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The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. Borders Classics Abridged Edition. Ann Arbor, MI: Borders Classics, 2006. 461 pp. ISBN: 978-1-58726-374-3.
The Borders Classics' version of Don Quixote is based on Charles Jarvis' 1742 English translation of the novel,1 and it is one of five English translations of Miguel de Cervantes' masterpiece to be published since the year 2000. 2 Unlike the previous four English translations, Borders Classics' Don Quixote is not a scholarly edition, and, linguistically, it varies very little from Jarvis' translation.
Jarvis' English translation of Don Quijote was the most popular version of the novel for nearly two hundred years. There were more than thirty editions by 1839, and it continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century.3 In 1998 Oxford World's Classics published a modernized English translation of Don Quijote based on Jarvis' translation, which its editor E.C. Riley describes as "sensitive, careful, and full of life. It is closer in spirit and style to the original than are most recent versions."4 Notwithstanding the merits of Jarvis' translation, readers may discover the unnamed editor's or editors' failure to modernize Jarvis' eighteenth-century translation to be a linguistic challenge. Upon seeing the windmills, for example, Don Quijote expresses his delight to Sancho that a great adventure awaits them: "Fortune disposes our affairs better than we ourselves could have desired: look yonder, friend Sancho Panza, where thou mayest discover somewhat more than thirty monstrous giants [...]" (28). Subsequently, the knight points out the windmills to Sancho: "Those thou seest yonder [...] with their long arms; for some are...