Reading Don Quixote
Memorial Day is upon us. Have you picked your summer book yet? Before you load up on Dean Koontz or John Grisham, a suggestion: why not read "Don Quixote"?
In these hectic times, taking on a 400-year-old, 940-page novel might not seem like the most intuitive decision. What with TiVo, game phones, podcasting and the war on terrorism, we should get credit for reading books at all — nanny lit, sports memoirs, David Sedaris, anything. Anyone who really needed to have read "Don Quixote" got it done in college; why should the rest of us have to deal with it?
Beyond the reflexive rejection of anything resembling required reading, some readers overlook the classics for the same reason they never get around to visiting the landmarks in their own towns: The Empire State Building isn't going anywhere, and neither is "Remembrance of Things Past," so what's the rush? Besides, I hear there's a new novel out with a flip movie in it!
Some canonical works manage to avoid being taken for granted through especially compelling plots, characters or philosophy — "A Tale of Two Cities," "Madame Bovary," "The Brothers Karamazov." "Don Quixote," on the other hand, shares the fatal flaw of "Moby Dick" in being too easily reduced to a single-sentence précis that makes actual reading seem unnecessary, especially at such great length. An obsessive captain chases a sperm whale around the South Seas; a deluded Spaniard tilts at windmills and his sidekick gets beat up a lot. Got it.
"Don Quixote" also shares with "Moby Dick" the burden of a titanic reputation. Herman Melville is said to have written the best novel ever to appear in English; Miguel de Cervantes gets the credit for creating the modern novel itself. That puts an awful lot of pressure on a reader who's just looking for something to pass the time on the F train. There's no shame in not liking or getting the literary fiction flavor of the week, but if you fail to appreciate the full genius of these guys — hang your head and get thee to Us Weekly, you mouth-breather!
If a reader is going to go the good-for-you route, nine times out of ten they'll choose Shakespeare instead. You're already pretty familiar with "Macbeth" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" before you open the book; between that and the copious footnotes in back, it doesn't really matter that you can't understand what anybody's saying — and the plays are all nice and short, so you can pick up your merit badge and get back to "Freakonomics."
It's striking to think of Cervantes as a contemporary of Shakespeare. Sure, the Bard transcends time and place; there's nothing outdated about his characters or their dilemmas. But the text itself is downright biblical, requiring an ongoing exegesis of obscure allusions, bizarre vocabulary and impossible jokes. "Don Quixote," on the other hand, makes for an entirely modern reading experience. There are references to be missed, especially to famous-at-the-time epics and their heroes, and to a large number of literary peers and rivals, but the illumination provided by the footnotes is strictly optional; you always get the idea anyway.
The plot of "Don Quixote" is as advertised: A middle-class farmer has read too many novels of knight errantry and comes to believe himself a natural for the order. He changes his name to Don Quixote, takes up sword and shield, mounts the nag Rocinante, hires his neighbor Sancho Panza for his squire and sets out to battle evil in the name of his lady, the beautiful Dulcinea, who is actually a peasant girl of manly features and strength to match whom the former Don Quixana had never actually met. He sees windmills as giants, taverns as castles and his fellow Castilians as princesses in distress, foul brigands and figures from his cherished courtly romances.
Although "Don Quixote" has been read and loved widely in translation for centuries, the novel's populist accessibility is easily lost en route from Spanish to English due to a quirk of linguistics. Whereas English has evolved considerably since Shakespeare's time, Cervantes could blend easily into conversation over tapas and minis in today's Madrid. Modern Castilian Spanish retains all the courtly elegance of its past, including some fourteen verb tenses in common usage (imperfect subjunctive, anyway?) and a variety of forms of address. For translators, this poses a dilemma: do you translate these ornate constructions literally, and make a book that sounds modern in Spanish sound archaic and quaint in English? Or do you modernize the syntax, and denature the book's satire of the chivalrous epics of its day?
Edith Grossman has managed to have her flan and eat it, too. The prose in her recent translation conveys the full flavor of Cervantes' time while sounding entirely natural to modern ears, as befits the first modern novel. With their affectations of an earlier era, Don Quixote and Sancho appear as anachronistic to us as they do to those they encounter on the road, but no more so, and the novel itself could have been written last year (although it probably wouldn't have been).
Past translators have lacked the literary grace to convey the stem-winding charm of Cervantes' wandering sentences. In Grossman's hands, they flow like a front porch yarn.
Cardenio and the priest watched all of this through some brambles, and they did not know what pretext they could use to join the others, but the priest, who was a great plotter, thought immediately of what they could do to achieve their desire, and with a pair of scissors he carried with him in a case, he quickly cut off Cardenio's beard, and dressed him in his gray jacket, and gave him his short black cape, while he was left wearing doublet and breeches, and Cardenio's appearance was so changed from what it had been before that he would not have recognized himself if he had looked in a mirror.
