The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha
“Wouldn’t it be better to stay peacefully in your house and not wander around the world searching for bread made from something better than wheat, never stopping to think that many people go looking for wool and come back shorn?”
— the niece of Alonso Quijano (Don Quixote) reasoning with her uncle
So I’ve decided to reread Don Quixote. I’ve got a copy of it in a relatively recent translation by Edith Grossman. I’ve also got a copy of it in the original early-modern Spanish. I thought it’d be fun to go back and forth between the two.
If any of my fellow bibliophiles on this site would like to weigh in with their insights on Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece, I’d sure like to read your thoughts.
By the way, Don Quixote’s response to the above goes like this:
“My dear niece, how little you understand! Before I am shorn I shall have plucked and removed the beard of any man who imagines he can touch even a single hair of mine.”
Yeah! Go-Man-Go
Concerning the madness of Don Quixote
Quite early in the novel Cervantes lays out the reason for Alonso Quijano going over the edge and becoming Don Quixote. I think he’s also taking a pot shot at some of the maddening, over-the-top prose of the most popular genre fiction of the day — chivalric literature
Trying to make sense of this sort of writing is what scrambled poor Alonso’s brains:
Quote:
“La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de la vuestra fermosura.” Y también cuando leía:…“Los altos cielos que de vuestra divinidad divinamente con las estrellas os fortifican y os hacen merecedora del merecimiento Que merece la vuestra grandeza.
Para los gringos:
Quote:
“The reason for the unreason to which my reason turns so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of thy beauty.” And also when he read:…“The heavens on high divinely heighten thy divinity with stars and make thee deserving of the deserts thy greatness deserves.”.
He goes on to say that even Aristotle couldn’t figure out that mess. I pictured the poor man in his house late at night, reading under candle light with wrinkled brow. I sympathized with him because at one time in my life I tried to get through the Sandymount Strand chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses.