“A translation is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side”

Don Quixote’s comparison of translation to the reverse of a Flemish tapestry gives a concrete shape to his distinction between carrying over a work’s visible meaning and preserving its full clarity and polish. The image appears in a conversation about translation, where his broad criticism is tempered by recognition that exceptional translators can make the boundary between translation and original difficult to discern.

The Tapestry Image

Don Quixote says that translation between languages other than Greek and Latin is “like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side”. The analogy does not claim that a translated work becomes wholly unreadable: its figures can still be seen. Its limitation lies in the distracting threads, which interfere with definition and finish. The contrast between visible figures and indistinct workmanship makes the reverse side an image of partial access rather than total loss.

The tapestry comparison also gives the argument a hierarchy. Don Quixote exempts translation from Greek and Latin—the “queens of languages”—from his general judgment, while dismissing translation from easier languages as evidence neither of ingenuity nor command of words. He likens such work to transcribing one document into another: a transfer that may preserve content without displaying the translator’s particular verbal skill.

The Qualification: Translators Who Rival Their Originals

Don Quixote qualifies his assessment rather than treating translation as worthless. He allows that a person may occupy himself in work worse and less profitable, then names Doctor Cristobal de Figueroa’s Pastor Fido and Don Juan de Jauregui’s Aminta as famous exceptions. Their translations are so felicitous, he says, that it is uncertain which is the translation and which the original. These examples complicate the tapestry image: translation may ordinarily expose the seams, but exceptional achievement can make the distinction between reverse and right side hard to locate.

The Exchange Around the Metaphor

The comparison is part of a conversation in which Don Quixote first tests the author’s claim to Italian proficiency by proposing obvious equivalents for several Italian words. The author answers that these are their proper equivalents; Don Quixote then moves from teasing that claim to a more considered judgment about translation’s limits and rare successes. The shift gives the passage a comic edge without reducing its argument to a joke: the exchange distinguishes routine word substitution from the ingenuity required to produce a version that can stand beside its source.

The conversation turns next to the economics of printing. The author expects a thousand ducats from two thousand copies sold at six reals each, but Don Quixote warns that the printers’ arrangements and the book’s unusual character may leave him burdened with unsold copies. Set between a discussion of translation and this warning about the market, the tapestry metaphor belongs to a broader exchange about literary labor: verbal skill may be undervalued, and the promise of reward may prove as uncertain as the effort of making a translation read like an original.