár . . . to make desolate")--also preserves the malapropism as well as being appropriate to Chrysostom's grief.
• (I.iii.7; 1: 126) Soon after Don Quixote mistakes the beat of the fulling-mill hammers for the terrible sound of giants, he prepares to assault a stranger whom he believes to be wearing Mambrino's helmet. Afraid of another painful misadventure,

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  Sancho says, "mas quiera Dios . . . que oregano sea, y no batanes"--adapting to his present purpose the proverbial expression, "á Dios plega que oregano sea y no se nos vuelva alcarabea" ("please God it be marjoram, and not turn carraway upon us" [Watts]). Smollett alone understood the original: he translates, "God grant . . . that this may turn out a *melon rather than a milling," commenting in the footnote that "Oregano . . . signifies sweet marjoram, as if Sancho had wished his master might find a nosegay, rather than a bloody nose." His predecessors either ignore the play on the proverb or get it wrong: "I pray . . . it may not prove another fulling-mill adventure" (Jarvis); "I wish this may'nt prove another blue Bout, and a worse Jobb than the Fulling-Mills" (Motteux and Ozell); "I wish . . . it prove a golden Purchase, and not a Fulling-Mill" (Stevens' revision of Shelton).
• (I.iv.2; 1: 209) In his footnote on the mythical "kingdom of Micomicon" ("Reyno de Micomicon") Smollett was first to propose that Cervantes intended a play on mico: "As if he had said Ape land: Mico signifying an ape."
• (I.iv.4; 1: 232) Andrew takes his leave of Don Quixote "and as the saying is, took his foot in his *hand." Smollett in his note was first to gloss the original: "Literally, Took the road in his hands [tomò el camino en las manos]." The expression is not in Stevens or Pineda, and Jarvis and Ozell, without comment, simply have, "and marched off."
• (I.iv.7; 1: 259) Leonola credits Lothario with "a whole alphabet of accomplishments," and proceeds to name a virtue beginning with every letter in the Spanish alphabet, which has no k and w. Smollett followed the original, omitting words beginning with k and w; only Shelton before him had preserved this peculiarity of the original, and Smollett seems not to have known Shelton except in Stevens' revision.
• (I.iv.15; 1: 332) As the curate tells the story of Zoraida and the captive, Cervantes writes: "A todo lo qual estava tan atento el Oydor, que ninguna vez avia sido tan Oydor como entonces," which Smollett renders: "to which the judge listened with more attention than ever he had yielded on the bench*." In annotating the passage, he became the first translator to note Cervantes' play on oidor: "*A judge in Spanish is called Oydor, i.e. Hearer, and the original literally translated , is, 'The hearer was never so much a hearer before.'"
• (II.i.3; 2: 16) Sancho recalls a time when Rozinante lusted after the mares, or, as he puts it, "'*longed for green peas in December.'" Smollett alone, probably referring to Stevens (Cotúfas), glosses this proverbial expression: "* Pedir cotufas en el golfo, signifies to look for tartuffles in the sea, a proverb applicable to those who are too sanguine in their expectations, and unreasonable in their desires." Jarvis, following Shelton, ignores the literal meaning, writing that Rozinante "had a longing after the forbidden fruit".
• (II.i.4; 2: 23) Sancho, though he avoids all fighting, will look after his master's needs gladly: "yo le baylarè el agua delante." Smollett renders this expression, "'I will †jig it away, with pleasure.'" In his note, probably derived from Stevens (Agua), he alone glosses the original: "Baylar el agua delante, is a phrase applicable to those who do their duty with alacrity, taken from the practice of watering the courts in Spain, an office which the maids perform with a motion that resembles dancing." Without comment Jarvis, following Motteux and Ozell, renders this, "I will fetch and carry like any water-spaniel."
• (II.i.8; 2: 43) Sancho fears that in the spurious continuation of Don Quixote, "andar mi honra àcoche acàcinchado," a proverbial expression which Smollett alone preserves: "'my reputation goes like a jolting hackney-coach.'"
• (II.i.9; 2: 47) At midnight Don Quixote and Sancho "dexàron el monte" and enter Toledo. Before Smollett, only Stevens in his revision of Shelton had seen that the context requires the secondary meaning of monte (Stevens: "Mónte, a hill, a mountain, a wood"). Smollett has "leaving their covert"; Stevens, "left the Wood." Jarvis, following Shelton, has "left the mountain"; Motteux and Ozell, "descended from a Hill."
• (II.i.10; 2: 55) Annoyed at Sancho's representing her to Don Quixote as his

