Don Quixote of La Mancha

By Miguel de Cervantes, John Ormsby and Ilan Stavans

Newly introduced by leading Quixote scholar Ilan Stavans, this 400th Anniversary edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha—called the most popular book in history after the Bible and the first modern novel—inaugurates Restless Classics: interactive encounters with great books and inspired teachers. Each Restless Classic is beautifully designed with original artwork, a new introduction for the trade audience, and a video teaching series and live online book club discussions led by passionate experts.

Described as “the novel that invented modernity,” Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote of La Mancha has become since its publication in Spain in two parts—the first in 1605, the second in 1615—a machine of meaning, endlessly adapted into ballet, theater, dance, film, music, and television, not to mention a veritable tourist industry.
Lionel Trilling argued that “all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” Mark Twain was a passionate fan. Flaubert modeled Madame Bovary after it. Dostoyevsky reimagined its protagonist in The Idiot. And Borges, in his story about Pierre Menard, looked at it as the gravitational center of Hispanic civilization. Milan Kundera fittingly summarized this unstoppable devotion when he said that “Cervantes teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.”
Of course, Don Quixote has its detractors, too. Nabokov, for instance, maintained it was one of the cruelest narratives ever. Still, after 400 years, the book remains with us, winding improbably through history like the famous errant knight and his companion, Sancho Panza.
The commemorative Restless Classics edition, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of its full release, features John Ormsby’s canonical English translation, illustrations by award-winning Mexican artist Eko, and an insightful, thought-provoking introduction by Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost public intellectuals today. Don Quixote, Stavans writes, is “not only a novel but a manual of life. You’ll find in it anything you need, from lessons on how to speak and eat and love to an exhortation of a disciplined, focused life, an argument against censorship, and a call to make lasting friends, which, in Cervantes’s words, is ‘what makes bearable our long journey from birth to death’.”
The volume includes access to an interactive series of video lectures by Stavans, available online at restlessbooks.com/quixote. The videos serve as map to this restless classic, which speaks more eloquently than ever to our perennial desire to sacrifice for a dream in order to see its true worth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Oct 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781632060808

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) was a Spanish writer whose work included plays, poetry, short stories, and novels. Although much of the details of his life are a mystery, his experiences as both a soldier and as a slave in captivity are well documented; these events served as subject matter for his best-known work, Don Quixote (1605) as well as many of his short stories. Although Cervantes reached a degree of literary fame during his lifetime, he never became financially prosperous; yet his work is considered among the most influential in the development of world literature.

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Restless Classics

Interactive Encounters with Great Books

and Inspired Teachers

As you read this edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha, look for the symbol. This signals a linked video lecture taught by Ilan Stavans. Access the videos by either clicking on the symbol or by visiting www.restlessbooks.com/quixote, and follow the instructions on the page. There, you’ll also find information about four live online book club discussions that will take place in the months following publication.

Cervantes’s masterpiece—called the most popular book in history after the Bible and the first modern novel—inaugurates Restless Classics: a series of great books from the past that still speak to our time and place, and especially, to our restlessness. In addition to their original artwork and fresh introductions, each classic brings the classroom experience to the reader with accompanying online teaching videos and live book club discussions led by passionate experts. We hope you’ll join us in this interactive reading journey.

Introduction

Ilan Stavans

Through others we become ourselves.

—Lev S. Vygotsky

1. The Spell

I have honestly lost count of how many times I have read Don Quixote of La Mancha. The first time was in my native Mexico City, in my late teens. I didn’t much like it: it seemed long and uncontained, its language stilted, even arcane. It was about an idealist ready to take on the world and realize his dreams. I was an idealist myself, but I couldn’t sympathize with the travails of the protagonist. I probably didn’t finish it, and if I did, it was after declaring my displeasure at every turn, complaining to those who would listen that it was an outdated classic that contemporary readers wouldn’t really find useful anymore. I even inserted a handful of marginalia about its repetitiveness, its unruliness. I know because I still have that precious debut copy in my library.

Maturity is about coming face-to-face with our own limitations, about becoming patient with ourselves. Sometime in my mid-thirties, after telling a friend I would never go back to Don Quixote, I suddenly realized I was wrong and, as if under a spell, felt the urge to reopen the book. A more assured, less gullible reader, I franticly devoured it in a couple of sleepless sessions. Since then, I have dutifully returned to Cervantes’s novel in periodic cycles, each time sensing anew its sheer magic. Whenever I’m back the book appears to me a different book, with nuances—a hidden adjective, a turn of phrase—I hadn’t noticed before. Its pages are fluid, inexhaustible, growing as I grow. I have lectured on Don Quixote, I have written about it, and I have taught it, which gives me enormous pleasure, for it is I who now puts it on the lap of a young generation, knowing perfectly well that, just like the earlier version of me, the young love to rebel. I must convince my students of the merits of the book, prove to them that because it spoke to my generation and to those before, it is likely to speak to theirs as well.

A classic is a book that waits for us until we are ready, a book that chooses its readers. These volumes don’t want to be read by just anyone but the right reader at the right time. Don Quixote is a prime example. Ask around and you will find out how many people stumbled along the way, like I did when I was young. You will also discover that those who finish it are radically transformed. This is a book for all seasons. It feels to me as if it has always been needed as a way to mend the world, perhaps today more than ever, modernity being both a blessing and a curse, as our sense of self undergoes heavy pressure to conform, to lose its uniqueness.

Now that I am, like the book’s protagonist, Alonso Quijano, in my mid-fifties, the plot seems to me about a bored, pathetic old man who refuses to grow up. And about a diehard reader who endlessly consumes second-rate literature, which, in the late Renaissance, was what chivalry novels were. And about an inveterate dreamer who, in middle age, knows that dreams, if unattended, have the tendency to sour. There is a haunting poem by Langston Hughes, a poem I love called Harlem, that strikes me as getting to the very essence of the novel. In it Hughes asks, What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up… Or fester like a sore?... Or does it explode?

Dreams do explode. Don Quixote is proof of it. Quijano, out of restlessness, becomes Don Quixote. He can no longer sit tight, passively reading books. He is ready to go out and conquer the world. That abrupt decision, in my eyes, makes him admirable: finally, he is ready to live up to his full potential, to take command of his actions, no matter how wretched they might be.

