Customer Reviews

Don Quixote (Barnes & Noble Classics)

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I have looked at a number of translations of Don Quixote. I don't know why this tranlation is often passed over. It is my favorite by far and I think it stands on its own as a masterpiece. I can't imagine the original language surpassing it.

Simply to echo the views of other reviewers: this is no dry academic translation of Cervantes' wildly comic Ur-novel. It is a priceless, peerless work of art in itself, and if it falls short in literalness, it brims with life, wisdom, genius...what can you say about a book that's lasted 400 years, in a translation that's 250 years old and still selling well, in new editions (even though it's on the Internet as a big fat freebie)? Why even review something so CERTIFIABLY GREAT? Only in the hope, I think, that you might nudge someone into reading something they might otherwise just set aside as one of those gray musty tomes everyone talks about but hardly anyone still reads.

(And the Modern Library edition, by the bye, is very nicely mounted in mass market and (particularly handsome) trade editions, with an interesting introduction by Carlos Fuentes and a useful set of notes that explain Smollett's language when a word or phrase bounces off contemporary comprehension.)

I'm 61 and finally got to this: you know, 100 books you didn't read in college or at any point afterward but had better read before you assume room temperature. Someone should have told me: Cervantes is BEACH READING. Or an AIRPLANE BOOK. Stow that John Grisham and read DON QUIXOTE!!! Gustav Mahler was fond of saying a symphony should embrace, or contain, or express, a universe. Don Quixote is often described as the first novel, and in this first time out Cervantes got pretty much all of his universe into the book. And then some. IN almost bite-sized chunks - a picaresque concatenation of tales that can be digested in those small bits or in much longer, multi-course meals. And Cervantes/Smollett renders this faraway world, culture, set of mores, a people and a time we can never experience directly (except in dreams)as freshly accessible, vital, vividly present, in page after sparkling page.

And after 400 years, we're not all that changed, are we?

As I commented to another reviewer, life is indeed short, and Don Quixote is l o n g , but the probability is you won't read this only once. Indeed, if you actually purchase the Smollett and lodge it in your library, I surmise you'll return to it (or passages of it) again. And again. And again. Especially if you happen to settle on Dickens, who so thoroughly absorbed Cervantes that he seems almost to have reproduced a work by him - not as in the Borges story of the scholar who reproduces, verbatim, Cervantes' novel - in capturing precisely the same dignified lunatic-serious sensibility in The Pickwick Papers. Or if you ever wonder whatever happened to the Shakespeare-Fletcher "Cardenio," you find him first, here in Cervantes.

Tobias Smollett's bawdy, high-toned translation of Don Quixote - produced by a gifted writer steeped in an inherited Elizabethan fondness for brilliantly flowing rhetorical superabundance - is to my mind the absolutely PERFECT reading experience, one of those rare books you might wish you hadn't read, so intensely might you long to experience (again) the pleasure of discovery.

'Don Quixote' is largely considered to be a satire on the popular chivalric ballads of Cervantes' day, but don't be fooled. This novel is no satire on chivalry, itself. Indeed, through the trials of Quixote and Sancho Panza, Cervantes is perhaps the greatest promoter of chivalric ideas that the West has ever known. No other protagonist so thoroughly embodies the ideals of heroism, romantic love, friendship, honor, discretion, trust, virtue, and adventure than does Don Quixote. It just so happens that he is insane, but the author is able to look beyond that. So too should the reader.

The knight's sallies are absolutely delightful and, it must be credited, alone prove Cervantes' genius in writing. The dialogue between Quixote and Sancho is excellent comedy, creating a duo that has gone unsurpassed in originality and endearment for five centuries. "Is it possible that Your Worship can be so thick skulled and brainless as to not perceive the truth of what I allege?" Classic.

But these adventures, hilarious as they may be, give us frame for a storehouse chivalric truisms, the like of which can be found in no other work of fiction. A sampling would include: "An author had better be applauded by the few that are wise than laughed at by the many that are foolish;" "Anyone who has been a good squire will never be a bad governor;" "There is a wide difference between flying and retreating; valor which is not founded on the base of discretion is termed temerity or rashness;" and "Whenever virtue shines in an emanant degree, she always meets with persecution."

The reader cannot help but to love such regal assuredness, such profound idealism. Ironically, Quixote's insanity never really contradicts his optimism and in fact vindicates it. It is commentary on the human condition that only the insane person can actually accomplish something virtuous. And after all the delusions are expired and all the fallacies uncovered, Don Quixote actually has accomplished everything he set out to achieve if only because he was noble enough to strive for it.

A note must be made on the translations. While much of the verbiage is straightforward, there are several repeated phrases that are different between the major translations, Quixote's moniker being one of the most important. In every translation I have seen, the name has been different--"The Knight of the Rueful Countenance," "The Knight of the Mournful Countenance," and "The Knight of the Sorrowful Face" are all used for the same phrase. I enjoyed the "Rueful Countenance" and found it to be well-suited for the style of the novel though I have not read other translations.

In the end, though, you cannot go wrong. 'Don Quixote' is a pure joy to read and we are fortunate to have the ability to do so.

In 1982 the Academie Francaise told the rest of us that there were some 2,796 separate languages being spoken in the world and I'm reasonably sure they didn't include the guttural grunts, swearing sighs, and elongated oaths that passed for English out of my old Drill Instructor's mouth. Now given that time has probably erased some of the accepted number of languages we're still left with a considerable amount of babel out there without the tower. So when academics argue over a word or phrase of a tranlator's copy of a truly great book they're missing the point of the effort.
Even though you've been dead since what, 1771? Thank you, Mister Smollett for offering up one of the true classics. Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote is a gem that has sparkled for centuries and still shines today thanks to you. The soldier-slave-writer Cervantes gave the world a better look at Chivalry and a fool we all can identify with from his misadventures to our own.
Tobias Smollett left us in good company and we should have the courtesy of saying thank you or gracias. Better still, mucho gracias and better late than never.

... avers that, this, the Tobias Smollett English-language translation most faithfully retains the quixotic and sprightly spirit of the original.

Given that life is short and that I will only ever read Don Quixote once, Rushdie's imprimatur is good enough for me.