nnyhav,
"The second piece of invaluable assistance came from an old friend, the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, who sent me a photocopy of a dictionary he had found in Holland when he was a diplomat there: a seventeenth-century Spanish-English dictionary first published by a certain gentleman named Percivale,...The dictionary was immensely helpful at those dreadful times when a word was not to be found in María Moliner, or in the dictionary of the Real Academia, or in Simon and Schuster, Larousse, Collins, or ...I was fascinated to realize how constant and steady Spanish has remained over the centuries (as compared with English, for example), which meant that I could often use contemporary wordbooks to help shed light on a seventeenth-century text."
(That began to dawn on me in high-school; but the teacher was less enthusiastic.)
"On occasion, at a certain point in the translation of a book...when I can begin to imagine that the author and I have started to speak together.... In those instances it seems as if I can hear the author’s voice in my mind speaking in Spanish at the same time that I manage to find a way ... The experience is exhilarating, symbiotic, certainly metaphorical, and absolutely crucial if I am to do what I am supposed to do—somehow get into the author’s head and behind the author’s eyes... the writer’s linguistic perceptions of the world.
And here I must repeat Ralph Manheim’s observation comparing the translator to an actor who speaks as the author would if the author could speak English. A difficult role...."
(It was not entirely coincidence to find my first textbook entitled, El Camino Real; a title of a play that Tennessee Williams had brought to Broadway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_Real_(play By which time, I had been to New Orleans and discovered the route of the Streetcar Named Desire, so that I was ready to begin my acting career in the local community theater, the year that Camino Real appeared on Broadway. In the following years, I could work with a second(or third) director in summer stock by starting out as prompter with the script of Streetcar in my hands.
What my Spanish teacher had not been enthused about was this: Jeronimo Bermudez, Alvaro Cubillo de Aragon, Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega "the dweller in the meadow", Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza, Pedro Calderone de la Barca, Juan del Encina, Juan Bautista Diamante.)
"For instance, the ballads or romances cited so frequently in Don Quixote by the characters and by Cervantes himself in the guise of the narrator were common knowledge at the time, familiar to everyone in Spain, including the illiterate. For a modern reader, however, especially one who reads the book in translation or is not conversant with the rich Spanish ballad tradition, the romances are unfamiliar, perhaps exotic, even though they are utterly unproblematic in the intention and structure of the novel. The same is true of allusions to figures and events from the history of Spain—not obscure in and of themselves, but probably not known to most modern readers of Don Quixote, regardless of the language in which they read it. For instance, in the course of the novel, Cervantes mentions well-known underworld haunts, famous battle sites and fortresses in North Africa and Europe, popular authors and major military figures of the sixteenth century. These were the kinds of references that I did my best to explain in the notes."
(And here is the piece de resistance, from a reader who posts: Ardon Gador | April 1, 2010 10:34 AM | Reply" As I am neither translator or man of letters, nor am I fluent in Spanish, I hesitantly suggest another tool that might shed light on Cervantes language, and this is the Judeo-Espanol, or Ladino,still spoken by descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and - as I am told - has retained many elements of the fifteenth century Castillian. I was told by a young lady that whenever she, as a high school student in Argentina, encountered an obscure word, her grandmother, fluent in Ladino, would explain it off hand."
I was fortunate enough to meet and make the acquaintance of a friend of a friend,with those origins, who helped me out at a low point when I was stuck in the country without a typewriter, receiving the low wages of an agricultural laborer(in other words, we picked more food than we could buy with our pay for doing so, in the early 1980s, hardly an equivalent exchange but that was in, what I called, East Lake Woebegone. Surreptitiously, she came up with a typewriter, just like that ! )
