Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) [Mass Market Paperback]

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Author), John Rutherford (Editor, Translator), Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2006

Don Quixote, errant knight and sane madman, with the company of his faithful squire and wise fool, Sancho Panza, together roam the world and haunt readers' imaginations as they have for nearly four hundred years.

Translated with Notes by John Rutherford
Introduction by Roberto González Echevarría

Editorial Reviews

Review

A more profound and powerful work than this is not to be met with...The final and greatest utterance of the human mind -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What a monument is this book! How its creative genius, critical, free, and human, soars above its age! -- Thomas Mann --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) , the son of a poor Spanish surgeon, achieved enormous success with the publication of the first part of Don Quixote in 1605.

John Rutherford is a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, where he teaches Spanish and Spanish-American language and literature.

Roberto González Echevarríais Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures at Yale.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 1072 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (January 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142437239
• ISBN-13: 978-0142437230
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,847 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Spanish

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Modern Translation, July 16, 2003

By 

JR Pinto (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

Everyone should read Don Quixote at least once. It is the first modern novel ever written. It is also one of the longest - although, I don't see how it could be any shorter. The novel is actually two novels stuck together. Cervantes published the first half, which became an incredible success. Years later, he published the second part which relates the third salley of the Don. The effect that this has on the book is that all the major characters in the Part II have all ready read Part I, making the book incredibly self-referential. Cervantes also has fun in mocking a spurious Part II by another author that was published at the time.

I do not speak Spanish - let alone 17th Century Castilian, so I was forced to read the novel in translation. I have never read another version, but John Rutherford's Penguin Classics version was satisfactory in every way. He does his best to retain Cervantes' humor, which is the most important aspect of the novel. Also, modern audiences my benefit from translation because it puts the book into the modern language - making a four-hundred-year-old book read fresh.

As for the plot, a country hidalgo named Alonzo Quixano spends his time reading chivalric romances. One day, he decides to become a knight errant named Don Quixote (Sir Thighpiece). He convinces a simple neighbor who speaks in proverbs, Sancho Panza, to come along with him to be his squire. Quixote is crazy and Sancho is a fool - except that they seem to be preternaturally sane and wise when the chips are down. If you are only familiar with Man of La Mancha, the book is drastically different. Dulcinae never actually makes an appearance. Sancho is traveling along because he has been promised the governorship of an island - and he gets it! They just spend the book wandering around and getting into adventures. Personally I prefer the second part of the novel (the first is too digressive).

Allow yourself some time, and enjoy this masterpiece of Western Literature.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent., June 21, 2001

By 

R. E. P. Esq. (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

The phrase 'ahead of it's time' is such a cliche that I tend to avoid it all together. Unfortunately, when trying to describe Don Quixote, no better phrase comes to mind. Written in the 1500's, this book is perhaps the first modern comedy. In Don Quixote's squire, Sancho Panza, you'll find traits later used in the ingenius Dickens' character Samuel Weller (Pickwick Papers) some 300 years later. And the craft of the language used by the translator of this new edition, along with their reassuring preface, gives me the impression that very little was lost in this translation, or at least this translation loses the least of other translations.

This book, which is a little over 1000 pages (though heavily laden with appendixes) is a great read, and the only complaint I have is the clumsy handling of the translator's notes. There is a lot of Latin quoting in the book, along with references to other chivalric novels, and rather than simply supplying a foot note, they've decided to place all of these in the back of the book, which add a lot of page flipping and unnecessary interruptions to your reading if you want to know and understand everything that's happening. Hopefully in the next edition of this translation, they will correct this. I gave this book 5 stars because it's such an excellent book in itself excellently translated, that I decided it more than worthy of the rating, but if the lack of foot notes bothers you, you may want to disqualify it.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good New Translation of an Old Classic, August 10, 2005

By 

Edward V. Killeen "One of the last literates." (Stuart, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

DON QUIXOTE was written exactly 400 years ago. Therefore as you can imagine it has been reviewed countless times already. It is called Europe's first narrative novel. I can only comment on the present translation, which I consider excellent. It sticks to the original Spanish in the important ways, but is not slavish ... lots of "thee", "thou" and "thy" have been modernized without really affecting the gist or the flavor of the story.