‘The Enchanted Knight’ who rode into literary folklore
In 1922, when The Commercial Press in Shanghai published “History of the Enchanted Knight,” a Chinese translation of Don Quixote, there was no mention of the ingenious nobleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain in the title of the book.
The Spanish classic was translated into classical Chinese by Lin Shu, who was then 70, and Chen Jialin, 30 years his junior, from the English version of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel “Don Quixote.”
But Chen Kaixian, a Cervantes expert and a professor at the Nanjing University Jingling College, is not surprised that the legendary character from one of the world’s most widely translated books was missing from the Chinese title.
“Most Chinese had never heard of Don Quixote, except probably the elites who had traveled abroad or had mastered some of the foreign languages,” says Chen Kaixian.
He cites the example of Lin’s translation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s “La Dame aux Camélias” in 1898, which was published as “The Legacy of the Parisian Lady of the Camellias” in Chinese.
Lin, born in 1852, was a self-taught scholar from Fujian Province in southeast China and rose from relative obscurity to become one of the leading translators of foreign fiction at the beginning of the 20th century. Working with his assistants, Lin translated, or more accurately, rewrote close to 180 Western novels from English, Spanish and Japanese, into classical Chinese.
When Inma González Puy, director of the Instituto Cervantes in Shanghai, discovered Lin’s “History of the Enchanted Knight” in 2013, she called it “a little jewel even though it looked like an ordinary notebook.”
González Puy sought the help of Alicia Relinque, a professor of classical Chinese literature at the University of Granada, to translate Lin’s book back into Spanish — a project she said was “double homecoming” with Don Quixote trotting back to Spain after a century in China. The book was recently published by The Commercial Press with Lin’s text (in classical Chinese) and Relinque’s translation (in Spanish) in a bilingual edition.
“We intended to give a glimpse of how Don Quixote’s image was accepted in China almost 100 years ago,” said Relinque.
“Probably the difference is that the character created by Cervantes is a bit absurd and a madman, but Lin gives him dignity, bringing him closer to an
Alicia Relinque’s bilingual work “Historia del Caballero Encantado.” The
author has retranslated Lin’s work of the Spanish classic Don Quixote. educated man — more literate than a warrior — disappointed with the world in which he lives, but very honest and generous.”
Lin was accused of “mistranslation” and omitting key aspects in his translations by Chinese critics, but according to writer Sun Ganlu, vice chairman of the Shanghai Writers’ Association, Lin’s works closely related to the tradition, culture, and social environment prevalent at the time. In short, Sun says, it was a conversion of different cultures.
For example, Lin removed all references to God and upgraded the lean old nag Rocinante to a “fast horse.” Don Quixote, known in the book as Quesada, is less deluded and more learned, while Sancho Panza is more of a disciple to a cultured master than a squire to a mad knight.
The priest who tries to cure the nobleman of his delusions becomes a doctor while Dulcinea, the peasant woman whom Don Quixote idealizes, is described with the beautiful Chinese epithet of “Jade Lady.”
“Lin lost readers, partly because his works were published in classical Chinese, which fell out of favor with the May Fourth Movement’s advocacy of baihua literature (vernacular literature) in the 1920s,” says Sun.
For Relinque, Lin’s work is almost like a translation manual, “where you can check all the processes that translators of literary works go through.”
The Spaniard has been studying Chinese since 1976, first in Spain and then in France, before getting into Peking University for further studies from 1985-89.
She has translated several classical Chinese texts into Spanish, such as “Wen Xin Diao Long” (Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), literary criticism by the 5th Century Chinese scholar Liu Xie; and “The Peony Pavilion,” a masterpiece by Ming Dynasty playwright Tang Xianzu (1550-1616).