From La Mancha to Kashmir

The present article aims at investigating selected passages from the Sanskrit version of Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Published in 2019 as Ḍān Kvikṣoṭaḥ, the translation was completed in 1936 by two Kashmiri Pandits—Jagaddhar Zadoo and Nityanand Shastri—on the basis of an English rendering by Charles Jarvis published in 1742. The study of the windmill episode from the Quijote (I, 8) and the comparative analysis of the early modern Spanish original, the English medium, and the Sanskrit translation reveal how the practice of translating not from the original source may influence the meaning and enlighten the difficulties of rendering extraneous elements in a language such as Sanskrit, quite distant from morphological and phonetical points of view. In the course of the analysis special attention is paid to the rendering of proper names, modern concepts and objects, specific expressions and to the translation strategies employed by the Indian Pandits

Original meaning · Rendering (computer graphics) · Sanskrit · Translation studies · Windmill · Legal and cultural studies analysis · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Translation Studies and Practices