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  Dulcinea, the country wench uses a proverbial expression that peasants say to their wives when they beat them: "Mas yo que te estr[i]ego burra de mi suegro"--which Stevens (Búrra) renders, "Stand still while I curry you, my father-in-law's ass." Smollett was first to render this in the text ("'Would I had the currying that ass's hide of thine'"); and he was first to understand that the woman speaks it not to the ass she rides on (as in Jarvis's note), but to Sancho.
• (II.i.13; 2: 71) Sancho compliments Don Quixote with a proverbial expression, referring to him as "moliente, y corriente." Smollett's vivid rendering of this as "well dammed and gristed," comes nearest to the full sense of the original, which literally refers to a mill working well, the water running and the sails going, but metaphorically signifies "anything that is in good order, and no way defective" (Stevens: Moliénte, y corriénte). Jarvis has merely, "wanting for nothing"; all others, "round and sound."
• (II.ii.1; 2: 108) After hearing Don Lorenzo's sonnet, Don Quixote compliments him with a play on words: "entre los infinitos Poëtas consumidos que ay, he visto un consumado Poëta." Smollett renders this, "'amidst the infinite number of consumptive poets that now exist, I have found one consummate.'" Only Shelton had previously attempted to translate this word-play, preferring, however, the combination "consumed . . . consummate." Watts and Putnam follow Shelton in rendring consumidos as "consumed"; but Smollett's "consumptive" (Stevens: "Consúmo, consumption") is funnier and makes better sense.
• (II.iii.2; 2: 216) The duke advises Sancho, when he becomes governor of the island, to take up hunting, "y vereys como os vale un pan por ciento." All translators resort to a loose paraphrase of this puzzling expression, Smollett rendering it, "'which you will find of incredible * service'"; but in his footnote Smollett was first to attempt a literal translation: "And you shall see it will be worth a loaf that will serve an hundred."
• (II.iii.15; 2: 289) Annoyed at the intrusion of a stranger with a petition, Sancho threatens: "yo ponga en pretina àmas de un negociante"--which Smollett renders, "'I will sit upon * the skirts of more than one of these men of business.'" In his note, Smollett alone offered a literal translation of this expression, which only the Royal Dictionary (1737) glossed (s.v. Pretina): "*The original Ponga en pretina, signifies, I will put in my girdle."
• (II.iii.15; 2: 289) The page describes the honest peasant as "una alma de cantaro" (literally, "a soul of a pitcher")--an expression usually used pejoratively to signify a stupid person (as in II.i.13; 2: 71, where Smollett renders it "dull as a beetle"). Smollett was first to see that in context the expression is here meant positively: Shelton has "a very dull Soule"; Jarvis, "a pitcher-soul'd fellow." Smollett's translation, "a simple soul," was indeed adopted by Putnam.
• (II.iv.[18]; 2: 447) Sancho pities Altisidora, whom Don Quixote has rejected: "Mandote yo, dixo Sancho, pobre Donzella, mandote (digo) mala ventura." Smollett alone preserves the repetition of "mandote" (which, following Stevens [Mandár], he renders "bequeath"), as well as the repetition "dixo . . . (digo)": "'Poor damsel! cried he, I can bequeath, bequeath thee nothing, I say, but bad luck.'" Jarvis, for example, has simply, " Poor damsel! Quoth Sancho, I forebode thee ill luck."
• (II.iv.[19]; 2: 447) In the opening paragraph of the chapter, Smollett's rendering of the obscure expression, "y catalo cantusado," as "and so the farce is acted" anticipates the sense favored by both Ormsby ("and, there, his labour is over") and Watts ("and lo, it is done").
• (II.iv.[19]; 2: 450) Insisting that he will keep his promise to scourge himself with three thousand lashes, Sancho quotes a proverb: "àdineros pagados, braços quebrados" ("The money paid, the arms broken"). Smollett alone preserves both the rhyming and the full sense of the proverb: "'When money's paid before it's due, a broken limb will straight ensue.'" Jarvis has, "The money paid, the work delayed"; Stevens, revising Shelton, has the following, which Motteux also adopted: "having received Money before hand, I thought much to work for a dead Horse."

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He has endeavoured to retain the spirit and ideas, without servilely adhering to the literal expression, of the original; from which, however, he has not so far deviated, as to destroy that formality of idiom, so peculiar to the Spaniards, and so essential to the character of the work.

Smollett achieved his aim of fidelity to the spirit of his great original. At the same time, for the particular enjoyment of his countrymen, he may be said to have translated it in another sense, bringing the work home to them from another time and another country, and making of it, as Dryden recommended, "an Original" in its own right. As Pope in his Iliad adapted Homer to the expectations of readers in England's Augustan Age, so Smollett succeeded in making Cervantes his contemporary. His gruff Biscainer speaks the Somerset dialect of Fielding's Squire Western; and Cervantes' narrator not only writes Smollett's mid-Georgian prose but at times echoes the phrases of Shakespeare and Milton, or recalls a song from The Beggar's Opera.[77] The narrative is colored by homely locutions that would make the plains of La Mancha seem a familiar place to an Englishman: Sancho stuffs his budget with good things to eat, and his stomach wambles; waits strike up tunes, and a skinker pours the wine; hare-hunters search in vain for a scut; desperadoes discharge their fusils; mariners worry about ships that steer athwart their hause.

In writing his translation of Don Quixote, Smollett, as he predicted in his preface, did indeed subject himself "to the most invidious comparison" with his rivals--and even, as he could not have predicted, to criticism in our own century designed to abstract him from his work altogether. My purpose in this essay has been to affirm his authorship of the translation and to offer an opinion of its merit. Samuel Johnson, Mrs. Piozzi tells us, considered Don Quixote second only to the Iliad as "the greatest" work of entertainment in the world.[78] As Johnson credited Pope with having produced in his translation of the Iliad "the noblest version" of poetry the world had seen,[79] we may at least, with Carlos Fuentes and Rodríguez Marín, allow that Smollett in his translation of Don Quixote not only succeeded in capturing the spirit of the original for English readers, as he aimed to do, but gave us as well the most readable version of Cervantes' masterpiece in our language.