Don Quijote says art is supposed to be fun
This letter is about Cervantes, books centered around friendship, and reading the translations instead of the originals.
For those five months that I lived in Madrid, I was living on a historic street named after Miguel de Cervantes, one of the city’s most celebrated writers. This meant that early on Saturday mornings when I would walk hungover to the cafe a block down I would first have to make my way through a crowd of tourists taking pictures of my building, and of me exiting the building. It also meant that when I learned of my new famous address, the month before I officially boarded the flight to Madrid, I felt obliged to read the stories that made this man so famous.
The most famous book, of course, is “El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha” which is regularly coined as the first modern novel and one of the greatest works ever written.
The book follows Alonso Quijano, a man from La Mancha, Spain who becomes entranced with the idea of knights and chivalric romances because of all the books he is reading. In an effort to chase after the lifestyle he reads about, he renames himself “Don Quijote”, enlists a loyal farmboy, Sancho Panza, to become his squire, and sets off on his own “noble missions”. These satirical missions generally follow the pattern of Quijote and Panza trying to provide help in some way and then getting beat up.
While Panza is going along with Quijote on these missions, Panza never fully commits to the idealistic knight lifestyle Quijote is living and seeing in his delusional daydreams. Quijote tends to see things much grander than they actually are. The windmills turn into giants he must slay, the humble inn turns into a castle, the religious procession turns into enemies who are forcing a woman into captivity, and the farmgirl down the way turns into a princess he is destined to marry. Panza sees reality for what it truly is – the windmills, the inn, the procession, and the farmgirl are just that. Plus, the farmgirl has BO from all that work.
There is a reason “El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha” is widely considered one of the first literary works about friendship as the relationship between Quijote and Panza is what a majority of the book revolves around. Despite their differences in how they see things, they remain loyal to each other throughout their adventures which span through the entirety of the two-part book. Although they see life in different ways, neither would be able to go about life without the other one. By the end of the story, both Quijote and Panza evolve, adopting elements of the other’s perspective. Panza adopts a more positive approach to life and understands the importance of optimism and imagination. Quijote became more grounded, realizing that there are plenty of considerations and challenges in his everyday existence and learning how to live in the present a bit more. The mutual influence causes a subtle, yet significant, shift in their identities and shows the grand impact that friendships can have on one’s identity.
That is until the very end of the second part of the novel when Quijote finally adopts Panza’s thinking entirely. When the two return back to their village in La Mancha, Spain Quijote falls ill. At this point, he outwardly renounces chivalry and reclaims himself as Alonso Quijano after coming to terms with morality and his succession of failed missions. He renounces chivalry as “foolish fiction” and tells his daughter to never read books about knights before he eventually dies.
After an array of foolish and funny misadventures throughout the body of the book, this final scene brilliantly underscored the satirical essence of the story further. Celebrated as the “best novel about knights” after the first part of the novel, Cervantes then made his protagonist renounce knighthood by the conclusion of the second part.
As the book that is said to be the first modern novel and is one of the best-selling novels of all time, these juvenile misadventures and the comical ending prove as a testament to the idea that art can be, and should be, fun.
The original text was written in 1605 meaning the Spanish used by Cervantes included archaic words and saying difficult for modern day Spanish readers to understand in the same way Shakespeare is initially difficult for modern day English readers to understand. As someone who is not fluent in Spanish and only started learning in the 7th grade, I took the easy way out to read a “translation” by Andrés Trapiello into modern Spanish. Since it’s the same language, the translation is light but makes a world of difference in the smoothness of the reading nature as you don’t have to continue to stray away from the story to read the footnotes. Possibly a bit sacrilegious to Spanish literature professors in the same way reading “No Fear, Shakespeare” would warrant a stern look from high school English teachers.
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian writer and Don Quijote lover, wrote an essay in the 1900s which said that Cervantes wrote “El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha” in such a way that the novel is unaffected by translations, misquotes, or reinterpretations because the novel is not dependent on specific words, it is specific on characters. Therefore when reading it, the exact words don’t need to be precise as long as the characters remain intact.
The majority of people who give up on reading the original “El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha” do so because it feels like a chore – constantly checking the glossary and footnotes to translate words they don’t know. With Trapiello’s work translating it into a Spanish that people are used to, it gives readers the opportunity to experience Don Quijote without the language barrier. It is not a book that is meant to be unattainable to some, it is a book meant for everybody. With the modern day translation, it turns the novel back into a satirical novel about two friends going off on their daily chivalric adventures.
I want to leave you with a quote from
about the nature of reading books that have been translated into another language. It puts words to the feeling I often find myself in while reading a book or excerpt that has been translated into English. This happened a lot during sophomore year when I took a literature class where the majority of the books were translated from German and our professor was fluent in German. At least five times every class he would start a sentence by saying, “Well they translated it into English to say XX but really what this word means is…” and before we knew it, class was over.“My professor said that we can acknowledge its limitations, but we are reliant on the English version and have to respect the choices the translator has made. This is a generous take—I still find myself disappointed about everything I am missing when the author sacrifices his voice to become comprehensible to me.”
Yours truly,
Calihan
p.s. the first interview episode of “between the stacks” is live now!
Honored!!!