John Phillips, 1687

London: Printed by Tho. Hodgkin, 1687.

John Phillips, the nephew, pupil and collaborator of John Milton, was himself a prolific author who excelled in satirical pamphlets. He translated not only from Spanish, but also from Latin and French. However, his translation of Don Quixote did not bring him much success and was never re-published. In order to adapt Cervantes' work "to the humour of our modern times" Philips took great liberties with the text, suppressing or changing passages, anglicizing the characters and the setting, and spicing it up with obscenities and sexual allusions. His work has been deemed so extraordinarily unfaithful that Peter Motteux, a subsequent translator of Don Quixote, declared "Never did Spaniard suffer more by Drake, than our Knight of La Mancha by the Writer of that English-Spanish Quixote..."