Don Quijote of La Mancha

Don Quixote de la Mancha is a novel written by the Spanish Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Published in its first part with the title The ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha at the beginning of 1605, it is the most outstanding work of Spanish literature and one of the main works of universal literature, as well as being the most read after the Bible. In 1615 its continuation appeared with the title Second part of the ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha . The Quijote of 1605 was published divided into four parts; but when the Quijote of 1615 appeared as the Second part of the work, the partition into four sections of the volume published ten years earlier by Cervantes was effectively revoked.

It is the first genuinely demystifying work of the chivalrous and courtly tradition due to its burlesque treatment. It represents the first modern novel and the first polyphonic novel; as such, it exerted an enormous influence on the entire European narrative. For being considered "the best literary work ever written", it topped the list of the best literary works in history, which was established with the votes of one hundred great writers of 54 nationalities at the request of the Norwegian Book Club and Bokklubben World Library in 2002; thus, it was the only exception in the strict alphabetical order that had been arranged.

Structure, genesis, content, style and sources

Placa at number 87 of Madrid’s Atocha street, placed on the occasion of the third centenary of the Quixote. The text reads: “Here was the printing press where the Prince edition of the first part of the The ingenious hydalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha composed by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, published in May [ sic ] of 1605. Memorandum MDCCV».

The novel consists of two parts: The ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in 1605, although it was printed in December 1604, by which time it should have been read in Valladolid, and the Second part of the ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in 1615.

Cervantes wrote the prologue and the burlesque poems that precede the first part in August 1604, the date on which he should have already submitted the original for approval to the Royal Council, since the administrative procedures and the mandatory approval by The censorship was completed on September 26, when the signature of the royal privilege was recorded. Don Francisco de Robles, "bookseller of the King our Lord", was in charge of publishing it, who invested between seven and eight thousand reales, of which one fifth corresponded to the payment of the author. Robles commissioned the printing of this first part at the house of Juan de la Cuesta, one of the printers that had remained in Madrid after the transfer of the Court to Valladolid, which finished the work on December 1, very quickly for the conditions. of the time and with a rather mediocre quality, of a level not higher than usual in Spanish printers at the time. other works by Cervantes of similar length. The first copies had to be sent to Valladolid, where the mandatory fee that had to be inserted in the sheets of each copy was issued and which was dated December 20, so the novel must have been available in the then capital the last week of the month, while in Madrid it probably had to wait until the beginning of the year 1605. This edition was reprinted in the same year and in the same workshop, so that e there are actually two authorized editions of 1605, and they are slightly different: the most important difference is that "El robo del rucio de Sancho", missing in the first edition, is recounted in the second, although out of place. There was, also, two pirated editions published the same year in Lisbon.

There is a theory that a shorter novel existed before, in the style of his future Exemplary Novels. That writing, if it existed, is lost, but there are many testimonies that the story of Don Quixote, without understanding exactly what it refers to or the way in which the news was circulated, was known in literary circles before the first edition. (printing finished in December 1604). For example, Ibrahim Taybilí, from Toledo, with the Christian name Juan Pérez and the best-known Moorish writer among those established in Tunisia after the general expulsion of 1609-1612, narrated a visit in 1604 to a bookstore in Alcalá where he acquired the Family Epistles and the Príncipes Clock by Fray Antonio de Guevara and the Historia imperial y cesarean section by Pedro Mexía. In that same passage he makes fun of the fashionable books of chivalry and cites Don Quixote as a well-known work. This allowed Jaime Oliver Asín to add information in favor of the possible existence of a disputed edition prior to that of 1605. This hypothesis has been denied by Francisco Rico.

Second strip of the first edition of the first part, and first edition of the second part

The Entremés of romances and other possible sources of inspiration

• There is a work whose parallels with Don Quixote are indisputable: the Entremés de los romances, in which the Labrador protagonist goes crazy for reading, but for romances. The husbandman abandoned his wife, and went to the roads, as Don Quixote did. This intermes has a double reading: it is also a critique of Lope de Vega, who, having composed numerous autobiographical romances in which he counted his loves, abandoned his wife and went to the Invincible Navy. Cervantes' interest in romance and resentment is known for having been thrown out of the theaters for the greatest success of Lope de Vega, as well as his character as a great entertainer. An argument in favour of this hypothesis would be the fact that, even though the narrator tells us that Don Quixote has gone mad because of the reading of cavalry books, during his first departure he recites romances constantly, especially in the moments of greatest disaster. For all this, it could be a credible hypothesis. However, scholars do not agree on the date of Entremés de los romancesor on the date of composition of the first chapters Don QuixoteTherefore it is not known, at all, which of the two works is the source of the other.

