Preface

[vii] In the second part of his great novel, Cervantes has the Knight of Sad Countenance enter a printing shop of Barcelona and utter the following words:

...it seems to me that translating from one language into another...is like viewing Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for, although you see the pictures, they are covered with threads which obscure them so the smoothness and gloss of the fabric is lost.[Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quijote, ed. J.M. Cohen (1950; New York, 1983, part II, chap. 62, p. 877].

Such is the bane of any translator. How does he retain the “figures” of the original text while transmitting it into his own language? This quandary is further complicated when the text in question is over seven-hundred-years-old; for, not only must its words be translated but the obsolete societal usages they describe must also be made clear. To remain within these margins, I have followed the Bastardas i Parera Latin edition as closely as modern usage allows. In the majority of the Usatges articles, as in many modern law codes, a form of judicial syllogism outlines in the first clause a certain situation and proceeds, in the second, to state the laws's response to it. With few exceptions, the authors of the code used future more vivid conditional with the future perfect indicative to form such clauses. At times, they lapse into the present subjunctive for the second part of the syllogism. In both forms, the phrase is best translated in the English present indicative. Nouns and adjectives follow classical norms more closely but even with these forms a large number of neologisms have entered the code in Latin rainment. The most important of these are treated in text footnotes.

           It is thus hoped that the following translation may be rendered faithfully in accordance with the idiosyncracies of the original and in line with the rules of modern English. If I prove successful at this task, the assessment of translation by the Knight of the Sad Countenance must convey some dubious satisfaction:

But I do not mean to imply that this exercise of translation is not praiseworthy; for, a man might be occupied in worse things and less profitable occupations [Ibid., 877].