Don Quixote in Sanskrit
Gustave DoréThe prophetic words that Miguel de Cervantes put into the mouth of Don Quixote, when he stated that the ingenious hidalgo's novel would be translated into all the languages of the world, now make even greater sense. On July 6, the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, will present at the Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi the translation of Don Quixote into one of the oldest languages in the world: Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the classical language of India with an uninterrupted literary production of more than 3,500 years and a volume of works greater than all Greco-Latin literature. This edition contains a Sanskrit translation of eight chapters of the first part of Don Quixote. At the suggestion of the American book collector Carl Tilden Keller and with the mediation of the British explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein two Kashmiri Brahmin pundits or scholars, Pandit Nityanand Shastri and Pandit Jagaddhar Zadoo translated chapters I.2, I.3, I.8 , I.10, I.16, I.17, I.18 and I.23 of Don Quixote. For this, the two Kashmiri scholars did not use the original in Spanish, but the English translation by Charles Jarvis prepared in the first half of the 18th century.