Given the extensive readings of Cervantes, a variety of works have been suggested as inspiration for this or that episode or aspect of the work. These include:

• Pull the White by Joanot Martorell.
• Morgante by Luigi Pulci.
• Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto.
• The golden ass from Apuleyo.
• The story of the pilgrim, the first autobiography of Ignacio de Loyola, very given, as Don Quixote and Cervantes himself, to the reading of cavalry books at a time of his life.
• Amadís de Gaula and The Sergas of Esplandian by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo.

Structure

Lamina de la edición de Joaquín Ibarra de 1780 para la RAE. José del Castillo drawing and engraving of Manuel Salvador Carmona.

The First Part is divided, in imitation of the Amadís de Gaula, into four parts. It met with formidable success —although as a comic work, not as a serious work— and there were several reissues and translations, some authorized and others not. It did not suppose a great economic benefit for the author, who had sold all the rights of the work to his publisher Francisco de Robles.

On the other hand, the attack on Lope de Vega in the prologue and the criticism of the theater of the moment in the speech of the canon of Toledo (chapter 48) supposed to attract the anger of the lopistas and of Lope himself, who, until then, had been a friend of Cervantes.

That motivated that, in 1614, a second apocryphal part of the work came out under the authorial name, invented or real, of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, and with a false imprint. In the prologue, Cervantes is seriously offended, calling him envious, in response to the offense inflicted on Lope. There is no news of who this Fernández de Avellaneda was, but very complex theories have been formulated about it; In addition, there was a contemporary character, a priest from Avellaneda (Ávila), who could have been the author. An important Cervantist, Martín de Riquer, suspects that it was another real person, Jerónimo de Pasamonte, a fellow soldier of Cervantes and author of an autobiographical book, offended by the publication of the first part, in which he appears as the galley slave Ginés de Pasamonte.. And it is even possible that he was inspired by the sequel that Cervantes was preparing.

In 1615 the authentic continuation of the story of Don Quixote, that of Cervantes, was published under the title Second part of the ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha. In it, the novelist would play with the fact that the protagonist finds out that people have already begun to read the first part of his adventures, in which both he and Sancho Panza appear named as such, in addition to the existence of the second spurious part.

Part One

The protagonist reading ensembled cavalry books at the beginning of the novel.

What we would later call "First Part" It was originally called The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha and consists of 52 chapters, separated into four parts of 8, 6, 14 and 24 chapters respectively. It begins with a prologue in which Cervantes mocks pedantic erudition and with some comic poems, by way of preliminaries, composed in praise of the work by the author himself, who justifies it by saying that he did not find anyone who wanted to praise a work. as extravagant as this, as we know from a letter from Lope de Vega. Indeed, as the priest (a character in the novel) says in chapter 47 of the first part, it is a matter of "unbound writing", free of regulations, which mixes the "lyrical, epic, tragic, comic" and where stories of various genres meddle in the development, such as: Grisóstomo and the shepherdess Marcela, the novel of The curious impertinent , the story of the captive, the discourse on weapons and letters, the of the Golden Age, the first outing of Don Quixote alone and the second with his inseparable squire Sancho Panza (the second part narrates the third and last outing).

Cervantes, as a homodiegetic narrator, that is, who intervenes both as narrator and character, explains (in chapter 9) that he did not have the manuscripts of the continuation of the novel which, as an ingenious literary device, he attributes to a Arab author (Cide Hamete Benengeli), but he found them by chance while walking in Toledo, so he can continue recounting the adventures of Don Quixote, after he finds someone to translate the "characters I knew to be Arabic". •

The novel begins by describing a poor hidalgo —whose exact name will only be revealed at the end of the work: Alonso Quijano—, a native of an indeterminate place in La Mancha, who goes mad reading books of chivalry and believes himself to be a medieval knight-errant.

In fact, already finished his judgment, he came to give in the strangest thought that he never gave mad in the world, and it was that he seemed convinced and necessary, so for the increase of his honor as for the service of his republic, to become a walking knight...(chapter 1)

Andrew receiving whipping from his master.

