[lit-ideas] Re: "Honesty Is The Best Policy"
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 14 Oct 2004 01:07:36 PDT
Harold writes:
>Try the OED; and notice the 1599 citation.<
Which is:
1599 Sandy's Europae Spec. (1632) 102 Our grosse conceipts, who think
honestie the best policie.
Well, I don't know. All evening between baseball games and debates I've been
meaning to look at the OED. I finally did and it seems to me that the citation
is oddly dated. I don't know what Sandy's Europae Spec. is or was, but the
parenthetical date (1632) could mean that 'Sandy' was quoting the translator of
El Quijote then. Of course it may not be a date, but the OED's practice for
noting volume numbers is to give them without parentheses.
If 1632 is the date this citation appeared the question may be still unsettled:
Volume II of Don Quixote was published in 1616. But iff 'Sandy' uttered or
printed the expression in 1599, he's ahead of Cervantes and wins the best policy
prize: Volume I of DQ was published in 1605.
What's needed, I think, is that someone look at the Spanish original and let us
know if 'honesty is the best policy' is the best, or the most natural, rendering
of the passage.
Thomas Shelton was the first to translate DQ into English; his translation of
Part II was published in 1620. That gives 'Sandy' 16 years to find out about it.
Robert Browning said 'Less is more...' (or has Andrea del Sarto say it in his
poem of the same name. But like Harold, I always associate the words with Mies
van der Rohe and the Bauhaus.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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