A review of Thomas Urquhart's 17th-century English translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, told through the tragicomic life story of the translator - a Scottish aristocrat who failed at everything except creating this masterpiece of baroque English prose.
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This is a book review of Thomas Urquhart's 17th-century English translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, framed through the extraordinary and often absurd life of the translator himself. The review traces Urquhart's journey from Scottish aristocrat to failed soldier, failed mathematician, failed universal language inventor, and finally successful translator - though he never lived to see that success. Born in 1611 into a noble Scottish family, Urquhart was educated in the classical tradition but proved spectacularly incompetent at nearly everything he attempted: he bungled military operations, invented an incomprehensible trigonometry system, spent seven years creating an impossible universal language (which was lost when he foolishly brought the manuscript to battle), and wrote a genealogy tracing his lineage back to Adam and Eve to impress his captors. His one genuine achievement was his translation of Rabelais, which showcased his love of obscure words, baroque prose, and verbal extravagance - qualities that were liabilities in his original work but perfect for capturing Rabelais' encyclopedic, exuberant style. The review argues that while the translation failed commercially in Urquhart's lifetime and he died in exile (allegedly from laughing too hard at the restoration of Charles II), his work survives as one of the great English translations, never out of print, full of extraordinary language and rhythm that makes it superior even to more modern versions.
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