A suggestive name is placed: Don Quixote de la Mancha; he names his horse Rocinante, rebuilds his great-grandparents' weapons, and chooses the lady he is in love with. Without anyone seeing him, he throws himself into the field on his first outing, but with a start he remembers that he has not been "knighted", so he arrives at an inn, which he mistakes for a castle, the innkeeper with the castellan and some prostitutes. like ladies, all in the manner of his books, he decides to make the "arms candle" there and convinces the innkeeper to give him his accolade. Finally, in a satirical ceremony, Don Quixote is knighted by the innkeeper and from this moment on he resumes his cavalcade with greater verve. All sorts of tragicomic adventures happen to him in which he, driven deep down by goodness and idealism, seeks to "righteous wrongs" and help the underprivileged and unfortunate. He professes a deep platonic love for his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, who is, in reality, a "very good-looking" farm girl: Aldonza Lorenzo. In his first adventure, he tries to save a young man named Andrés from being whipped by his employer, which ends up in further harm to the young man; then, at a crossroads, he challenges a whole group of merchants to admit that her lady is the most beautiful in the world, without even seeing her. Beaten by one of the merchants, he is found by a neighbor of his who, riding his horse, returns him to the village, where he is cared for by his niece and the housewife. The local priest and barber subject Don Quixote's library to a purge, and burn part of the books that have done him so much harm, making him believe that some enchanters have made his collection disappear. The recourse to the manipulations of the enchanters will be permanent in the discourse of the play, enchanters that will disfigure reality for Don Quixote at every step, allowing him to explain his failures.

In the meantime of the first and second outings, Don Quixote requires the services of his neighbor, a farmer named Sancho Panza, as squire, to whom he promises great favors, especially making him governor of some kingdom that he conquers in his adventures. Then the other fundamental character in the novel appears, who allows Don Quixote to dialogue and who will counterbalance his extreme idealism.

Don Quixote shot down by the asp of a mill.

Once again, on his second outing, this time accompanied by his squire Sancho, Don Quixote sets out across the Campo de Montiel demanding to practice his new trade. At this moment, his most famous adventure occurs: Don Quixote fights against some giants, which are nothing more than windmills, despite the warnings of his squire.

In this they discovered thirty or forty windmills in that field, and as Don Quixote saw them, he said to his squire:

- The venture is guiding our things better than we came to wish; for you see there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or little more disastrous giants are discovered with whom I intend to battle, and take away all lives, with whose spoils we will begin to enrich: that this is good war, and it is great service of God to take away so bad from the face of the earth.

"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.

-Those you see there-reponsed their master-, of the long arms, who usually have some of almost two leagues.

"Look at your mercy," said Sancho, "that those who look there are not giants, but windmills, and what in them seem like arms are the asps, which blown from the wind make the millstone walk.

"Well it seems," said Don Quixote, "that you are not involved in this adventure; they are giants, and if you are afraid to get out of there, and pray in the space that I will enter with them in fierce and unequal battle.

And saying this, he spawned his horse Rocinante, without attentive to the voices that his squire Sancho gave him, warning him that no doubt were windmills, and not giants those that he was going to undertake. But he went so since they were giants, that he did not hear the voices of his squire Sancho, nor did he see, though he was already near, what they were; but he said in loud voices:

-Non fuyades, cowards and vile creatures, that a single gentleman is the one who binds you.

Rise up in this a little wind and the great asps began to move, which seen by Don Quixote, said:

- Even if you move more arms than those of the giant Briareo, you will pay me.

And in saying this, and in wholeheartedly entrusting to his mistress Dulcinea, asking that in such a trance he might help him, well covered with his fence, with the spear in streak, he snatched the whole galope of Rocinante, and he snatched with the first mill that was before him; and giving him a spear in the aspa, he turned the wind with so much fury, that he rolled the pitch. Sancho Panza came to help all the running of his ass, and when he arrived, he found that he could not be lied, such was the blow he gave with him Rocinante...(Chapter 8)

Sancho Panza Manteo.

