I’ve been enjoying Matt’s blog posts (earliest, most recent) as he’s been working working his way through Melville’s Moby-Dick. So I decided I’d do something similar with a book I’ve been putting off, Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
The first task was to find an edition I thought I could use. The one on my shelf is an older Penguin paperback translated by J. M. Cohen from 1950. I’d read about 50 pages of it previously. And it isn’t a bad translation. But it is a mass market paperback, set in very small type. Though it wins on portability, I didn’t think I could stick with it for 940 pages. It also lacks, as far as I can tell, any explanatory notes whatsoever other than a brief introduction by the translator. Since I know nothing about Spanish literature and little about 17th century lit, I knew I’d benefit from some scholarly apparatus.
So I hit the local big box book store and read the first few pages of the prologue in three or four different editions, including the Oxford Classics, the Barnes and Noble edition, and this very recent translation by Edith Grossman. None were terrible, but the one that seemed the nicest to me–in terms of the translation but also in overall aesthetics–was this newer translation by John Rutherford. It’s also a Penguin, but it’s a trade paperback set in a nice font with useful, but not excessive, endnotes and introductions. It clocks in a 982 pages, but the extra weight and size is worth it.
[Full disclosure: All book links above go to the Bassplaying.com Online Store. Any book, CD, or other item you order there puts a few dimes in my pocket.]
But to the book itself. The witty prologue sets up the novel, explaining that it will be a spoof of the Chivalric Romances of the day. We find Cervantes in mock sadness that he doesn’t have sonnets and other poems to adorn the opening of his novel like other romance authors do, until his friend reassures him that he can simply write his own. So we get some sonnets from heroes of other Romances (and their horses, and their lovers) claiming that Don Quixote, the hero of the novel is more brave, more knightly, and more dedicated to the cause of chivalry than they have been.
Then we get to Chapters one and two, which give us a description of Don Quixote, a man so intoxicated by Romances that he takes them to be true and decides to venture forth, like his knightly heroes, in search of his own adventures. It’s an absurd proposition, of course, but therein lies the humor, as Don Quixote does not cut much of a figure as a knight. His armor is old and rusty. His helmet is makeshift. His brave steed is a pitiful nag. He, himself, besides being blinded by idealism, is also fifty years old and untrained in any of the courtly arts he so admires. But none of this deters him, as he is thoroughly blind to it. After rechristening himself and his horse, he sets forth and makes it as far as an inn in a nearby town, which he takes for a castle.
Chapters Read:: Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2
Stopping Point: pg. 35 (3.56% finished!)
Favorite Passage: “And since this work of yours is only concerned to destroy the authority and influence that books of chivalry enjoy in the world and among the general public, there isn’t any need to go begging maxims from philosophers, counsel from Holy Scripture, fables from poets, clauses from rhetoricians or miracles from saints, but rather to attempt, using expressive, decorous and well-ordered words in a straightforward way, to write sentences that are both harmonious and witty, depicting what is in your mind to the very best of your ability, setting out your ideas without complicating or obscuring them.”