Join Me For a Don Quixote Readathon

It is time for another reading of  El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. I just acquired an audio edition of the Edith Grossman translation (read by George Guidall, one of my favorite audiobooks readers) and it is finally time to dust it off and listen. Yes, I am reading in English. I have never had the patience to read dense prose in Spanish. But I will have a Spanish edition nearby, just in case. 

 

I have jumped on the Don Quixote bandwagon. It is one of the best books I have ever read. In its day, it was boundary breaker. Nobody had every written like this, especially not in Spain, where one had to be so careful of what one was saying lest one be hauled before the Inquisition. So much of what we take for granted today, was new ground for readers. Ostensibly, the book was written to discredit books of chivalry, the Harlequin Romance novels of the 15th and 16th centuries. In truth, discrediting books of chivalry was just the jumping off point for critiquing so much more; speaking through the mind and mouth of a crazy person was just a way of getting passed the censor. Yes, the censors. Every book that was published in Spain had to be approved by the Inquisition before it could be published.

 

If you are reading along with me or when you finally decide that you are going to read it, please do yourself a favor: forget Man of La Mancha; forget what you think you know about the story; forget what you may have seen on TV or in the movies. Go into the reading of it with a blank slate. What you are reading was a new kind of storytelling. The artifices of plot and story arc, setting, character development are new ideas still being defined. The borderlines between fact and fiction are fluid; in fact, in Spanish the word for "story" and the word for "history" are one and the same, historia. This is what the novel looked like in its infancy; it was still learning. 

Don Quixote: A Warning for Readers

As I will talk about in another post, I have started re-reading El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha.

This one is for all my bookish buddies: 

My Well Annotated Editions

...he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping and much reading, his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason."  (Walter Starkie)

...he spent his nights reading from disk till dawn and his day reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. (Edith Grossman)

...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. (Cervantes)

So, my book - loving friends, it seems we are warned: our brains are going to dry up and we are going to lose either our minds or our reason -- or both.

And yes, two translations of the same work, because we are lovers of words and attuned in our own reading to the authors choice of words. The same goes for the art of translating. There is no such thing as an exact translation; there are always choices to be made. Does he lose his mind or his reason; do both words have the same meaning? I suppose that is why I have so many different translations in my house.