From here numerous adventures follow one another, most of which end badly. However, in the first of them, Don Quixote obtains a real victory by defeating a young, strong and quarrelsome Biscayan in a true duel to the death, although he puts a distinguished lady passing by in a carriage, whom he wishes to protect against his will. Soon, master and squire run into misfortune when they are beaten by a mob of muleteers because of Rocinante, who got too close to his mares. Battered, Don Quixote and Sancho go to an inn where they try to rest. At the inn, the master and the waiter engage in a hilarious nocturnal scandal, when Don Quixote confuses in his imagination a scruffy prostitute named Maritornes with the innkeeper's daughter, whom he believes to be in love with him; This arouses the anger of a muleteer, who beats Don Quixote and Sancho to a pulp. In the morning, after Don Quixote tasted his magical Fierabrás balm, they both leave, but not before Sancho —to his great shame— was thrown into the air by a group of carders who were staying in the place.

Don Quixote packing a flock of sheep.

Then one of Don Quixote's most absurd adventures occurs: the adventure of the flocks of sheep, in which the character confuses the sheep with two armies that are going to attack; in his imagination he makes a lengthy description of the main combatants to Sancho's astonishment; Finally, Don Quixote takes sides and attacks one of the herds, soon being knocked off his horse by the shepherds. That night Don Quixote attacks a procession of mourning Benedictine monks who were accompanying a coffin to his burial in another city. Then, the master and the young man keep vigil in a forest where they hear some loud noises that lead Don Quixote to believe that there are other giants nearby; although, really, they are only the blows of fulling mills in the water. The next day Don Quixote experiences the "high adventure and rich gain of Mambrino's helmet", in which he snatches from a barber the famous basin that has immortalized the plastic and graphic representation of his figure. Then, a new and grotesque adventure occurs, in which Don Quixote deforms to the extreme the chivalrous ideal of freeing captives: the forcible release of a group of galley slaves taken by the king's justice to serve their sentence; the galley slaves, led by Ginés de Pasamonte, repay the favor very badly, stoning their liberators, to the great shame of Don Quixote.

Cardenio, Sancho, Don Quixote and a bullfighter talk in Sierra Morena.

Don Quixote and Sancho then enter the Sierra Morena. Various situations occur in this place: the strange disappearance of Dapple, Sancho's donkey, a fact not recorded in the first edition and amended in subsequent ones, although not satisfactorily. Imitating Amadis de Gaula, Don Quixote decides to do penance and at a certain point declares to the surprised Sancho his most intimate secret: who Dulcinea del Toboso really is. They meet a new character: Cardenio, who shows signs of derangement as a result of a great love frustration. Don Quixote sends Sancho with a letter to Dulcinea, forcing him to leave in the direction of Toboso. While this is happening, his neighbors, the priest and the barber, have followed Don Quixote's trail and on the way they meet Sancho who returns to his lordship and lies to him about the success of his trip. They also come across a girl named Dorotea who, alone, goes in search of settling sentimental accounts with the man who took her honor from her. Dorotea is convinced to participate in an intricate plan to return Don Quixote to her village: he poses as a princess named Micomicona, whose kingdom is being terrorized by a giant. The princess, the priest and the barber in disguise appear before Don Quixote. The princess asks him to accompany her to kill the giant and free the kingdom from her. Don Quixote willingly accepts and everyone leaves the Sierra and arrives again at the inn where Sancho's blanketing took place. In the course of this trip, Sancho mysteriously recovers Rucio from him.

Meeting of Cardenio, Dorotea, Don Fernando and Luscinda on sale.

In the sale, a series of secondary characters converge whose stories are intertwined: Cardenio, his beloved Luscinda, his former friend Don Fernando and others. They confront and resolve their sentimental conflicts. For his part, Don Quixote arouses everyone's admiration with his speeches and his apparent discretion, but he also exasperates the innkeeper with his new occurrences: the famous battle of the character with the red wine skins takes place, whom he believes to be giants, and the lawsuit with the owner of the basin who angrily claims it; Don Quixote is also the victim of a nasty joke on the part of Maritornes and the innkeeper's daughter, consisting of leaving him tied up and hanging by one hand from one of the walls of the inn. Finally, they all agree on the way to control Don Quixote: they tie him up and make him believe that he has been enchanted, and they deposit him in a cage in which they take him back to his village. For his part, Sancho realizes the lie, but Don Quixote ignores him, believing he is under a spell. After some incidents they return to his town where the protagonist is once again cared for by his niece and his mistress. Here comes the first part. As an epilogue, in the manner of the books of chivalry, Cervantes simulates a series of epitaphs in honor of Don Quixote and promises a third exit.

