Sanskrit translation of Don Quixote rediscovered

A new dual English and Sanskrit edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is finally completed and will be presented at the Instituto Cervantes in Delhi, after the original translation languished untouched for almost sixty years in a Harvard University library.

The translation had been part of a trove of items given to the university after the 1955 death of businessman and book collector Carl Tilden Keller, who had commissioned the translation in 1935. Eight chapters of the translation were completed by Sanskrit scholars Nityanand Shastri and Jagaddhar Zadoo, working from the 18th-century English translation by Charles Jarvis, and Keller was satisfied. But after his death, the project was forgotten, until Dr. Dragomir Dimitrov stumbled upon an article about it by Shastri’s grandson and dug it up.