The 1885 translator who became a model for many modern English translators of Don Quixote was John Ormsby. His version was widely respected for its learning, accuracy, introduction, and explanatory notes.
Ormsby was an Anglo-Irish translator who produced his English Don Quixote in the late nineteenth century. In addition to translating Cervantes, he surveyed earlier English versions and explained the choices behind his own rendering of the Spanish text. His work helped establish a durable reference point for later translators.
The translation was not universally praised. Samuel Putnam, whose own version appeared in 1949, admired Ormsby’s precision but criticized aspects of its close handling of Spanish pronouns and sentence structure. Later editors also revised Ormsby’s text, including the 1981 Norton edition by Joseph Jones and Kenneth Douglas.
The other options belong to different translation histories. Charles Jervas translated the novel in the eighteenth century, Tobias Smollett published his version in 1755, and Samuel Putnam’s influential translation appeared decades after Ormsby’s.