1 of 4
Edith Grossman's new translation of Don Quixote is a pleasure to read, not a chore. Easy, vernacular, high-conversational in tone, written in the long sentences of an expansive spirit, this English version let me truly enter the greatest of all dialogues, literary or otherwise.
Don Quixote
|
What kind of proprietary relationship exists between the writer and his character? Hamlet, Falstaff, Lear, and company are always Shakespeare's. They are giants of the stage, along with their mysterious creator. Deeply as they speak to the human heart, they don't leave the boards, walk out through the audience, and exit to the street. What writer could name a character "Hamlet" and think even for a moment that it would not conjure Shakespeare's?
Doctor Johnson, a historical personage, may live by dint of James Boswell's journalizing, but the author of The Dictionary had a larger-than-life existence of his own. Thanks to the heap of minute particulars amassed by Boswell, there is little chance of anyone "being" or invoking "another" Samuel Johnson. The obverse of a character imagined so vividly that he seems real, like the mural painted by Appelles that birds tried to light on, Boswell's subject is an actuality meticulously documented by an imagination in love with another man's life.
Don Quixote presents itself as a personal history, framed in the conventions of a courtly romance. Miguel de Cervantes, the author of record, was perhaps descended from Spanish Jews on his mother's side. As a young man, he fought with the Spanish navy alongside the vessels of Venice and the Papal States in the Battle of Lepanto and was wounded in that victory over the Ottoman fleet. Sailing home four years later, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates, and endured five years of slavery in Algiers before his family finally ransomed him. Back in Spain and dirt-poor, he worked for a time as a collector of taxes beginning around the defeat of the Spanish Armada, only to be imprisoned for peculation, or incompetence, or some other haplessness. One tradition holds that Cervantes began writing his Ingenious Gentleman: Don Quixote of La Mancha while still in prison, in 1598. Part 1 of the novel was published in 1605. It was an instant success, for its publisher if not for the author.
Part 2 of Don Quixote appeared in 1615, about one year before Cervantes' death on April 23, 1616. As the Second Part of The Ingenious Gentleman … by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Author of the First Part makes abundantly clear, Cervantes was galvanized by the popularity of a false sequel, The Second Part of the Exploits of Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Fernandez de Avellaneda, which made a mockery of his character. So again Cervantes picked up his pen, to defend the honor and dignity of the Knight of the Sad Countenance (or the Sorrowful Face, in this translation), and the integrity of his imagination.
The true adventures of the real Don Quixote are only found in Cervantes' novel. But his knight has ridden off the page and into the minds of all, whether they've read his adventures or no. The novel has fostered such multifarious inventions as an English song cycle by William Purcell, a 19th-century Russian ballet, an 18th-century French ditto, and a German romantic ballet set by Felix Mendelssohn. Also numbered among its progeny are a 17th-century French stage comedy and operas by Jules Massenet and Georg Philip Telemann. Tobias Smollett did a complete English translation, Mikhail Bulgakov made the Don into Russian. There are a Hebrew Don Quixote, the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha and, most recently a film, Lost in La Mancha.
share this page
RSS Feed
