"I know his worship," said the curate; "that is where Señor Reinaldos of Montalvan figures with his friends and comrades, greater thieves than Cacus, and the Twelve Peers of France with the veracious historian Turpin; however, I am not for condemning them to more than perpetual banishment, because, at any rate, they have some share in the invention of the famous Matteo Boiardo, whence too the Christian poet Ludovico Ariosto wove his web, to whom, if I find him here, and speaking any Language but his own, I shall show no respect whatever; but if he speaks his own tongue I will put him upon my head."[1]
"Well, I have him in Italian," said the barber, "but I do not understand him."
"Nor would it be well that you should understand him," said the curate, "and on that score we might have excused the Captain[2] if he had not brought him into Spain and turned him into Castilian. He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced. In short, I say that this book, and all that may be found treating of those French affairs, should he thrown into or deposited in some dry well, until after more consideration it is settled what is to be done with them; excepting always one 'Bernardo del Carpio' that is going about, and another called 'Roncesvalles;' for these, if they come into my hands, shall pass into those of
the Twelve Peers, it was the most popular of the Carlovingian series of romances. It is creditable to Cervantes as a critic that he should have mentioned Boiardo as he does, at a time when it was the fashion to regard the Orlando Innamorato as a rude and semi-barbarous production, only endurable in the rifacimento of Ludovico Domenichi.
- ↑ An Oriental mode of showing respect for a document.
- ↑ Geronimo Jiménez de Urrea, whose translation of Ariosto into Spanish was first printed at Antwerp in 1549. This is not the only passage in which Cervantes declares against translation. In chapter lxii. of the Second Part he puts his objection still more strongly, and there extends it to translation of prose. And yet of all great writers there is not one who is under such obligations to translation as Cervantes. The influence of Homer and Virgil would be scarcely less than it is if they had never been translated; Shakespeare and Milton wrote in a language destined to become the most widely read on the face of the globe, and no reader of any culture needs an interpreter for Molière or Le Sage. But how would Cervantes have fared in the world if, according to his own principles, he had been confined to his native Castilian?