What I like most about Don Quixote is its imperfection. I wasn’t wrong in my teens about the sloppiness of the writing; it is just that my attitude was too pedantic. It is, unquestionably, a defective narrative. Cervantes is often criticized as a numb and careless stylist. Aside from the countless typos in the first edition, which subsequent editions mercifully corrected, there are all sorts of errors: for instance, Sancho Panza’s donkey disappearing without a trace at one point, only to reappear later, or the name of Sancho’s wife, Teresa Panza, constantly changing, as if the author forgot what to call her.

Worse perhaps is the feeling one gets—I do, at least—that Cervantes is often falling asleep at the wheel, that he wants to stubbornly fill pages. Although this isn’t a flaw per se, the First Part and the Second Part, published a decade apart (the first in 1605, the second in 1615) at times feel as if they are unrelated siblings, the first maybe written tempestuously, the second more relaxed and philosophical, if not more fatalistic. Furthermore, I love all this clumsiness, I love the way things appear to be clogged up. It reminds me of my own ineptness. The business of classics being perfect books is baloney. They are as defective, as inadequate as everything else in the universe. Careful readers see these flaws as reflections of their own frailty. That, I suspect, is why audiences adore Don Quixote himself: because he is awkward, pitiful, inchoate, seeking excellence but failing in the process. The knight’s charm is to be found in his folly. Imperfection is a feature of our universe, and this classic is distinct because it both deliberately and haphazardly replicates that feature.

The book came out during the late Renaissance, a time of resistance to the Counter-Reformation in Spain. Cervantes was a devotee of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, perceived as dangerous by the Holy Office; its ideas promoted a critical, defiant view of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and were credited for igniting a fever of anti-clericalism. Don Quixote is, at its core, not just an irreligious but also even an anti-religious book because it doesn’t talk about sins or embrace any type of eternal redemption. Still, in my eyes it is book about faith of another sort: it calls readers to sacrifice for a cause—any cause, just as long as one is passionate about it.

This edition celebrates the four-hundredth anniversary of the release of the Second Part of Don Quixote. The endurance of this book is nothing short of astonishing. The shelf life of an average book is relatively short: a month, a year with luck. Four centuries is more than proof of durability. Marketers and publicists can’t even contemplate such longevity. It is impossible to imagine the millions who have converged on its pages—first in Spanish, then in almost all the languages in the world.

2. The Real Thing

I don’t often think about Cervantes when reading Don Quixote, and when I do it feels like a distraction. Is it really important to know who the author of a work of art is? Doesn’t the work strive to have a life of its own, independent from its creator? Miguel de Unamuno believed Cervantes was unworthy of his book, a second-rate author behind a first-rate work. And Nabokov panned him as an unconvincing realist novelist (in one of his lectures on the book, he talked about how Cervantes had no sense of geography). But I’m talking of something even more extreme. Do we really need him to understand his creation? We do, because no matter how much we wish it, as Parmenides stressed, nihil fit ex nihilo, nothing comes from nothing.

There is only scattered information about Cervantes’s life. Born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547, Cervantes fought as a young man in the Battle of Lepanto, in which the Spanish and a coalition of southern European Catholic maritime states fought the Ottomans. Cervantes lost use of his left arm during the incident, earning himself the nickname "el manco de Lepanto," the one-armed man of Lepanto. In the novel, there is a chapter in which Don Quixote, offering a speech to Sancho, mulls over whether the pen is mightier than the sword. Although it is undeniably Cervantes’s writing and not his soldiering that cemented his place in history, the knight comes out in favor of the sword, a fact that always seemed anachronistic to me, even when I know well that a military life in Spain then was deemed far more admirable than one devoted to literature. It is anachronistic today as well—or at least I hope so, although, given the state of our world, I acknowledge I am in the minority.

Upon his return home from time spent in Italy, Cervantes and his brother were captured by the Turks and imprisoned in Algiers. In Don Quixote there is a self-sufficient novella, The Captive’s Tale, about a man who suffers the same fate. Cervantes held a position as a tax collector, among other jobs. He spent some time in jail. People have the mistaken idea that this was because of his intellectual activities, but in truth he had mishandled funds. He had an out-of-wedlock daughter and married a woman almost his daughter’s age. Although Cervantes was, in addition to being a novelist, a poet and a playwright, he excelled in neither discipline. Among other items, he left behind a pastoral novel and a series of short narratives known as Exemplary Novellas. Had his masterpiece not been written, we would likely consider him a minor figure of El Siglo de Oro, the baroque Golden Age of Spanish literature, or otherwise not remember him at all. Luckily (for him but, mostly, for us), he found success in his old age. The First Part of Don Quixote was published when he was fifty-seven.

Again, none of this might appear crucial to understanding the novel—which, when it came out, was an instant success—yet it is indispensable to appreciating its essence. Maybe Cervantes’s personal failings underscore the enormity and unexpectedness of the book’s durability. Maybe his poverty and desperation to make money help explain why the narrative is so entertaining and seemingly geared toward mass appeal. It took just a few years for about 1,500 copies to sell—a number that may seem meager by contemporary standards but was at that time, with illiteracy rampant, quite significant. There are historical records showing that people constantly talked about Don Quixote and Sancho, and even dressed up like them. Although the Holy Office of the Inquisition forbid novels in the Americas, we know that during the 1630s copies circulated in Mexico and Peru, the two epicenters in Spain’s colonial domain.

Most people in the Spanish-speaking world affectionately refer to Cervantes’s novel as El Quijote. The reasons are manifold: it is the book of books, the center of gravity around which Hispanic civilization rotates. But the appellation also has do to with the fact that, before the Second Part was published, a spurious Second Part appeared in 1614 to meet the demands of readers anxious to put their hands on the next installments. A man writing under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, about whom even less is known than about Cervantes, wrote the ersatz sequel. This version is known as El Falso Quijote, in English The Apocryphal Quixote. In the real Second Part, the characters, not only Don Quixote and Sancho but also several others, often talk about it with disdain, proclaiming themselves authentic, unlike Fernández de Avellaneda’s creations. Referring to Cervantes’s novel as El Quijote is thus a way of stating what is rightfully his.

One could argue that, since Cervantes’s death, countless others have laid claim to his book. Think of the infinite echoes of Don Quixote. Shakespeare probably read it, or at least knew about it. (The Bard co-wrote a play with John Fletcher called Cardenio, based on one of the Don Quixote episodes.) Diderot believed it encapsulated all philosophy, from Socrates to the Encyclopaedists. Samuel Taylor Coleridge recommended it without restrain. Flaubert modeled Madame Bovary after it. Dostoyevsky couldn’t stop praising it in his diaries and shaped his novel The Idiot as a tribute. Kafka felt a deep kinship toward it, making Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis verily Quixotic. And Borges repeatedly reimagined its structure and narrative premises. The list of admiring literati goes on: Henry Fielding, Lord Byron, Michel Foucault, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, and so on. There have been many detractors, too: Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought of it as unending, and Vladimir Nabokov believed it was a cruel book. Outside literature, the fan club is equally substantial: it includes Manuel de Falla, Orson Welles, George Balanchine, Terry Gilliam, Ernesto Ché Guevara, Nelson Mandela, and Subcomandante Marcos.