As every traveler and expatriate learns at some painful moment, jokes are doggedly resistant to translation. Don Quixote have long been celebrated as comic characters, but their ability to provoke actual laughter can be more a matter of legend than reality. Humor can be inferred from many of the novel's awkward situations and slapstick passages, and from the peculiar dynamic of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho, but always at a remove. Consider a scene where the knight has dragged his squire into the mountains to witness his self-punishment for imagined slights to the honor of his lady Dulcinea, to whom Sancho will be expected to report in full. Sancho finds the whole business disturbing and embarrassing, and tries desperately to excuse himself. First, the workmanlike translation of John Ormsby:
"But what more have I to see besides what I have seen?" said Sancho.
"Much thou knowest about it!" said Don Quixote. "I have now got to tear up my garments, to scatter about my armour, knock my head against these rocks, and more of the same sort of thing, which thou must witness."
Hmm, yes, Don Quixote does have his ideas, doesn't he? Now, Edith Grossman:
"But what else do I have to see," said Sancho, "besides what I've seen already?"
"How little you know!" responded Don Quixote. "Now I have to tear my clothes, toss aside my armor, and hit my head against these rocks, along with other things of that nature, all of which will astonish you."
That's more like it. Elsewhere, Grossman delivers one winning turn of phrase after another, as with Cervantes' euphemism for a bathroom break: "Doing the thing that no one can do for you."
Brought properly into English for the first time, Don Quixote transcends comic stiffness to achieve genuine dignity and fine intelligence in spite of his ludicrous delusions, while the wit of Sancho Panza is drier than Asturias in August. Together, they strike buddy story gold that makes contemporary comedies pale in comparison. Their bickering, manipulations and betrayals are as broad and rewarding as any pairing from Abbott and Costello to Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run. At the same time, there is real affection and loyalty between them, a living relationship that evolves and deepens over the course of their adventures.
Although clear-eyed about his master's sanity, and more than willing to call him on his hallucinations, Sancho Panza's love for Don Quixote draws him to his cause, and the reader follows. The dogged refusal of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance to acknowledge reality is both infuriating and highly engaging.
Is it possible that in all the time you have traveled with me you have not yet noticed that all things having to do with knights errant appear to be chimerical, foolish, senseless, and turned inside out? And not because they really are, but because hordes of enchanters always walk with us and alter and change everything and turn things into whatever they please, according to whether they wish to favor or destroy us; and so, what seems to you a barber's basin seems to me the helmet of Mambrino, and will seem another thing to someone else.
In spite of his convenient manipulations of the laws of errantry, there is also a refreshing moral clarity to Don Quixote. Through all manner of adversity, his confidence in his vision is absolute.
I know and believe that I am enchanted, and that suffices to make my conscience easy, for it would weigh heavily on me if I thought I was not enchanted, and in sloth and cowardice had allowed myself to be imprisoned in this cage, depriving the helpless and weak of the assistance I could provide, for at this very moment there must be many in urgent need of my succor and protection.
The knight's baroque reasoning and noble visions are beautifully offset by the wry asides of his squire, who baits and tests Don Quixote in rapid-fire routines that could have been written by Mike Nichols and Elaine May as easily as Samuel Beckett. Ultimately, of course, Sancho would be devastated to see his boss successfully disabused of his chivalric mania, as would we, and it's in this possibility that the real peril of the novel resides.
With such companions, the length of "Don Quixote" works in its favor; like a cross-country car trip with good, funny friends, you're in no hurry to arrive. The road you're traveling is more than happy to oblige. The sprawling plot turns on unimaginably improbable coincidences and chance meetings, with endlessly shifting objectives and confusingly parallel sets of secondary characters. The ample girth of Don Quixote's own adventure is further padded with no fewer than three interpolated novels as lavish as any of those in his library of knight errantry.
For readers whose tastes run to the postmodern, "Don Quixote" has got you covered. The novel's text is presented as having been written in Arabic by a scribe named Cide Hamete Bengali, then translated into Spanish by an unnamed translator in the Toledo market where a fictionalized Cervantes is said to stumbled across the mysterious manuscript. Published by the real Cervantes, the runaway success of the novel's first part inspired a fraudulent sequel. This led an outraged Cervantes to publish a Part Two of his own, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have become famous through the publication within their fictional world of Part One. The characters they meet in Part Two are thus familiar with both Don Quixote's delusion and Sancho Panza's complicity in its, and one pair of loyal fans go so far as to fabricate a world of knight errantry within their castle on his behalf. Either Don Quixote steps out of their favorite novel and into their real lives (which are of course fictional), and they in turn recreate the world of his favorite novels around him; or else the readers themselves have stepped into the novel they had been reading, in the novel you are reading; or both. Got that?
But leave the dissertations to the grad students. As summer begins, all that matters is this: Edith Grossman's stellar translation is now available in paperback. Pick it up this weekend, and it'll last you all the way to Labor Day, and maybe beyond. It'll bring you no end of reading pleasure, though it just might spoil you for everything written since. Nothing lasts four hundred years by accident.
In a year that will see quatercentenary celebrations of his work the world over, Cervantes' own invocation holds as strong as it ever did.
"O celebrated author! O fortunate Don Quixote! O famous Dulcinea! O comical Sancho Panza! Together and separately may you live an infinite number of years, bringing pleasure and widespread diversion to the living."
— J. Daniel Janzen (jdaniel at flakmag dot com)
