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In 1687 John Phillips, Milton's nephew, produced a "Don Quixote" " to the hue" His

"Quixote" is not so much a translation as a travesty, and a travesty that

for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in

the literature of that day

Ned Ward's "Life and Notable Adventures of Don Quixote, merrily

translated into Hudibrastic Verse" (1700), can scarcely be reckoned a

translation, but it serves to show the light in which "Don Quixote" was

regarded at the time

A further illustration may be found in the version published in 1712 by

Peter Motteux, who had then recently co with

literature It is described as "translated froinal by several

hands," but if so all Spanish flavour has entirely evaporated under the

manipulation of the several hands The flavour that it has, on the other

hand, is distinctly Franco-cockney Anyone who coinal will have little doubt that it is a concoction from Shelton

and the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked out by borrowings from

Phillips, whose mode of treatment it adopts It is, to be sure, more

decent and decorous, but it treats "Don Quixote" in the same fashion as a

comic book that cannot be made too comic

To attempt to improve the humour of "Don Quixote" by an infusion of

cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux's operators did, is not

a sirloin of prize beef, but an

absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of

the uncritical way in which "Don Quixote" is generally read that this

worse than worthless translation--worthless as failing to represent,

worse than worthless as --should have been favoured as it

has been