University of Virginia Library

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?