“Don Chisciotte della Mancia” Translation

Helena Losada

“Don Quixote” was published by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Alcalá de Henares,

1547 - Madrid 1616) in two different stages: a first part, probably written between 1598 and
1604, was printed in 1605; while a second part got out in 1615. After the success and hence
numerous reprints of the first edition, an unidentified Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda
published, in the previous year, “Second Volume of the life of Don Quixote of the Mancia, the
Ingenious Knight”, a knockoff clearly not written by Cervantes. Concerned after seeing his
own character be used by other authors, Cervantes sped up the writing of the second and
last part of Don Quixote’s adventure.
In both editions, the story revolves around the travels undertaken by the protagonist,
namely Don Quixote, in the West of Spain. Three times he leaves his native village in search
of chivalric undertakings. These ventures must be performed to emulate the hero in the
courtly literature of which he has always been an avid reader, and which has made him lose
his sense of reality, making him imagine himself a wandering knight. Each one of these three
outings (salidas) has its own peculiarity: the first two “outings” are in the first part of the book,
whereas the last one is in the second part.
The novel starts by introducing the protagonist, Alonso Chisciana, a nobleman from
the countryside who is already fifty years old. He lives in a small town of la Mancia and, after
years reading chivalric books, he goes mad, starts to think that all he has read corresponds
to reality and that he should repeat the deeds of the wandering knights seeking fame and
glory. Therefore he puts on his ancestors’ armor (but his visor is made of cardboard),
renames his lean horse Rozinante, chooses for himself the battle name “Don Quixote of the
Mancia” and elects as his damsel a local farm woman, changing her name to “Dulcinea of
Toboso”. Thus he begins his wandering. However, this first lonely sortie is destined to be
brief, since after some mishap and a good dose of beating inflicted by those who he
challenged, a neighbor finds him rather beat up and takes him home. The neighbor is
assisted by his nephew, by the priest and by the barber who, holding the chivalric novels in
Quixote’s library responsible for their friend’s madness, burn nearly all of the books. In the
meantime, Don Quixote recovers and immediately decides to go out again (chapters VII-LII);
but first he chooses a squire, a local farmer - Sancio Panza - who is attracted by the
possibility of earning money and by the promise of obtaining an island he could rule. And
thus formed one of the most famous partnerships in the history of literature: the tall, thin and
lanky knight riding his Ronzinante, and the short, fat and round squire on the back of his
donkey. Among the most famous adventures in the novel is the battle against the windmills,
which Don Quixote mistakes for giants and then challenges to a duel. After a series of
comical adventures that almost always get the worst of them, the two split because Don
Quixote asks Sancio to deliver a love letter to Dulcinea. During the journey, however, he
encounters the barber and the priest. He tells them where Don Quixote is and, together,
through a ruse, they manage to bring him home.
Don Quixote’s third outing happens in the middle of the second part of the novel,
edited in 1615. Upon returning to his village, Don Quixote learns that a book has been
published that narrates his adventure, but describes it in a very inglorious way. That is why
the nobleman decides on a third outing, precisely to affirm his ideals of justice, of courtesy,
and of defending the oppressed so ridiculed in the recently published book. Numerous
events follow, but our protagonist always gets the worst of it, especially since, having now
become famous, he is a victim of the mockery of those he encounters that recognize him as
the mad man who thinks he is a wandering knight. Distinct motive, indeed, in the second part
of the novel, is the fact that it is not so much Don Quixote who transforms reality with his
imagination, but rather the characters around him, including Sancio, who wish to convince
him to perform eccentricities so that they can laugh at him. This outing also ends
nevertheless with a return to the village, where Don Quixote falls ill with a strong fever that
keeps him in bed. The illness brings him to his senses but, now sane, he dies.
Don Quixote is a work of extraordinary complexity, both in thematic and stylistic
levels, and consequently several interpretations have been put forth, being even
contradictory amongst them. The universality of the characters created by Cervantes has
then often induced the critics to historically decontextualize the novel and to read it almost as
a work contemporary to them. It is possible however to fundamentally reduce the various
critical analysis to two types of readings: on one hand, the “playful one”, whose major
advocate is perhaps Auerbach who, in his Mimesis, underlines that Quixote’s madness is
nothing but a game, parody, comedy, traceable to the Erasmian folly. On the other hand,
there is the “tragic” interpretation, historically established during Romanticism, that in turn
sees in the hidalgo a champion of idealism forced to collide with a prosaic reality empty of all
heroism.
What is important to emphasize, and where the reader should focus their attention, is
the stylistical modernity of the work (the one that explains why the critical debate during the
1900s was also passionate about this novel) that, going from courtesy-chivalry literature, to
pastoral literature, to picaresque novels, to fiction, had united all this expertise to create
something absolutely original and unique, determined by many as the first modern novel.
The stratification of the narrative levels, for example, with several narrators that cross-
reference each other, is an essential narrative characteristic. Cervantes claims, in fact, to
refer to an Arabic manuscript by a certain Cide Hamete Benengeli for the narration of Don
Quixote’s deeds. In the second part of the novel, the published book about the hildalgo’s
adventures is often brought up in the fiction, and it presents Don Quixote under a bad light.
In using this literary technique, Cervantes does not spare criticism towards the truly
apocryphal book that was published in 1614 using his mad knight as a protagonist. In this
regard, there has been talk about an actual game of mirrors through which the univocal
concept of reality is eliminated, being substituted by numerous perspectives that provide us
with a fleeting and contradictory picture in eternal balance with reality and irreality.