John Ormsby

British translator John Ormsby (1829-1895) was most famous for his 1885 translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha, perhaps the most thorough and accurate English translation of the novel up to that time. His translation went through more editions than any other nineteenth-century version of the novel and was the first English version of the book to appear complete on the Internet. In his introduction, Ormsby scrutinized every previous major English version of Don Quixote and offered a controversial analysis of the work, critiquing Cervantes’s writing style and refuting the commonly held view that Don Quixote is an innately noble character.

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