LIKE THE EDITOR OF a text, a translator is creating a text as well. The translator must, of course, choose a text (or perhaps multiple versions of a text) in the original language. Given the heated debate over the text of Don Quixote during the last thirty years, and the lack of a general consensus about which of the several competing editions is most worthy of use, (1) it may be helpful to examine how the translators have approached the question of the work's text. As will be seen, some are aware of the problems and carefully explain how they have handled the text, while others are less informative or seemingly ignorant of the whole situation. First the translations will be reviewed chronologically; then we will examine how the translators have handled some key textual points. The earliest translators are the ones who go into the greatest depth about textual questions. John Ormsby is the earliest translator (1885) whose version is still in current use, free for the taking on the Internet, though without his careful notes and with his Introduction much abbreviated. (2) He comments on the process of establishing an accurate text: "The London edition of 1738, commonly called Lord Carteret's from having been suggested by him, was not a mere edition de luxe. It produced Don Quixote in becoming form as regards paper and type, and embellished with plates which, if not particularly happy as illustrations, were at least well intentioned and well executed, but it also aimed at correctness of text, a matter to which nobody except the editors of the Valencia and Brussels editions had given even a passing thought; and for a first attempt it was fairly successful, for though some of its emendations are inadmissible, a good many of them have been adopted by all subsequent editors" (53). As for the Spanish text he uses, "the text I have followed generally is Hartzenbusch's. But Hartzenbusch, though the most scholarly of the editors and commentators of Don Quixote, is not always an absolutely safe guide. His text is preferable to that of the Academy in being, as far as the First Part is concerned, based upon the first of La Cuestas three editions, instead of the third, which the Academy took as its basis on the supposition (an erroneous one, as I have shown elsewhere) that it had been corrected by Cervantes himself. His emendations are frequently admirable" (n). In his notes he occasionally comments on textual questions, (3) and, as the above quote states, he takes a position on a debated textual point, the validity of the corrections in the edition of 1608. (4) This is as much information as Ormsby gives us about his text, but his notes confirm that he consulted multiple editions, as was also stated by Joseph Jones (ix), whose revision of Ormsby will be mentioned shortly.
