here is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time.
To do so, he enlisted the help of his friend, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew“I am frank enough to admit that while I recognise the childishness of this desire of mine I am still extremely interested in having it carried out,” Keller wrote to Stein in November 1935.
Having no Spanish, the two scholars worked from an 18th-century English translation of the Quixote by the Irish painter and translator Charles Jarvis. It lay forgotten in the university library until 2012 when Dimitrov, spurred on by a 2002 article on the book written by Shastri’s grandson, hunted it out and began thinking of identifying the English version used for the translation. Then came plans for a bilingual, side-by-side edition of Sanskrit and 18th-century English, accompanied by a Sanskrit audiobook and music., got a little lost when it emerged in 2019, not long before the Covid pandemic hit.
“You have the energy and the impetus and the goodwill to do this, but war was coming and Stein was travelling from Oxford via Germany and he saw what was coming; what the Nazis were already preparing,” says Dimitrov. “However, translating Don Quixote was a singular exception in that league because here the west wanted to embellish western literature by the treatment of Kashmiri hands.”