While all this points to the universality of the novel, it is intriguing to note that Don Quixote is extraordinary local in its focus. It mainly deals with rural life in central Spain. And while it described, endearingly, the arid landscape of La Mancha, it is also, at least in my eyes, a severe critique of Cervantes’s time. Not a single page goes by without a stern assessment—social, political, religious, and military—of his society. The novel is built on pure satire, meaning that nothing is sacred. The list of targets is endless: one famous chapter criticizes the Holy Office of the Inquisition, another chapter ridicules the government; there are harsh comments about the place of women in Spanish society, Moors, aristocratic arrogance, and so on. Don Quixote and Sancho laugh at everything, including—and especially—themselves. In doing so, they indulge in a long-lasting sport in the Hispanic world: self-deprecation.

The relationship between Spain and Don Quixote is rather complex. In spite of its early success, the country’s intelligentsia scorned it. Lope de Vega, Cervantes’s contemporary and rival as well as the most famous poet and playwright of the period, called it inferior. Since then, a national debate has ensured about its qualities and overall value. Among others, figures like Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset have even attempted to extrapolate from its pages a distinct ideology, called Quijotismo: the capacity, in the face of adversity, to stick to one’s own ideals. For Spain, this ideology has been a double-edged sword: at times it has pushed it into depression, economic and psychological, and on other occasions it has been the inspiration in the finding of new collective goals.

In Latin America, which for centuries functioned as the principal satellite of the Spanish Empire, another ideology has emerged, again linked to Don Quixote: Menardismo. It originates in Borges’s short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," about a French symbolist poet who at the end of the nineteenth century decides to rewrite—not to copy but to rewrite from scratch—Don Quixote. The story has been read widely as a metaphor for the Latin American approach to art: through a stream of outside influences, it futilely seeks its own distinctiveness. Menardismo, then, finds uniqueness in a copy, declaring it authentic.

From novel to ideology, Don Quixote has become a veritable fountain of linguistic expressions. As in the case of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, lots of Cervantes’s sentences, which he might have harvested from the time he lived in, are now part of popular parlance, such as "El amor es deseo de belleza (Love seeks beauty), Dad crédito a las obras y no a las palabras (Give credit to acts, not to words), La guerra, así como es madrastra de los cobardes, es la madre de los valientes (War is mother of the brave and stepmother of cowards), and Se va a la plaza del nunca por la calle del ya voy" (Promises are thinner than air). Furthermore, the novel’s protagonist has given the world an adjective: quijotesco, Quixotic, which the dictionary tells us means unrealistic, exceedingly idealistic but that conveys so much more: impetuous, ambitious, imaginative, capricious, determined, hopeful, optimistic, and even perfectionist.

3. On Angst

Chivalry literature was to Cervantes’s time what superhero adventures are to ours. Just as people today dress up like Batman, Spiderman, Superman, and the X-Men, readers then imagined themselves as Amadis de Gaula, Tirant Lo Bancc, and Palmerín of England. These were imaginary characters based on the mythic travails of the Crusaders and other knights. Dressed up in shining armor and riding their loyal horses, in the popular imagination they were ready to conquer heathen lands as a sign of courtly devotion to their fair ladies.

Cervantes parodied these archetypes at a moment when people were eager to go beyond a stilted kind of heroism and he showed them how. Don Quixote is considered the first modern novel in the sense of the bildungsroman. Quijano, the protagonist, starts in one physical and emotional place and ends up in a radically different one. Modernity is about being in a constant state of change. And that state, that condition, generates endless angst.

No matter how one looks at him, Don Quixote is an anxious character. He is always agonizing about his enemies, his capacity to defeat them, and his beloved’s fidelity to him. Early on in the narrative, he is described as a hidalgo, a lowly member of Spain’s seventeenth-century aristocracy. The word hidalgo derives from "hijo de algo," son of wealth, and it describes an individual who is financially passive, wasting his energy in idle endeavors, unlike the early manifestations of the bourgeoisie, who understood that change came as a result of individual talent and that such talent was a type of capital. Don Quixote’s angst is largely a byproduct of his class, whose standing is permanently untenable.

The character Don Quixote is unprecedented by those in stories that come before because he has an inner life that is as vivid and complex as his outer one. Think of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible, The Arabian Nights and the Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. All of them are populated by characters without any interiority. In Genesis 12, the outset of the Abrahamic story, the Almighty says to him (in the King James Version), Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. Abraham—then called Abram—reacts mechanically, without much thought. The Bible simply says, So Abram departed. I’m even tempted to describe him as an automaton.

In contrast, any exchange between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is a showcase of complex emotions. In the First Part, Chapter VIII, which stands among the most famous in the volume, the knight errant is eager to convince his squire that nearby windmills are actually a group of giants, but his squire isn’t convinced:

Look, your worship, said Sancho; what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.

It is easy to see, replied Don Quixote, that thou art not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.

This, unquestionably, is a two-way conversation. It defines the characters in the way dialogue makes any of us real people (if we can be said to be real). Not only is Don Quixote always changing, but, as this passage demonstrates, he is also stubborn, which implies he refuses to change. As a character, he disagrees internally. Indeed, in Cervantes’s novel, his characters don’t talk at each other but to one another; moreover, they exist in order to converse… and vice versa.

I once attempted a list of the entire cast of Don Quixote. I stopped counting after I reached two hundred. Aside from the knight, there is his niece and a housekeeper, the town’s priest and barber, innkeepers and other villagers. There is Sancho, of course, who doesn’t show up as the knight’s companion until Chapter VII of the First Part; his family, as well as thieves, puppeteers, a duke and duchess, Moors, prisoners, printmakers, etcetera. And, of course, there is Dulcinea del Toboso, an ethereal presence, a Platonic figure more in Don Quixote’s psyche than in reality. Truly, like Shakespeare’s Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, Don Quixote isn’t in love with Dulcinea as such but, rather, with love itself.

