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:
[Smollett] has been accused [Moore writes] of not
having had a sufficient knowledge of the Spanish language
when he undertook that task. To perform it perfectly, it
would be requisite that the translator had lived some years
in Spain; that he had obtained not only a knowledge of the
language of the court and polite society, but an
acquaintance also with the vulgar idioms, the proverbs in
use among the populace, and the various customs of the
country to which allusions are made. It would likewise be
requisite that the translator of Cervantes should be a man of
genius, of a great native fund of humour, of a complete
knowledge of his own language, and the power of adopting
the solemn, the familiar, the ironical, and the burlesque
phraseology as they suited the occasion. It will probably be
long before all those requisites are united in one man, and
that he shall be inclined to translate Don Quixote. Dr.
Smollett possessed, in an eminent degree, the qualities last
mentioned; and although he never was in Spain, he
certainly had a very considerable knowledge of the
language; that he had been at pains to inform himself of
many of the obsolete customs of the country appears by the
notes to his
translation.
[46]
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.
