John Ormsby

Who was John Ormsby?

John Ormsby was a nineteenth-century British translator. He is most famous for his 1885 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha, perhaps the most scholarly and accurate English translation of the novel up to that time. It is so precise that Samuel Putnam, who published his own English translation of the novel in 1949, faults Ormsby for duplicating Cervantes' pronouns so closely that the meaning of the sentences sometimes becomes confusing.

Ormsby's translation has seen more editions than any other nineteenth-century English version of the novel, having been included in the Heritage Book Club series of great novels, and in the famous Great Books of the Western World set. The contemporaneous translations by Alexander J. Duffield and Henry Edward Watts have been virtually forgotten. Ormsby's translation was the first English version of Cervantes's book to appear complete on the Internet.

Ormsby not only translates the novel; he provides a long and informative introduction with a brief analysis of all the major English versions of "Don Quixote" up to then, as well as explaining the choices that he himself made in translating the novel. He also features a short biography of Cervantes in his introduction, as well as providing his own controversial analysis of the work. Ormsby refutes the widely accepted view that "Don Quixote" is a sad novel with allegorical meanings and a pessimistic philosophy, and states that because Cervantes himself declared it to be a satire against books of chivalry, it is primarily only that, although it does contain much observation on human character. Ormsby also refutes, in addition, the commonly held view that Don Quixote is an innately noble person, stating that his nobility of character is an attitude that he assumes simply to imitate his knightly heroes. An 1886 edition of the Quarterly Review, published only a year after Ormsby's translation was first issued, took him to task for his limited interpretation of the novel and of Don Quixote's character, while praising the accuracy of the translation.