Peter Anthony Motteux, a native of Rouen, is a French Huguenot who had come to England in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
At first making his living as an auctioneer, by 1706 he was maintaining a shop in Leadenhall Street, selling imports from China, Japan, and India, and (in his own words) "silks, lace, linens, pictures, and other goods."
He also holds a position with the Post Office in the first decade of the eighteenth century.
Among his miscellaneous works, A Poem in Praise of Tea (1701) is arguably the best known.
Motteux is perhaps best known for completing Sir Thomas Urquhart's translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Books I and II of Urquhart's translation of Rabelais had been published in 1653; Motteux (with outside help) had revised these, completed Urquart's translation of Book III, and translated Book IV and the possibly spurious Book V. The entire work was published in 1693 and 1694 (reprinted in 1708; revised by John Ozell in 1737).
While Urquhart's original version of Rabelais has sometimes been acclaimed as a masterpiece in itself, critics have had reservations about Motteux's continuation.
In part, Motteux suffered for frankly rendering the vulgarity of Rabelais, to a generation of readers less prepared to tolerate it than Urquhart's had been.
Motteux produced an important translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote; this four-volume 1712 edition is credited as "translated from the original by many hands and published by Peter Motteux."
Very popular in its own era, Motteux's version of the work has been condemned by later, more rigorous translators, for: adopting a frivolous style, compared to the mock-serious and ironic tone of the original; turning Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into buffoons; casting the work in a "Franco-Cockney" rather than a Spanish ambience.
John Ormsby, in his Introduction to his own 1885 translation of the novel, will call Motteux's version "worse than worthless."
Motteux has translated other works as well, one example being The Present State of the Empire of Morocco (1695) by François Pidou de Saint-Olon.
Motteux's end is controversial, and may have constituted a case of autoerotic asphyxiation: "His death in a bawdy house was thought to be suspicious, and caused a good deal of legal disturbance."
(MacDonald, Hugh. John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1939; reprinted Kessinger, 2006) Five people are tried for his murder, but are acquitted.
He is survived by his widow Priscilla, two sons and a daughter.