In all adventures, master and squire have pleasant conversations. Little by little, they reveal their personalities and forge a friendship based on mutual respect, although Sancho clearly realizes his master's madness and takes advantage of this to distort reality for him, generally to get out of the trouble he places him in.

Cervantes dedicated this part to Alfonso Diego López de Zúñiga-Sotomayor y Pérez de Guzmán, VI Duke of Béjar and grandee of Spain.^{[citation required]}

The echo of Cervantes' work caught on quickly, giving rise to the Quixotic masquerades for university students that took place in Córdoba and Zaragoza that same year on the occasion of the beatification festivities for Teresa de Jesús throughout Spain. On October 4, the eve of the main festival, the Cordovan students represented a mischievous mask of the "Engagement of Don Quixote and his beloved Dulcinea" through the streets; and two days later, in the Plaza de los Carmelitas Descalzos in Zaragoza, another similar masquerade demonstrated the great popularity achieved by the first part of the work. Even within the List of Festivals of Zaragoza on the occasion of this beatification, Luis Díez de Aux includes some humorous verses on "The true and second part of the ingenious Don Quixote de la Mancha. Composed by Licenciado Aquesteles,… Year of 1614”, included in his Fiesta and walk of the Students, which parody Cervantes' work. The popular rejoicing with the peculiar staging of the first part of Don Quixote shows us to what extent the beatification of Teresa de Jesús in 1614 becomes the germ of future and successful dramatizations of the masterpiece of our literature.

Part Two

Cover of the first edition of the Second part of the ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, Madrid, Juan de la Cuesta, 1615.

The title of this was The ingenious knight Don Quixote de la Mancha and it has 74 chapters. In the prologue, Cervantes ironically defends himself against the accusations of the lopista Avellaneda and laments the difficulty of the art of novels: fantasy becomes as insatiable as a hungry dog. The novel plays with various planes of reality by including, within it, the edition of the first part of Don Quixote and, later, that of the apocryphal Second part, which the characters have read. Cervantes defends himself from the implausibility found in the first part, such as the mysterious reappearance of Sancho's Dapple after being stolen by Ginés de Pasamonte and the destination of the money found in a suitcase in Sierra Morena, etc.

So, in this second installment, Don Quixote and Sancho are aware of the publishing success of the first part of their adventures and are already famous. In fact, some of the characters that will appear in the future have read the book and recognize them. What's more, in a display of clairvoyance, both Cervantes and Don Quixote himself state that the novel will become a literary classic and that the figure of the hidalgo will be seen throughout the centuries as a symbol of La Mancha.

The play begins with Don Quixote's renewed purpose of returning to his old ways and his preparations for it, not without the fierce resistance of his niece and the mistress. The priest and the barber have to confess Don Quixote's madness and hatch, together with the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, a new plan that allows them to imprison Don Quixote for a long time in his village. On his part, Don Quixote renews his offers to Sancho, promising him the long-awaited island in exchange for his company. Sancho reacts by becoming obsessed with the idea of being governor and changing his social status, which provokes the ridicule of his wife Teresa Panza. With the knowledge of their neighbors, Don Quixote and Sancho begin their third outing.

I meet in El Toboso.

