Interview with Gerald J. Davis

 

“Half a page is a good day.”

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Interviewer: Tell me, why did you decide to write a new translation of Don Quixote?

 

Davis: When I read a few of the recent translations of Don Quixote, they seemed to me to be insubstantial,
too modern and lacking the heft and gravitas, while retaining the wit and humor, which a work of this magnitude required. I felt there were too many colloquialisms, neologisms and expressions that just didn’t fit with the tenor of the original.

 

Interviewer: Why did you choose to use the Thomas Shelton translation as the basis for your work?

 

Davis: Thomas Shelton wrote the first translation of Don Quixote in 1612. He was a contemporary of Cervantes and was conversant with the Spanish of that era, although his translation was riddled with mistakes and mistranslated words and expressions. However, his translation was charged with the same kind of energy and spirit that animated the work of Cervantes. I wanted to bring Shelton’s translation into the modern age in order to give today’s readers a sense of what someone reading Don Quixote in the seventeenth century would have experienced.

 

Interviewer: And why should someone want to read your translation of Don Quixote?

 

Davis: I am a novelist. I have written eight novels and so I wanted to bring a novelist’s sensibility to what is, after all, “the greatest book of all time.” I wanted to dispense with all the footnotes and endnotes, so a reader could be able to enjoy the story for what it was, a riotous explosion of sublime storytelling. Noel Coward once famously said, “Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.” So, if any explanations were needed, I embedded them in the text of the story. Most of the translated versions of Don Quixote have been written by academics or translators, and I wanted to write it the way a novelist would. I believe the only novelist to write an English translation of Don Quixote was Tobias Smollett in 1755, and his is great fun to read, but somewhat laborious for a modern reader because it requires many visits to an old English dictionary.

 

Interviewer: How long did it take you to write the book?

 

Davis: Seven years. However, the first two years were wasted, because it took me that long to find the right voice to tell the story. I didn’t want to use thee and thou, and a multitude of other archaisms, because that would have impeded the flow of the narrative, but I did put in a few wonts and fains and methinks to give it an archaic flavoring. In addition, I tried to use English names wherever possible, so it would not feel as if you were reading a work in translation. The matter of coinage was another problem. The profusion of maravedis, crowns, ardites, doblas, reales, ducados, escudos and vellons would have confused the most ardent coin collector. So I tried to estimate the value in today’s pesos, since the use of the Euro was out of the question. You see, a modern reader would have no idea if a maravedi was worth a penny or a hundred dollars.      

 

Interviewer: What first gave you the idea to translate Don Quixote?

 

Davis: Well, I have been fascinated by this book since I first read it in my high school Spanish class. I must admit I was a little in love with my Spanish teacher, which probably added to the attraction of the story. And then, in 2004, I had just finished writing a novel and was looking for my next project. My wife and I were on a trip to Charleston, South Carolina with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law when we stepped into a second-hand bookstore and my sister-in-law, who was born in Honduras, picked up an old copy of Don Quixote in Spanish. The sight of her paging through the book caused me to contemplate the possibility of translating the work into English. I never imagined it would take seven years to complete.

 

Interviewer: What is your day like? How do you go about writing?

 

Davis: Well, after breakfast, I climb up the stairs to my garret and begin to scribble away. Whenever King George III saw Edward Gibbon (who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), he would say, “Scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?” Actually, I have been writing for over forty years and, in the beginning, I used to scribble on yellow legal pads. I try to write every day, even if it is only a few words. Emile Zola had carved on the mantel over his fireplace, “No day without a sentence.” Over the years I graduated to a laptop on which I would write during my daily rail commute into New York City. Now, I use a desktop on which I write until lunchtime. Then I take a walk and resume writing until I can write no longer. You do hit a wall after several hours, because you are immersed in an alpha state when you write and you are transported into a magical world in which it feels as if you are removed from reality and that anything is possible. It is almost like a transcendent condition which is so pleasant, until it is not. I guess I could say I am addicted to writing, obsessed by writing.

 

Interviewer: How faithful to Cervantes’s original is your translation?

 

Davis: It is a true and accurate line by line translation. I used the 400th anniversary edition published by the Royal Spanish Academy as the basis for my work. I did no violence to Cervantes’ original, although one has to update the text for punctuation, paragraphs and sentence structure, otherwise you would end up with quite convoluted sentences.          

 

Interviewer: How different is the Spanish of Cervantes from the Spanish of today?

 

Davis: Not as different as you might imagine. The English of Shakespeare is quite different from today’s English, but the Spanish of Cervantes’s time has not changed as much over the years. Perhaps English is a more dynamic language. In any case, I have a good Spanish dictionary of archaic words and it proved quite useful.

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Interviewer: How many pages do you write in a day?

 

Davis: In the past, when I wrote novels I would write about a page a day. If you want to know what got me started writing fiction, I can tell you that I read an article about a prisoner who wrote a book. He said he wrote a page a day in jail and that, at the end of a year, he had a book. I thought, “If he can write a page a day, so can I.” Now, with this translation of Don Quixote, I must say that half a page is a good day.

 

Interviewer: And what happened to those early books?

 

Davis: They are in a storeroom in the attic. Stacks of old yellow pages. I had to write five novels before I finally got it right, before I could publish anything. Call it an apprenticeship.

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Interviewer: Which writers do you admire most?

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Davis: Of the modern writers, I would say Mailer, Bellow and, of course, Hemmingway. I have always liked Somerset Maugham. When an interviewer asked him where he would place himself among the great authors, he said, "In the front ranks of the second-rate."

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Interviewer: Thank you very much.

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Davis: You're welcome. It's my pleasure.