Walter Starkie - Writings

Writings

He won fame for his travels and was profiled by Time Magazine as a modern-day 'gypsy'. He published accounts of his experiences as a university vacation vagabond following the trail of the Gypsies in Raggle Taggle, subtitled "Adventures with a fiddle in Hungary and Roumania" and sequels, Spanish Raggle Taggle and Don Gypsy which are picaresque accounts in the tradition of George Borrow, with frontispieces by Arthur Rackham. His observations of Gypsy life, while more anecdotal than scholarly, provide rich insights into these shadowy, nomadic people. Just as important Starkie's life serves as an example. As Julian Moynahan said in reviewing Scholars and Gypsies for The New York Times Book Review (November 24, 1963): "Many lives have been more interesting and enviable in the telling than the living, but not so here. Emerging from the shadow of a somewhat blighted inheritance, Walter Starkie chose and enjoyed a lifelong freedom which most of us throw away with both hands on the day we leave school and take our first jobs." He was the President of the Gypsy Lore Society from 1962 to 1973.

In addition to publishing a 1964 translation of plays from the Spanish Golden Age in the Modern Library volume as Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age, he published an abridged translation of Don Quixote in hardcover for Macmillan Publishers in London in 1954. Illustrated with drawings done by Gustave Doré in 1863 for the French language edition, Starkie's biographical introduction of Cervantes was 116 pages long. In 1957, Starkie published an abridged version of his translation for Mentor Books with the introduction shortened to seven pages. Later Starkie published his complete and unabridged version of his translation for New American Library in 1964. Written in contemporary English, both unabridged and abridged versions have been in print since their publications, and are 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 his translation of The Mask, a brief one-acter by Lope de Rueda published in Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age.