Both of them go to Toboso to visit Dulcinea, which puts Sancho in a tough spot, fearful that his previous lie will come to light. In one of the most accomplished episodes of the novel, Sancho manages to deceive her lord into believing that Dulcinea has been enchanted and passes off a rude village girl as Don Quixote's beloved, who gazes at her in astonishment. Once again, Don Quixote attributes the transformation to the enchanters who are chasing him. Dulcinea's enchantment and the way in which Don Quixote will seek to reverse it will be one of the reasons for this second part. Saddened, Don Quixote continues on his way; he soon runs into some actors who are going in a car to represent the act The Courts of Death , who tease them and enrage don Quixote. One night he meets a supposed knight-errant who calls himself the Knight of Mirrors —who is neither more nor less than the bachelor Sansón Carrasco in disguise— together with his squire, a neighbor named Tomé Cecial. The Knight of Mirrors boasts that he has defeated Don Quixote in a previous battle, prompting Don Quixote's challenge. The one with the Mirrors accepts and imposes as a condition that if Don Quixote wins he will retire to his village. They prepare to fight, but with such bad luck for the bachelor that, surprisingly, Don Quixote defeats him and forces him to admit his mistake; In order to save his life, the bachelor accepts the condition and leaves humiliated, plotting revenge, revenge that will manifest itself almost at the end of the novel. This unexpected victory cheers up Don Quixote, who continues on his way. He soon meets another gentleman, the gentleman in the Green Coat, who will accompany him for a few days. Next comes one of the most eccentric adventures of Don Quixote: the adventure of the lions; Don Quixote tests his courage by challenging a male lion being transported to the king's court by a carter; fortunately the lion pays no attention to him and Don Quixote is satisfied; even, to celebrate his victory, he changes his previous nickname of & # 34; Knight of the Sad Countenance & # 34; to that of the "Knight of the Lions". Don Diego de Miranda—the one in the Green Coat—invites him to his house for a few days, where he is tested to the degree of his madness by his son, a student and poet praised by Don Quixote. Don Quixote says goodbye and resumes his journey, soon meeting two students who are going to the wedding of Camacho el Rico and the beautiful Quiteria. In this episode, Don Quixote manages, atypically, to solve a real mess, by taking sides with Basilio (Quiteria's first fiancé, whom he marries by surprise) in defense of his life threatened by Camacho and his friends; Don Quixote obtains recognition and gratitude from the newlyweds.

Rest in the cave of Montesinos.

Then a series of self-conclusive episodes follow one another: the first is the descent into the Montesinos cave, where the knight falls asleep and dreams all kinds of nonsense that Sancho Panza does not believe, as they refer to the supposed enchantment of Dulcinea. This descent is a parody of an episode from the first part of the Espejo de Príncipes y Caballeros and of the epic descents into hell, and which for Rodríguez Marín constitutes the central episode of the entire series. second part. Then, they arrive at an inn that Don Quixote recognizes as such and not as a castle, to Sancho's liking, which shows that the protagonist begins to see things as they are and not as in the first part, in which he saw things differently. according to his imagination ("Approach to Quijote", edit. Salvat 1970, page 113, by Martín de Riquer). At the sale comes a certain Maese Pedro whose trade is that of a puppeteer and has a fortune teller monkey; but it is none other than Ginés de Pasamonte, who immediately recognizes Don Quixote and agrees to give a performance of his puppet altarpiece; at a certain moment Don Quixote, seized by a sudden madness, attacks the altarpiece with his sword, tearing it to pieces, but he blames the enchanters for having confused him. The cavalcade continues and Don Quixote and Sancho find themselves involved in the braying adventure: they try to call to harmony two towns that are fighting over an ancient joke, but Sancho's misplaced forces them to flee under the threat of crossbows and firearms. They soon arrive on the banks of the Ebro River, where the adventure of the enchanted ship takes place: Don Quixote and Sancho embark on a small boat, believing that the trip is enchanted, but the navigation ends abruptly and both plunge into the river.

From chapter 30 to 57, Don Quixote and Sancho are welcomed into their castle by some well-to-do dukes who have read the first part of the novel and know in what mood they both limp. For the first time, Don Quixote and Sancho come into contact with the high Spanish nobility and their courtly entourage, all similar to the atmosphere of the books of chivalry. The dukes, for their part, take pains to present reality to them in the same way, orchestrating chivalrous situations in which Don Quixote can act as such; deep down Don Quixote and Sancho are considered two buffoons whose stay in the castle is intended to entertain the dukes. Subtly but ruthlessly, the Castilians organize a series of farces that ridicule the two protagonists who, despite everything, trust their hosts to the end. Only the chaplain of the castle flatly rejects the operetta and violently rebukes Don Quixote for his lack of sanity.

Don Quixote and Sancho mounted in Clavileño.