Still, it is the pair of Don Quixote and Sancho, at first master and servant, soon teacher and pupil, then inseparable friends, that justifies the whole ride. Exquisitely drawn, they are a study in contrast: one a nobleman and the other poor, one is thin and tall and the other fat and short, one an idealist and the other a materialist, and one stubborn and impulsive and the other practical and flexible. As they go along their adventures, the two slowly influence one another, bringing about a Quixotization of Sancho Panza and a Sanchification of Don Quixote. The most dramatic point of mutual influence might be, at the book’s very end, Don Quixote recognizing that his idea of being a knight was an illusion and Sancho finally coming to believe in that illusion. Maybe that’s what friendship is about: sharing one’s essence and, as a result, changing it. Not accidentally, that friendship—that eternal couple—has become a staple of our culture. Think of its countless clones: Jacques and his master, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Ernie and Bert, Abbot and Costello, Vladimir and Estragon, and C3PO and R2D2.

Since everything is transient, everything can and should be recorded, if only to fix that moment in time. The key to our identity resides in the language we use to describe a vision of the universe in any given moment. Words, hence, are our brick and mortar. And they surely are for Don Quixote and Sancho: Everything becomes a story. Through storytelling, they navigate epiphanies and misunderstandings. In truth, Don Quixote is just an accumulation of thinly interwoven episodes with this couple at center stage. Despite the novel’s long diversions (there are even autonomous novellas, like The Ill-Conceived Curiosity and The Captive’s Tale, that take several chapters that, even once we finish them, have no apparent connection to Don Quixote and Sancho), the back-and-forth between the two characters quickly becomes a labyrinth in which multitudes of narratives exist in dizzying competition.

4. The Master of Artifice

At one point in the Second Part, Don Quixote and Sancho enter a print shop in Barcelona, where they have a conversation about books and then about translations. The knight tells his squire that reading a novel in translation is like looking at a Flemish carpet from the back. Aside from being a superb metaphor, this line is also intimately linked to one of the essential themes of Don Quixote: the role of translation.

From the very first line ("En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme…; In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind…), the narrator comes across as capricious and unreliable. As the plot unfolds, alternate narrators emerge, competing for the reader’s attention. Among them is an Arab historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, who is said to have written down the adventures of Don Quixote beforehand in his native Arabic, which the novel’s original narrator stumbles across on a table with old books in Toledo. There is un moro aljamiado," a young Moor born in Spain, whom the narrator comes across in Toledo and asks to translate into Spanish Benengeli’s original Arabic text. On top of all these narrators is the author himself, either Cervantes or someone assuming his authorial voice, who occasionally reclaims control of the material.

This game of voices makes Don Quixote a quintessential product of the Baroque, a style that stresses ornamentation and self-consciousness. The characters, particularly Don Quixote and Sancho, are relentlessly aware of their appearance—that is, their literariness. At one point in the Second Part, for instance, Don Quixote and Sancho encounter a reader of the First Part, who tells them that they aren’t quite as he imagined them. In another instance, two characters come across in Alonso Quijano’s library a copy of La Galatea, a novel by Cervantes. The effect of all such moments is that of a culture in the process of being turned into a caricature or imitation of itself, as in Diego Velázquez’s famous Las Meninas, in which the king and the queen, standing next to the would-be position of the painting’s creator and across from that painter’s image within the painting, look at themselves in a mirror, one in which only the observers—ourselves—are able to stand: a reflection of a reflection.

To me, the most decisive of these games is the suggestion by Cervantes that what the reader has in hand is a palimpsest, one that originates in another language, with Cide Hamete Benengeli as its true author. That’s why I feel as if reading the book in Spanish is, in and of itself, an act of translation. Consequently, the fact that the vast majority of readers that have ever come to Don Quixote accessed it in translation is, at least to me, quite fitting. In my personal library, I have a large collection of versions in multiple languages, including, French, Portuguese, German, Korean, Hebrew, and Yiddish. (Plus, I have translated the novel into Spanglish. It begins: "En un placate of La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme…") And I have all the translations ever done into English.

There have been no fewer than twenty English translations. To my knowledge, with the exception of the Bible, no other book has been translated as frequently into Shakespeare’s tongue. The majority was produced in England; not until the mid-twentieth century did American translators enter the ring. All but one translation are by men; the exception is by Edith Grossman, who published her popular version in 2003. The first English translator was Thomas Shelton, who is said to have completed the translation of the First Part in approximately thirty days at the request of a close friend who didn’t know Spanish. The British translators include a mailman, a nephew of John Milton, and a diplomat. One of those translators, novelist Tobias Smollett, is said not to have known a word of Spanish.

This edition uses the rendition by John Ormsby (1829–1895), first published in London in 1885. I find his version the most genuine, the closest to the original, and with the most rhythm and sharpness. In a kind of mission statement, he states that fidelity to the method is as much a part of the translator’s duty as fidelity to the matter. He adds that the first duty is to those who look to him for as faithful a representation of his author as it is in his power to give them, faithful to the letter so long as fidelity is practicable, faithful to the spirit so far as he can make it.

I like this version because it avoids affectation. In Ormsby’s words, no man abhorred it more than Cervantes, and the book skewers pretension with its sometimes ridiculous depiction of Don Quixote and the affected chivalry novels the character adores and the author detested. He does a particularly fine job of reflecting this skewering in his translation. Also, Ormsby understood that Spanish underwent less change since the seventeenth century than other European languages did. It is harder today for a native English speaker to read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for instance, than it is for a native Spanish speaker to read Cervantes’s novel. Of course, the translation the reader has in hand is 125 years old, so it isn’t contemporary. That is an aspect I frankly adore. After all, experiencing a classic of this caliber is an act of reaching back in time. The language of more recent translations is too fresh for me, too immediate. Unless one was a denizen of Cervantes’s Spain, a filter is needed to convey a degree of historical distance. Ormbsy concludes: "Seeing that the story of Don Quixote and all its characters and incidents have now been for more than two centuries and a half familiar as household words in English mouths, it seems to me that the old familiar names and phrases should not be changed without good reason. Of course a translator who holds that Don Quixote should receive the treatment a great classic deserves, will feel himself bound by the injunction laid upon the Morisco in Chap. IX not to omit or add anything."*

Ormsby’s promise—to be true to the original—is kept fully in this anniversary edition, except for one addition: twenty spectacular new illustrations by the Mexican artist Eko, whose imaginative art is in line with legendary lithographer José Guadalupe Posada. There is a rich tradition of artists whose work engages with Cervantes’s novel: Picasso produced a silhouette of the knight and his squire that is as famous as the characters themselves, in part because Spain has used it—and abused it—for tourism purposes. Salvador Dalí produced an array of images to accompany the book. And then there are the phantasmagorical engravings of Gustave Doré, a French Romantic who in the nineteenth century produced some of the most recognized pictorial depictions. Eko has obviously studied those ancestors closely. His art is both a tribute and a departure. He turns the cast into almost outrageous, larger-than-life eyes, fingers, and hands, which he places on a curtained stage, to emphasize the spectacle of it all.

