‘First modern novel – oldest language’: Sanskrit translation of Don Quixote rescued from oblivion

Translated by two Kashmiri pandits from an C18th English translation in the 1930s, unique work lay forgotten in a Harvard University library

There 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.

Today, the same word might equally be applied to the efforts of the Bulgarian-born Indologist and Tibetologist who has rescued their text from decades of oblivion.

In 1935, the wealthy American businessman and book collector Carl Tilden Keller – whose shelves already held Japanese, Mongolian and Icelandic translations of Cervantes’s masterpiece – embarked on a quest to have some of the book rendered into an Indian language.

To do so, he enlisted the help of his friend, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew India well.

“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.

Dr Dragomir Dimitrov, the editor of a new dual English and Sanskrit edition that will be presented at the Instituto Cervantes in Delhi on Wednesday, puts it a little more bluntly: “Keller was aware that it was quite crazy, but he was willing to get the strange translation.”

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