How Translations Work

Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in 1605, has been called the first modern novel. It has been translated many times, and each translation highlights the pitfalls that await all translators. The pitfalls begin in the very first paragraph:

At a certain village in La Mancha, which I shall not name, there liv’d not long ago one of those old-fashion’d gentlemen who are never without a Lance upon a Rack, an old Target, a lean Horse, and a Greyhound. His Diet consisted of more Beef than Mutton; and with minc’d Meat on most Nights, Lentils on Fridays, Eggs and Bacon on Saturdays, and a Pigeon extraordinary on Sundays, he consumed three Quarters of his Revenue.

The problem with this translation, published in 1700 by Peter Motteux, is that plate of “Eggs and Bacon.” In the Spanish original, Don Quixote did not eat “Eggs and Bacon on Saturdays.” What Cervantes wrote was that the Don ate duelos y quebrantos on Saturdays. Literally translated, duelos y quebrantos means “gruntings and groanings.” Eggs and bacon do not produce gruntings and groanings, so what on Earth are duelos y quebrantos when served on a plate?

Motteux has no idea. In a lengthy footnote to this passage, he sends out a translator’s cry for help: he lists various solutions arrived at by previous translators. “Caesar Oudin,” he notes, “will have it to be Eggs and Bacon, as above. Our translator and Dictionary-maker, Stevens, has it Eggs and Collops (I suppose he means Scotch-Collops).” A “collop” was a thin slice of meat, usually mutton, fried in a skillet and served with eggs: not so far from eggs and bacon, but fried eggs and mutton don’t usually cause gruntings and groanings, either. What do collops, or eggs and bacon, have to do with gruntings and groanings?

The question sends Motteux into a translator’s tailspin. “Signor Sobrini’s Spanish Dictionary,” he continues in his footnote, “says Duelos y Quebrantos is Pease Soup. Mr. Jarvis translates it as Amlet (Aumulette, in French), which Boyer says is a Pancake made of Eggs, tho’ I always understood an Aumulette to be a Bacon-froisé (or rather Bacon-frysé, from its being fry’d).” Motteux is diving down translation rabbit-holes, leaving poor Don Quixote grunting and groaning at his table. “Some will have it to mean Brain fry’d with Eggs, which, we are told by Mr Jarvis, the Church allows in poor Countries in Defect of Fish. Others have guessed it to mean some windy kind of Diet, as Peas, Herbs, etc., which are apt to occasion Cholick, as if one would say, Greens and Gripes on Saturdays.”

A diet that causes painful wind – greens and gripes – does get us close to “gruntings and groanings,” so why did Motteux go with eggs and bacon? Probably because there is no such dish in English as Greens and Gripes. In linguistic parlance, an expression peculiar to a particular region or profession is called a cant-phrase. Duelos y quebrantos is a cant-phrase, whereas “greens and gripes” is not.

“To conclude,” writes Motteux in a sweat, “the forecited Author of the new Translation absolutely says Duelos y Quebantos is a Cant-Phrase for some Fasting-Day Dish in use in La Mancha. After all these learned Disquisitions, who knows but the Author means a Dish of Nichils!” Nichils is an old Scottish word meaning “nothing.” An empty plate.

In fact, no translator of Don Quixote has come up with a satisfactory English equivalent for duelos y quebrantos. An anonymous translation I picked up in a used bookstore had “boiled bones.” Nope. The usually reliable Edith Grossman, in her recent re-translation of Don Quixote, has the poor knight dining on “eggs and abstinence,” which is pretty close to a dish of nichils.

In other words, for the past 420 years, what Don Quixote ate on Saturdays has been lost in translation.

If the sixteenth-century Spanish reader knew immediately what duelos y quebrantos was, and that it gave Don Quixote gas and cramping indigestion, if they said to themselves, “Oh, that’s funny, Don Quixote eats the same thing we do on Saturday, and it gives him gas, too,” then a translator needs to find a cant-phrase in English that would have the same effect on a modern-day English reader. One might translate duelos y quebrantos as “bubble and squeak,” for instance, or perhaps “a Jiggs dinner.” When we visited my aunt in Newfoundland, she made a traditional Jiggs dinner. But “Jiggs Dinner” is not in any dictionary, not even in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. A modern reader who has never read the comic strip “Bringing Up Father” – which featured the “lace-curtain Irish” Maggie and her “shanty Irish” husband, Jiggs – would not have the foggiest idea what a Jiggs dinner was. Maggie was always making Jiggs eat fancy things like poached salmon and asparagus, when all Jiggs really wanted was a plate of good old corned beef and cabbage. Maybe a Jiggs dinner would work as a plate of duelos y quebrantos, but Jiggs dinners didn’t exist in Motteux’s day, let alone Cervantes’. Motteux might have gone with “corned beef and cabbage.” “Corned beef” was eaten in the early seventeenth century: it was called “corned” not because it was made with corn, but because it was salted, and at the time any small pellet-like objects were referred to as “corn,” whence barley-corn, acorns, and the corns one gets on one’s foot. What would a French translator of Michael Crummey’s poem “Viewfinder” do with the line: “They’ll be off to church now the once in their overcoats and galoshes, salt beef and cabbage on the boil”? He or she would certainly agonize over “the once” and “on the boil,” and probably translate “salt beef and cabbage” as “boeuf salé et choux,” which gives an idea of what the couple ate, but no sense of the deeper social context of the dish. In other words, the translator would get the words right, but would miss the culture entirely. Michael Crummy’s poem pulls the reader into the couple’s kitchen; the translation leaves the reader out on the front porch.

Answers to even the trickiest translation conundrums can sometimes come down the least expected of routes. And they do not hurry. I first wrote about Don Quixote’s problematical Saturday meal in a talk I gave in Mexico in 2019, ending by confessing that we may never know what Cervantes meant by duelos y quebrantos. But a few months ago, I was reading a short story by J.M. Coetzee – “The Old Woman and the Cats ” – in which the old woman, Elizabeth Costello (an Australian writer who has moved to Spain and is a recurring character in Coetzee’s work), lives “in a benighted village on the Castillian plateau, where one is cold all the time,” and “where for supper one is given a dish of beans and spinach.”

Don Quixote’s village, La Mancha, is also on the Castillian plateau. Coetzee goes on to tell us that in that region, beans and spinach is “a traditional dish of the Spanish peasantry,” and that it causes wind.

So we may now say what Don Quixote ate on Saturdays. My guess is, if one happened to be in the benighted Castillian village described by Coetzee, one could ask for a plate of duelos y quebrantos, and one would be served a dish of beans and spinach.