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"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Posted by Michael Sympson on 18/9/2001, 4:29:15
For the record: there is no such thing as a classic; only authors who ran out of copyright. Literature is not a museum but culture's foremost battle-line. Books can become dated and suffer defeat in the ongoing war for mankind's spirit: only a precious few improve with vintage, and become pivotal testimonies, a kind of intellectual haven to fall back upon. The worst thing that can happen is a college teacher who plants into the student's mind a notion that a book is great and an absolute must read, because, well guess, because his own teacher told him so. And so puts the student on the quest, to find out what the heck could possibly be so great about this blasted thing. And not having found anything tangible yet pressured to disseminate the mantra, the student becomes a teacher himself on a mission to recruit more students ... .
This doesn't mean that old books have always to be an easy read. It is quite alright if a teacher is actually doing his job and points out where to look, and what to look for, and is telling his students what kind of gear is needed to get there. If it is there, the student will find it, whatever
"it" might be. If not -- see above. Having said all this, "Don Quixote" definitely is a book that
grew under the author's hand and turned into something Cervantes hadn't anticipated when he
wrote the first chapter. The lack of plan in the first part is painfully obvious, we really could do
without the inlaid novelettes from Cervantes' potboiler. Apparently, the book had had a bad
editor, i.e. none at all. What compensates is the fact that Cervantes managed the rarest of all
feats: to create the book's own legend almost from the moment it was publicized. The legend
has lasted and still lasts, which is every add-executive's dream. Cervantes did it single-handed
and all by himself -- but never earned even a fraction of an add-executive's income. Makes you wonder. Why the hell do we write books?
I venture a political strictly incorrect proposition: if children or men no longer affected by viagra are telling you they like the "Don Quixote," even enjoy it, they probably speak the truth. If girls and women and most men in their full sexual prowess make such claim, they are probably lying through their teeth. Just try recalling all the incidents of this book: isn't it the melancholic fantasy of a man who knows that he has passed his prime? Who can see himself doing childish things again, because he just found out, that nothing really matters? But Cervantes was not a nihilist, he would rather live in a world where the rules of chivalry maintain a modicum of application. He also knows they don't. So he sits down and daydreams a character that is not exactly his alter ego but an object of his empathy, someone who found a way to live through Cervantes' own predicament, and in the end he simply let him die a "good" death. Kafka even suspected, that Don Quixote was merely a dream in Sancho's mind ... .
Not every old translation is outmoded or "bad." Ovid was a wit; so to translate his
"Metamorphoses" into Dryden's mock-heroic couplets is perfectly adequate. However, the
same standard applied on Virgil endangers the very qualities of his style: subtlety and melos.
Sometimes Dryden's vigor juggernauts roughshod across Virgil's delicate world of veiled
suggestions and carefully arranged low key settings, but then again, does anybody actually dream to read Rabelais in any other translation than Sir Thomas Urquard's? Not if it is Rabelais we want to read! Cervantes "Don Quixote" had been "done" by Thomas Shelton (1612), P.A.
Motteux (1743), Tobias Smollet (1763), John Ormsby (in the 1800s), Samuel Putnam, and lately Barton Raffel. Each and everyone has merits. None of them are downright bad, but if you want to hear the author's voice in a version that is still close enough to the time and life of Cervantes, that catches the smells (it stank!), the brutal gusto of practical humor, and takes for granted the cruelties of the general outlook, instead of wallowing in the romantic notions a modern reader is often asked to read into the text -- then, well then, Motteux's translation is the only option, and it is quite a good option.
Of course it requires a reader who actually is interested in what the author himself has to say; a reader who understands that despite portions of a more universal appeal, there speaks a voice from the past and a witness to the paraphernalia of a very different world. To "translate" this into a "modern" idiom, slick and slangy that would suit our Pavlovian TV-trained giggle-response to silly sound-bites, would be the next thing to publicly performed necrophilia. Not every modern translation is junk, but translating should not replace an author's carefully crafted style with the jargon of another period, even if this should strike the naive reader as catching. But then, this is Cervantes, an author who couldn't care less about the stylistic obsessions that possessed a Flaubert or Joyce. Yet it has at least to be the style of his period to get the right feel for the Don's adventures. And even Cervantes had moments when his dialog spread wings and soared.
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Posted by Lale on 19/9/2001, 11:12:57, in reply to "'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)"
Michael, I am expecting a very hot Moby Dick review from you.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 20/9/2001, 3:24:25, in reply to "Re: 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)"
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Posted by Guillermo Maynez on 25/9/2001, 3:51:58, in reply to "Re: 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)"
Michael: Thankfully, I still have no need to resort to Viagra, but alas, I do love the Don Quixote. In fact, I just read it for the second time this last spring, and found it as charming as ever. I do see your points, however, and of course they're right -they express your opinion and that suffices-.
