telephone line.

In my last blog i used another painting of Norman Rockwell's to illustrate a point, and this one here came to mind the other day in class.
When the reader response group was presenting, we acted out a little game that was some what similar to this painting, where one person would hear something, try and repeat it to the next, and so on and so on.
I didn't really think of this in relation to Don Quixote, until just today. For today i just recently got back in touch with a girl with whom i stayed, while i was in France for about a month. Let's just say my French is a little rusty now compared to what it was before. She speaks perfect English, and is actually studying in England right now, but she is cute and i had a crush on her along with a relationship so i tried to impress her by using her native language... I have no idea if what i wrote made any sense, or if it made me at all any more impressive than if i had just wrote to her in English. She wrote me a lengthy letter back (in French) and like i said i could barely decipher it, so thinking i could cheat, i just plugged it into a French/English translator on the web and read it that way. I got the key points she was saying but the translator made some major mistakes and things just didn't look right, sentences ended up taking on different connotations even though i think i knew what she was saying.
I then thought about Don Quixote, and all of the other books i've read that have been translated. I know very well, that translators of these works operate in impeccable fashion-such is their job- And i doubt Edith Grossman (our translator of Don Q.) was at all incapable. But i still wonder what things might be omitted or misrepresented? It seems that much of this edition drafts the work into a relatively modern translation, which again makes me wonder. and then i think about things like Beowulf, again i understand that scholars are experts in what they do when they make these translations. But i would have to imagine that there are some things that simply just do not transfer, there are still things in modern French/Spanish/Italian that do not, so i would have to assume that 1600's Spanish might have some issues and certainly 11th century Gaelic or Old English would have some problems