Walter Starkie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Walter Fitzwilliam Starkie (1894-1976) was an Irish scholar, author, and translator of Spanish literature. He was the first Professor of Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1926.

He won fame for his travels and was once profiled by Time Magazine as being a modern-day gypsy. His published a record of his experiences in the book Raggle-Taggle Gypsy.

Starkie was also the director of Ireland's famous Abbey Theatre for seventeen years. But he is most famous to modern readers as a translator of Spanish literature. In addition to publishing a 1964 translation of plays from the Spanish Golden Age in the Modern Library volume Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age, he published his own abridged translation of Cervantes's Don Quixote in 1957 in hardcover for Macmillan Publishers, and seven years later, published an unabridged version in paperback for New American Library. Written in contemporary English, it has seldom been out of print since its publication, and is considered highly accurate, but Starkie does occasionally put Irish slang and phrase construction (e.g. the phrase "I'm thinking", instead of "I think", and the oath "Bad 'cess to you!") into the mouths of its peasant characters. This is a trait he repeats in a translation of a brief one-acter by Lope de Rueda published in Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age.

The academic Enid Starkie was his sister.