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* The one part of Ormsby’s rendition I dislike is in the First Part, Chapter I, when Alonso Quijano loses his mind. The original reads: En resolución, él se enfrascó tanto en su lectura, que se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio; y así, del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le secó el celebro de manera que vino a perder el juicio. Ormsby abbreviates this section thus: In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon... Others, including Thomas Shelton, Cervantes’s first translator into English, do a far better job. Shelton’s version reads: In resolution, he plunged himself so deeply in his reading of these books, as he spent many times in the lecture of them whole days and nights; and in the end, through his little sleep and much reading, he dried up his brains in such sort as he lost wholly his judgment.

5. Basic Questions

I beg to differ with the characterization of Don Quixote as unrealistic; to me, Don Quixote is hyper-realistic. He understands quite well the weight of reality, even if he refuses to see it, thus choosing to sidestep it, to improve on it. I find him the most learned of all characters in literature, a wise man, an enlightened soul. His repeated mishaps are conventionally seen as demonstration of the outdatedness of his values. His redemption doesn’t come from standing unintentionally for his dream but, instead, for endorsing it even if it is… well, Quixotic.

Indeed, after countless readings I have come to see Don Quixote not only as a novel but as a manual for life. You’ll find in it anything you need, from lessons on how to speak and eat and love to an exhortation of a disciplined, focused life, an argument against censorship, and a call to make lasting friends, which, as Cervantes puts it, is what makes bearable our long journey from birth to death. People have been drawn to the book because it addresses the basic questions: Who am I and what makes me unique? What is truth and how should that truth be shared? Are we all trapped in our own circumstances? And what happens to a dream deferred? Don Quixote sweeps these questions off the table with a simple response: it is our imagination that sets us free. For, as Yeats wrote, in dreams begins responsibility, though it certainly doesn’t end there.

Chronology

This timetable mentions only a handful of the infinite echoes of Don Quixote in literature, culture, and history. For a fuller explanation of the publication and legacy of Miguel de Cervantes’s masterwork, see Ilan Stavans’s Quixote: The Novel and the World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015).

1547 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, Spain.

1605 The First Part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de La Mancha, by Cervantes, is published.

1608 César Oudin renders Cervantes’s novella The Ill-Conceived Curiosity into French. Oudin will translate the First Part of Don Quixote in 1614. His translation of the Second Part, which completed the rendition of the novel into French, appeared in 1618.

1612 Thomas Shelton releases in London an English-language rendition of Don Quixote, First Part. It is the first translation of Cervantes’s novel ever to be done. Thousands of translations will follow into every single standardized tongue as well as into dialects, jargons, and slangs. It supposedly took Shelton over a month in 1607 to finish his rendition, but he didn’t publish it until some five years later.

1613 The History of Cardenio, a lost play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, is written. It shares with Don Quixote the character of Cardenio, a nobleman in love who becomes mad and does penance in the Sierra Morena.

1614 A fake sequel to Don Quixote, under the title of Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, written by one Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, appears in Spain. Cervantes is furious. He uses the excuse to finish his own sequel. Avellaneda’s identity remains unknown.

1615 Cervantes’s own sequel, known as the Second Part, is published.

1616 Cervantes dies at the age of sixty-eight in Madrid. He is buried in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians.

1622 Lorenzo Franciosini translates the First Part of the novel into Italian. The Second Part will appear in 1625.

1677 François Filleau de Saint-Martin translates Don Quixote into French as Histoire de l’admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche. He leaves the last chapter out in order to write a sequel of his own. He will die before finishing the task. One of Filleau de Saint-Martin’s students, Robert Challe, will complete it years later.

1700 French-born English author, playwright, and translator Peter Anthony Motteux renders Cervantes’s novel into English. In abbreviated, recomposed, and modified versions, his remains the most frequently reprinted rendition.

1734 Don Quixote in England, a play by English satirist Henry Fielding, is staged. It is designed as an attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole.

1737 For the first time, the words Quixote, Quixotada, and Quixotería enter a lexicon. They are included in Spain’s Diccionario de autoridades.

1742 In the title page of Joseph Andrews, Fielding notes that the novel is "written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote." Three years after his death, the translation of Don Quixote by Irish portrait painter and art collector Charles Jervas (misspelled in the title page as Jarvis, a typo forever stuck to the name) appears posthumously. It is considered the most accurate but is also described as stiff and without humor. It is reprinted frequently in the eighteenth century.

1752 The Female Quixote: or, The Adventures of Arabella, a novel by Gibraltar-born British poet and actress Charlotte Lennox, is published in England.

1755 After several publication delays, Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett releases in London his own translation of Don Quixote, known as The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. He is immediately accused of not knowing a word of Spanish, and his translation is criticized as being a commissioned job wholly done by a group of hired translators who plagiarized portions from previous versions.

1759 The character of Uncle Toby in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne, is based on Don Quixote.

1761 German baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann writes the opera Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Camacho.

1767 Telemann writes the orchestral suite Don Quichotte.

1769 N. Osipov translates Don Quixote into Russian for the first time. His rendition is based on the French version by Filleau de Saint-Martin.

1780 The first map of Don Quixote’s itinerary in La Mancha is drawn by Spanish royal geographer Tomás López. It is endorsed by the Real Academia Española (RAE).

1792 American writer and Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Hugh Henry Brackenridge publishes the first two parts of his novel Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His servant, set in the western Pennsylvania frontier. The third part appeared in 1793 and the fourth and last in 1797. A revised edition was published in 1833.

1801 New Hampshire–based American writer Tabitha Gilman Tenney writes the novel Female Quixotism, Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon.

1833 Mariano Arévalo’s five-volume edition appears in Mexico City, the first time Don Quixote is printed in the New World. At the same time in Spain, scholar and diplomat Diego Clemencín puts out the first annotated edition of Don Quixote. His exhaustive effort concludes in 1939.

1838 Konstantin Massal’skii translates Don Quixote into Russian. It is the first translation into that language done from the Spanish.

