Tilting at Windmills

Edith Grossman found trying to translate Miguel de Cervantes’ 400-year old masterpiece “Don Quixote” into modern English somewhat… Quixotic: “The doubts and paradoxical questions that pursue translators must also arise for authors: Is their text an inevitable betrayal of the imagination and the creative impulse? Is what they do even possible? Can the written work ever be a perfect fit with that imaginative, creative original when two different languages, two realms of experience, can only approximate each other?”