For Spanish speakers who know English, reading Don Quixote in English is probably easier (and more pleasant). The Spanish one is full of words that even though a native speaker can understand (with footnotes sometimes), it's just not as pleasant as reading modern Spanish.
First time I read the whole book, it was an annotated edition with lots of footnotes, explaining all the differences. I was hating the experience. Solution? I stopped reading the footnotes.
After some time, I got much more engaged in the story and got the occasional arcaism right from the context.
The "bad translation" must have been Borges identifying old Spanish as a broken, not idiomatic modern Spanish.
I guess when an old text is translated into a foreign language, the translator often takes certain liberties to make the translated text more accessible to a modern audience. But there isn't really any separate process by which old works are "translated" to a more modern version of their original language (and any such process could be controversial). An interesting lacuna.
The boundaries between languages over time are as elusive as they can be between dialects in the present day. Most educated people can read English prose from the 1800s on a familiar topic and generally understand it. It's English. But to be fair, some will struggle. Further back in the 1600s, it's much harder. Does it need translation? If we go back to the 1400s, there's general agreement that it's Middle English, which is a different language, and it needs translation, as even many educated fluent speakers can't make heads or tails of it.
One of my textbooks in high school had a translation of Shakespeare into modern English, alongside the original text in both original and modernized spellings, with glossary and cultural notes. I'm not sure I'd have understood even it half as well without those.
> But there isn't really any separate process by which old works are "translated" to a more modern version of their original language (and any such process could be controversial).
This is dependent on the perception of the source language: For example, Beowulf is often translated into Modern English, even though it is (officially) written in English itself, but even the worst prig will admit that Old English isn't comprehensible to a modern reader who hasn't explicitly learned it as a foreign language.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, is almost never translated, even though his poetic Early Modern English is so distant from our own that Juliet's famous "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" is often performed with Juliet looking for Romeo from her perspective on the balcony. Translating Shakespeare would be admitting defeat, I daresay, so the prigs allow footnotes and no more.
Is Chaucer translated these days? Have the prigs ceded at least that much?
That said, there's No Fear Shakespeare and (probably) some other works aimed at students, which do essay an actual translation:
For some cultural reason that I'm not qualified to explain, the Spanish literary world is much more stilted than the English one. When I first read the Odyssey about 20 years ago, I found it more pleasant to read in English than in my native Spanish because all Spanish translations were full of intrincate poetic language and obscure words, while English ones where much more down-to-earth.
(Now there is at least one Spanish edition with a plain language translation as well, edited by Blackie Books, which as a layman in these things I have found enjoyable).
By the way, this happens also with original literature (I mean, not translations). I find most Spanish literature rather pedantic, there tends to be a huge focus on form over content, using the richest vocabulary, the longest sentences, the most complex subordinates, the most subtle nuances, spending 4 pages on describing the movement of a leaf with the wind, etc. while in English literature actual stuff happens and is told in a nice but practical way. As a native Spanish speaker, I read much more Anglo-Saxon literature than Hispanic one, although I guess it's all a matter of taste, of course.
(PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish).
> For some cultural reason that I'm not qualified to explain, the Spanish literary world is much more stilted than the English one. When I first read the Odyssey about 20 years ago, I found it more pleasant to read in English than in my native Spanish because all Spanish translations were full of intrincate poetic language and obscure words, while English ones where much more down-to-earth.
This is a common theme in Romance language writing, but it's especially so in Spanish. Lots of elliptical sentences longer than most paragraphs in English, requiring extensive effort to parse. Lots of flowery language. A bit of a word game, but usually just dreadful.
> (PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish).
He learned to read English before Spanish while living in Switzerland as a child. In a way he very much was an English language author writing in Spanish. The result is that his writing is very accessible in the original Spanish and very translatable to English, and his writings have a very unique flavor.
> while in English literature actual stuff happens and is told in a nice but practical way.
That’s an overly broad generalisation.
I can give you a ton of English novels spending pages after pages describing the movement of a leaf in the wind in rather florid language. It’s much more likely that you have been mostly exposed to a lot of old and rather serious novels during your education in Spanish are now mostly consuming novels you find entertaining in English.
It’s the same with the Odyssey which let’s not forget is originally written in ancien Greek verses. The epic has been translated hundreds of times with vastly different goals. Even in the same language, some translations aim to capture the poesy of the original either in its rythme or in its evocative power, some try to stay as close as possible to the Greek text, some just want to be easy to understand.
I don't know how it is in Spanish culture, but in English culture there is certainly an amount of sneering done at "modernisations" of older English texts.