1850 French artist Honoré Daumier exhibits at the Paris Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a series of drawings based on Don Quixote.

1851 American writer Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. It displays a strong quixotic quality, the result of Melville’s lifelong admiration of Cervantes’s book.

1856 French novelist Gustave Flaubert releases Madame Bovary. The book comes after years of rereading Don Quixote.

1860 Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev lectures on Hamlet and Don Quixote in different parts of Russia.

1863 French engraver, illustrator, and sculptor Gustave Doré completes the engravings that illustrate the French translation by Louis Viardot in two volumes, published under the aegis of Hachette and Co., in Paris, and Cassell and Co., in London.

1868 Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky serializes The Idiot in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Its protagonist, Prince Myshkin, is an idealized version of Don Quixote. The serialization concludes in 1869.

1869 The ballet Don Quixote, with music by Austrian composer Ludwig Minkus and choreography by French ballet dancer Marius Petipa, is presented at the Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow. Petipa and Minkus will expand it into five acts in 1871, when it will be staged at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre, in St. Petersburg.

1871 For the next decade, Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud corresponds with his Romanian friend Eduard Silberstein. They sign their letters as Cipión (Freud) and Berganza (Silberstein), after the characters of Cervantes’s novella The Colloquy of the Dogs.

1874 Don Quichotte, a play by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, with music by the Prussian-born French composer Jacques Offenbach, premieres in Paris.

1876 Mexican American writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, author of the classic novel The Squatter and the Don, about land claims in California after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, brings out her theatrical adaptation Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts: Taken From Cervantes’ Novel of That Name.

1878 Minsk-born writer and pedagogue Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, also known by the name Mendele Mokher Sforim, the grandfather of Yiddish literature, writes the novel Kitser masoes Binyomen hashlishi. It is structured as a tribute to Cervantes’s book. American journalist, romantic poet, and editor of the New York Evening Post William Cullen Bryant writes a poem about Cervantes to commemorate his death.

1884 American writer and humorist Mark Twain publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Along with its prequel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it meditates on the themes of Don Quixote.

1885 British translator John Ormsby publishes his translation of Don Quixote, the most scholarly up until then. It later becomes the first translation available on the Internet. American poet James Russell Lowell delivers a lecture on Don Quixote in London’s Working Men’s College.

1892 British scholar James Fitzmaurice-Kelly publishes the biography The Life of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

1895 American writer William Dean Howells, in his book My Literary Passions, discusses his discovery of Don Quixote. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, about a journey of self-realization that is inspired in Don Quixote.

1897 Later-Romantic German composer Richard Strauss writes Phantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters (Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character), Opus 35. Spanish writer and diplomat Ángel Ganivet publishes Idearium español and El porvenir de España. They discuss his country’s infatuation with Quijotismo.

1900 Uruguayan literary critic and cultural commentator José Enrique Rodó publishes his book-long essay Ariel, structured as a letter to the youth of Hispanic America. It is an overt variation on Quixote themes.

1902 The French silent movie Don Quichotte, by directors Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet, is the first ever to be based on Don Quixote. Spanish zarzuela composer Ruperto Chapí premiers the light comedy La venta de Don Quijote.

1905 To commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, Nicaraguan poet and leader of the Modernista movement Rubén Darío publishes the poem "Letanía de nuestro señor Don Quijote." Spanish philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno releases his volume Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly publishes Cervantes in England. José Martínez Ruíz, better known as Azorín, commissioned by the newspaper El Imparcial, follows the route of Don Quixote in Spain, writing a travel book that is also a psychological exploration of the novel’s impact in the nation’s popular imagination.

1907 Mexican lampooner José Guadalupe Posada engraves the Calavera Quijotesca.

1909 French composer Jules Massenet begins composing his five-act opera, Don Quichotte, with a libretto by French librettist Henri Caïn. Massenet calls it a "comédie-héroïque."

1912 Russian Jewish poet of the Hebrew literary renaissance Chaim Nachman Bialik translates Don Quixote into Hebrew. His source is a Russian version.

1914 Spanish thinker and cultural commentator José Ortega y Gasset writes Las Meditaciones del Quixote.

1915 American actor, singer, and comedian William DeWolf Hopper produces the short film Don Quixote.

1916 Fitzmaurice-Kelly publishes Cervantes and Shakespeare.

1922 Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro, a puppet-opera in one act, with a prologue and an epilogue, has its premier.

1926 Spanish theorist, literary critic, and journalist Ramiro de Maeztu publishes Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina, in which he meditates on Spain’s archetypal literary character.

1927 British detective writer, biographer, and polemicist G. K. Chesterton writes The Return of Don Quixote.

1928 Daniel Venegas serializes his Chicano novel, The Adventures of Don Chipote: or, A Sucker’s Tale, in the Mexican newspaper El Heraldo. It tells the quixotic story of an impoverished and illiterate peasant who immigrates to the United States.

1931 Hasidic parable Die Wahrheit über Sancho Panza, by German-language Czech novelist and insurance worker Franz Kafka, appears in the collection Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer.

1932 French composer Maurice Ravel writes the first of three songs for voice and piano, collectively known as Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, set to poems on Don Quixote by French poet, playwright, and diplomat Paul Morand.

1933 Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst releases the film Adventures of Don Quixote. There are three versions of it, all done the same year: one in French, another in English, and the third in German. Russian actor Feodor Chaliapin stars in all of them.

1935 Spanish-born Oxford scholar, historian, and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga releases the literary study Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology.

1939 Argentine hombre de letras Jorge Luis Borges publishes in the magazine Sur his story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." It is reprinted in his 1944 collection, Ficciones.

1940 Catalan composer Roberto Gerhard writes the ballet Don Quixote. In 1947 Gerhard rewrote the ballet. It is staged at London’s Covent Garden with choreography by Irish-born British Ninette de Valois and décor by English printmaker Edward Burra.

1945 Catalan surrealist artist Salvador Dalí creates a series of watercolors to illustrate the First Part of Don Quixote, for an edition published by Random House.

1947 The first full-length feature film based on Don Quixote is released. It is called Don Quijote de La Mancha, directed by Spanish screenwriter and director Rafael Gil. Pedro Salinas, a Spanish poet who belonged to the Generation of ’27 aesthetic movement, publishes in The Nation an essay called "Don Quixote and the Novel."

1948 Spanish journalist, translator, and essayist Luis Astrana Marín publishes the first of his seven-volume biography Vida ejemplar y heróica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The last volume appears in 1958. The first partial translation into Japanese based on the Spanish, by Hirosada Nagata, is released in Tokyo.