I think that your interpretations of literary works are too heavily centered on the author's psychology and not so much on the book itself. That, of course, is interesting, but it misses a crucial aspect: does the book tell you something you care about?, or not? For me, Don Quixote is a book about the two faces of life: realism and idealism. You can face the facts of life with a thorough and cold realism, like Sancho, or you can dream the perfect world and try to bring it to reality. The first approach has the advantage that it gives you tools to cope with this hard world and achieve some gains, however small, but it takes poetry and joy out. The second gives you something to live for and embellishes your life, but it can produce serious setbacks and disappointments. Most sane people's lives combine the two approaches. But Cervantes gives us both extremes and caricaturizes them in order to render them clearer. I have read the book at ages 15 and 31, and keep enjoying it. I plan to read it again in ten years. That is, if by then I haven't got mad and set out to the world to look for beautiful ladies in trouble.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 26/9/2001, 3:24:53, in reply to "Re: 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)"
I don't think, that I give too much weight to the author's psychology. That's not where I am coming from. But I do insist that an author's voice carries weight for the reception of his product.
There is an unfortunate tendency to encourage the reader to stuff the pastry. Instead of actually listening to what the author has to say, readers of the last 200 years read into old texts what suits their own proclivities.
As a consequence the brutality and gusto for practical jokes in Cervantes' period and in Cervantes' book has receded a bit to the back-ground.
It is true, what happens between a book page and the reader is of course a completely private
matter; a reader's communication with an author's intention is not. Cervantes had many thing to say, but he said it to the kind of audience he could envision.
So the reader seeking communication with an old author is obliged to do a bit of metamorphosis himself and put on the old costumes and fold his brain in the old wrinkles.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 29/9/2001, 3:16:57, in reply to "Re: `Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)"
"For me, Don Quixote is a book about the two faces of life: realism and idealism. You can face the facts of life with a thorough and cold realism, like Sancho, or you can dream the perfect world and try to bring it to reality. The first approach has the advantage that it gives you tools to cope with this hard world and achieve some gains, however small, but it takes poetry and joy out. The second gives you something to live for and embellishes your life, but it can produce serious setbacks and disappointments."
I think your statement deserves a more specific answer, because it expresses a common
sentiment among modern readers since the Romantics. In fact it is almost a definition of the
modern mind-set. But this is not the kind of reader, Cervantes himself thought to address. In his day and age (and for centuries after) and with the actual age of chivalry not so far distant in the past, Amadis de Gaul's romances of chivalry and its somewhat pagan ethics were seen to
mean a serious proposition. It was a time full squalor, depravity and cruelty. The mentally ill were customary victims of ridicule and pratical jokes - the rougher the funnier, and children and dirty old men, still find it funny.
Cervantes objective was to write rough and tumble comedy, not a character study or a study on modern sensibilities. More than eanything else, he aimed for the laughs, and he aimed low.
Today this means he hits the more archaic layers in the modern psyche - thatÕs why the children and semi-senile like him so much. As I said before, what happens between the reader and the printed page is private, and you are certainly in your rights to get out of the text whatever you fancy.
It is true, with the expansion of the manuscript the author too expanded, and he created one of the great archetypes of world literature and humanity, but that has still to be seen in its proper context, to do justice to the authorÕs own intentions. After all, he thought it important enough, to entrust what he had to say, to a hefty 1,200 pages of print. That, on the readerÕs part, deserves the courtesy, to enquire a bit closer into the authorÕs own intentions. ÒPsychologyÓ has little do with this, more a quest for the intellectual foundations of a specific mind-set or model of rhetorics.
P.S.: Do you really think a person that goes through all of this pain holding on to the crazy Don, would be a man of "thorough and cold realism" or even sane? Remember Kafka's observation that Don Quixote actually could be a dream in Sancho's mind.
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Posted by Guillermo Maynez on 30/9/2001, 17:29:42, in reply to "Re: 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)"
I agree with you on these points you make: Cervantes wasn't probably thinking much about posterity when he published the book, and certainly I don't think he intended to conduct any deep moral or mental study. I am convinced that he just wanted to make people laugh with the adventures of the crazy Don and his -probably- even crazier companion.
What I said is that I find analogies and metaphors that allure me. I still think there's definitely
something about the Don. Just imagine how many other books with similar structure and type of
adventures must have been written in those centuries, and it's the Don that's still read and, as we
As for my being a despicable product of Post-Romanticism and Modernism, you are probably right on the money. I sometimes surprise myself finding in books things that only exist in my mind.
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