1949 American translator and scholar of Romance languages Samuel Putnam releases his translation of Don Quixote into contemporary English. He also rendered into English a couple of novellas from Cervantes’s Exemplary Novellas.

1950 British translator of European literature J. M. (John Michael) Cohen, also known for his translations of Rousseau, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Teresa de Ávila, renders Don Quixote into English for Penguin Books.

1951 During the fall semester, Russian-born trilingual novelist Vladimir Nabokov teaches a course at Harvard on Don Quixote, accusing it of cruelty. The first translation of the novel into Yiddish is released by Argentine Jewish intellectual and newspaper editor Pinie Katz. Done directly from the Spanish, it is published in Buenos Aires.

1953 Avant-garde Irish novelist Samuel Beckett premiers the play Waiting for Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone, in Paris. Berlin-born Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach publishes the study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. One of its chapters deals with Dulcinea.

1954 Irish Hispanist Walker Starkie, known for his worldwide travels, publishes his abridged translation of Don Quixote into English. The unabridged version will appear in 1964.

1955 Spanish scholar Juan Givanel Mas y Gaziel published the illustrated volume Historia gráfica de Cervantes y del Quijote. The cover of the French weekly magazine Les Lettres Françaises features a silhouette by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso of the knight-errant and his squire. It quickly becomes a staple of the novel’s durability. American writer Kenneth Grahame published the novel Adventures in Yankeeland, which transposes Don Quixote to the United States.

1956 American film director and actor Orson Welles, on The Frank Sinatra Show, comes up with the idea of making a film based on Don Quixote. This lifelong project will be left unfinished. In 1992, Spanish B-movie director Jesús Franco and producer Patxi Irigoyen make a 116-minute remix, greeted negatively by audiences. The Russian film Don Kikhot, directed by Ukrainian-born Russian Jewish director Grigori Kozintsev, wins an award at the Cannes Film Festival.

1961 A collection of vignettes by Puerto Rican activist and New York newspaper columnist Jesús Colón is published under the title A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. It is marked by a quixotic view of immigrant life as dwelling between two extremes: materialism and idealism.

1965 The American musical Man of La Mancha, with a book by playwright Dale Wasserman, lyrics by songwriter Joe Darion, and music by composer Mitch Leigh, premiers on Broadway. (American-based British poet W. H. Auden was originally asked to write the libretto, producing an early draft.) The movie adaptation, with Peter O’Toole, Sophia Loren, and Ian Richardson, and directed by Canadian filmmaker Arthur Hiller, is released in 1972. Russian choreographer George Balanchine premiers his ballet Don Quixote, with music by Russian-born composer Nicholas Nabokov, and performed by American ballerina Suzanne Farrell. French filmmaker Éric Rohmer makes a twenty-three-minute movie called Don Quichotte de Cervantes.

1966 French semiotician Michel Foucault publishes The Order of Things, in which Don Quixote, a central topic, is seen from a semiotic perspective.

1973 Mexican standup comedian Mario Moreno Cantinflas is Sancho Panza in the movie Don Quijote cabalga de nuevo.

1977 British comedian John Cleese, a guest of The Muppet Show, apologizes for not singing the lyrics of The Impossible Dream, the theme song of Man of La Mancha, calling it trash.

1980 The first branch of the Japanese discount store Don Quijote, known simply as Donki, opens up in the Suginami neighborhood of Tokyo. Japanese anime series Don Quixote: Tales of La Mancha is released. British writer Robin Chapman published the novel The Duchess’ Diary. It is part of a trilogy, along with Sancho’s Golden Age (2004) and Pasamonte’s Life (2005), featuring characters from Don Quixote. Chapman is also the author of Shakespeare’s Don Quixote (2011), a novel-cum-dialogue between Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Cervantes.

1982 British novelist and Catholic polemicist Graham Greene publishes the novel Monsignor Quixote.

1983 Swiss astronomer Paul Wild discovers Asteroid 3552. It functions as an asteroid but behaves like a comet. He names it Don Quixote.

1985 American experimental writer Kathy Acker writes the novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. And Susan Sontag writes an essay on Don Quixote for Spain’s Tourist Agency. It is called "España: Todo bajo el sol."

1986 Czech novelist Milan Kundera published The Art of the Novel, which includes the essay The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes.

1987 Dinamic Software releases in Spain the video game Don Quijote, based on an animated series produced by Televisión Española.

1991 TVE, Spanish Television, produces the movie El caballero Don Quijote, based on the First Part, by Spanish screenwriter and director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón.

1995 Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie publishes the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. American academic Burton Raffel publishes his translation into English of Don Quixote.

1998 Chilean-born Spanish-based novelist Roberto Bolaño publishes the novel The Savage Detectives. Terry Gilliam, the American-born British comedian and director, fails to make a movie called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp. After being postponed, it goes into production in 2000, with a budget of $32.1 million. The effort collapses after a number of mishaps, including insurance issues, the destruction of equipment during a flood, and an actor’s illness. Apparently, the project acquires new life in the decade following and—with a different script—is slated to be completed for a 2015 release.

2000 American film director Peter Yates makes the TV movie Don Quixote. The script is by British novelist John Mortimer. It stars John Lithgow, Bob Hoskins, and Isabella Rossellini.

2002 Mexican-born American literary critic and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans publishes a Spanglish translation of Don Quixote, First Part, Chapter I, in a literary supplement in Barcelona. It is included in his book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. TVE produces El caballero Don Quijote, a movie based only on the Second Part and directed by Gutiérrez Aragón. The documentary Lost in La Mancha, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, is released. It is about Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to freely adapt, or pay tribute to, Don Quixote in the movie called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

2003 American translator Edith Grossman is the first woman ever to translate Don Quixote into English.

2005 The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid releases a commemorative edition of Don Quixote to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of its release.

2006 Peruvian scholar Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui translates parts of Don Quixote into Quechua.

2007 The Conseil de l’Europe, an organization endowed with promoting Europe’s cultural heritage, gives its official stamp to the tourist route the knight-errant and his squire supposedly follow in their three adventures. A Spanish CGI-animated movie Donkey Xote, with Sancho’s donkey as lead character, is released.

2009 Retired American university librarian James H. Montgomery publishes Don Quixote. It is the twentieth full rendition of the novel into English.

2015 To relocate them to a more decorous grave, the remains of Cervantes, identified through DNA, are exhumed in Madrid. The Second Part of Don Quixote turns four hundred years old, acknowledged with symposia, translations, books, and film cycles.

2016 The four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the two most important writers of the Renaissance, is commemorated globally.

Index of Illustrations

first part

CHAPTER I With little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

CHAPTER VI The priest and the barber burn Alonso Quijano’s books of chivalry

CHAPTER VIII What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.

CHAPTER X I have found no mention made of knights-errant eating, unless by accident or at some sumptuous banquets prepared for them, and the rest of the time they passed in dalliance.

CHAPTER XXV Don Quixote and Dulcinea del Toboso

CHAPTER XL A Moor and his captives

CHAPTER XLVII Don Quixote in the barber and priest’s cage

END OF THE FIRST PART

second part

CHAPTER XII So long as the game lasts, each piece has its own particular office, and when the game is finished they are all mixed, jumbled up and shaken together, and stowed away in the bag, which is much like ending life in the grave.

CHAPTER XIII Alonso Quijano and his greyhound for coursing

CHAPTER XVII Don Quixote faces the lions

CHAPTER XX Don Quixote and company at Quiteria’s wedding

CHAPTER XXII Don Quixote descends into the cave of Montesinos

CHAPTER XXV The puppet-showman Master Pedro and his question-answering ape

CHAPTER XXVI Master Pedro puts on a puppet show

CHAPTER LX Don Quixote and Sancho enter Barcelona

CHAPTER LXI Don Quixote, upon entering Barcelona, contemplates the sea

CHAPTER LXII Don Quixote and the Enchanted Head

CHAPTER LXIV Don Quixote and the Knight of the White Moon

CHAPTER LXXIV The death of Don Quixote

Contents

first part

Author’s Preface

Dedication of the First Part

Chapter I

Which treats of the character and pursuits of the famous gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

Chapter II

Which treats of the first sally the ingenious Don Quixote made from home

Chapter III

Wherein is related the droll way in which Don Quixote had himself dubbed a knight

chapter iv

Of what happened to our knight when he left the inn

chapter v

In which the narrative of our knight’s mishap is continued

chapter vi

Of the diverting and important scrutiny which the curate and the barber made in the library of our ingenious gentleman

chapter vii

Of the second sally of our worthy knight Don Quixote of La Mancha

chapter viii

Of the good fortune which the valiant Don Quixote had in the terrible and undreamt-of adventure of the windmills, with other occurrences worthy to be fitly recorded

chapter ix

In which is concluded and finished the terrific battle between the gallant Biscayan and the valiant Manchegan

chapter x

of the pleasant discourse that passed between Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza

chapter xi

what befell Don Quixote with certain goatherds

chapter xii

of what a goatherd related to those with Don Quixote

chapter xiii

in which is ended the story of the shepherdess Marcela, with other incidents

chapter xiv

wherein are inserted the despairing verses of the dead shepherd, together with other incidents not looked for

chapter xv

in which is related the unfortunate adventure that Don Quixote fell in with when he fell out with certain heartless Yanguesans

chapter xvi

of what happened to the ingenious gentleman in the inn which he took to be a castle

chapter xvii

In which are contained the innumerable troubles which the brave Don Quixote and his good squire Sancho Panza endured in the inn, which to his misfortune he took to be a castle

chapter xviii

In which is related the discourse Sancho Panza held with his master, Don Quixote, and other adventures worth relating

chapter xix

of the shrewd discourse which Sancho held with his master, and of the adventure that befell him with a dead body, together with other notable occurrences

chapter xx

of the unexampled and unheard-of adventure which was achieved by the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha with less peril than any ever achieved by any famous knight in the world

chapter xxi

which treats of the exalted adventure and rich prize of Mambrino’s helmet, together with other things that happened to our invincible knight

chapter xxii

of the freedom Don Quixote conferred on several unfortunates who against their will were being carried where they had no wish to go

chapter xxiii

of what befell Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena, which was one of the rarest adventures related in this veracious history

chapter xxiv

in which is continued the adventure of the Sierra Morena

chapter xxv

which treats of the strange things that happened to the stout knight of La Mancha in the Sierra Morena, and of his imitation of the penance of Beltenebros

chapter xxvi

in which are continued the refinements wherewith Don Quixote played the part of a lover in the Sierra Morena

chapter xxvii

of how the curate and the barber proceeded with their scheme; together with other matters worthy of record in this great history

chapter xxviii

which treats of the strange and delightful adventure that befell the curate and the barber in the same Sierra

chapter xxix

which treats of the droll device and method adopted to extricate our love-stricken knight from the severe penance he had imposed upon himself

chapter xxx

which treats of address displayed by the fair Dorothea, with other matters pleasant and amusing

chapter xxxi

of the delectable discussion between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his squire, together with other incidents

chapter xxxii

which treats of what befell Don Quixote’s party at the inn

chapter xxxiii

in which is related the novel of The Ill-Advised Curiosity

chapter xxxiv

in which is continued the novel of The Ill-Advised Curiosity

chapter xxxv

which treats of the heroic and prodigious battle Don Quixote had with certain skins of red wine, and brings the novel of The Ill-Advised Curiosity to a close

chapter xxxvi

which treats of more curious incidents that occurred at the inn

chapter xxxvii

in which is continued the story of the famous Princess Micomicona, with other droll adventures

chapter xxxviii

which treats of the curious discourse Don Quixote delivered on arms and letters

chapter xxxix

wherein the captive relates his life and adventures

chapter xl

in which the story of the captive is continued

chapter xli

in which the captive still continues his adventures

chapter xlii

which treats of what further took place in the inn, and of several other things worth knowing

chapter xliii

wherein is related the pleasant story of the muleteer, together with other strange things that came to pass in the inn

chapter xliv

in which are continued the unheard-of adventures of the inn

chapter xlv

in which the doubtful question of Mambrino’s helmet and the pack-saddle is finally settled, with other adventures that occurred in truth and earnest

chapter xlvi

of the end of the notable adventure of the officers of the holy brotherhood; and of the great ferocity of our worthy knight, Don Quixote

chapter xlvii

of the strange manner in which Don Quixote of La Mancha was carried away enchanted, together with other remarkable incidents

chapter xlviii

Reviews for Don Quixote of La Mancha

[beauxarts79 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Laugh-out-loud funny. Touching. Educational without pedantry. Far more readable than I'd expected. Exotic glimpses of Greece, Algiers, Constantinople. Romance, betrayal, war, secret identities, slapstick comedy, dangerous sea voyages, serendipitous reunions. Tremendous fun. Interminable, but fun.