The following joking episodes follow one another: the surprise appearance of the magician Merlin, who declares that Dulcinea can only be disenchanted if Sancho gives himself three thousand lashes on his behind; This does not seem good to the squire and from then on there will be a permanent tension between master and groom because of this penance. Immediately, they convince Don Quixote to go flying on a wooden horse called Clavileño to rescue a princess and her father from the enchantment that a giant has cast on them; Don Quixote and Sancho fall naturally into the joke. One of the most memorable farces is the obtaining and government by Sancho of the promised island: in effect, Sancho becomes governor of an "insula" called Barataria that is granted by the dukes interested in mocking the squire. Sancho, however, demonstrates both his intelligence and his peaceful and simple character in the government of the dependency. Thus, he will soon resign from a position in which he is harassed by all kinds of dangers and by a doctor, Pedro Recio from Tirteafuera, who does not let him eat anything. While Sancho governs his island, Don Quixote continues to be the object of ridicule in the castle: a brash girl named Altisidora pretends to be hopelessly in love with him, jeopardizing her chaste love for Dulcinea; one night she is hung from her window by a bag of cats that scratch her face; On another occasion, at the request of a lady named Doña Rodríguez—who foolishly believes that Don Quixote is a true knight-errant—he is forced to participate in a frustrated duel with the offender of her daughter. Finally, don Quixote and Sancho meet again (don Quixote finds Sancho deep in a chasm into which he has fallen back from his failed rule).

Entrance in Barcelona.

Both say goodbye to the dukes and Don Quixote heads to Zaragoza to participate in some jousts that are going to be held there. Little happens to them next; at a certain moment they are attacked by a herd of bulls due to the recklessness of Don Quixote. And in an inn, the man from La Mancha found out from some gentlemen who were staying there that Quijote de Avellaneda had been published, and whose details, set in Zaragoza, greatly indignant him, since they present him as a barking mad. He decides to change course and go to Barcelona. From this moment on, according to Martín de Riquer in his work Approach to Don Quixote , the plot changes substantially: the real adventures begin and in which the character loses presence, which anticipates his end.. First, they meet a gang of bandits led by Roque Guinart, a rigorously historical character (Perot Rocaguinarda), a true adventurer. Although the bandit treats them well, they witness bloody events (for example, Roque murders a bandit a few meters from Sancho). After several days of fully participating in the clandestine life of his hosts, Roque leaves them on the beach in Barcelona. Don Quixote and Sancho enter a large and cosmopolitan city and are amazed by the activity that takes place there. They stay at the home of Don Antonio Moreno, who shows them a supposedly enchanted bronze head and who gives witty answers to the questions asked. Another day the knight and his squire visit the galleys anchored in the port and suddenly find themselves immersed in a naval combat against a Turkish ship —which brought a Moorish lady fleeing from Algiers—, with a large deployment of men and artillery, dead and wounded. Nobody pays attention to Don Quixote's observations and proposals and his madness no longer amuses. Finally, the most dramatic moment of his career is reached: his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon. One certain morning he appears on the beach in Barcelona and challenges Don Quixote to a unique duel for matters of prevalence of ladies; the battle —in the presence of the authorities and the Barcelona public— is rapid and the great man from La Mancha falls defeated in the arena.

Then he went over him, and put the spear on his girdle, and said,

- You are, sir, and still dead, if you do not confess the conditions of our challenge.

Don Quixote, stubborn and stunned, without raising his visor, as if he spoke in a grave, with a weak and sick voice, said:

-Dulcinea del Toboso is the most beautiful woman in the world, and I am the most unhappy knight on earth, and it is not good that my weakness defrauds this truth. Squeeze, knight, the spear, and take away my life, for you have taken away my honor (Chapter 64 of Part II)

"Here finally, my venture fell to never rise."

The Knight of the White Moon is actually the bachelor Samson Carrasco in disguise and he has made him promise to return to his town and not leave it as a knight-errant for a year. This is what Don Quixote does, after several days of lying dejected in bed.

The return is sad and melancholic and Sancho tries by various means to raise his master's spirits. Don Quixote thinks, for a moment, of substituting his chivalrous obsession with that of becoming a shepherd like those in the pastoral books. During the return master and servant are trampled by a large herd of pigs - the "pigly adventure" -, and when they pass by the castle of the dukes they are the object of new ridicule; Further on, Don Quixote and Sancho have a heated argument over the matter of the whipping that the servant should give himself to disenchant Dulcinea. In a certain place they meet Álvaro Tarfe, a character from Quixote de Avellaneda , who declares the falsehood of the one he met in Zaragoza. They finally reach their village. Don Quixote falls ill, but finally returns to sanity and abhors with lucid reasons the nonsense of the books of chivalry, although not the chivalric ideal. He dies of grief amid everyone's compassion and tears.

While the story is being told, many others are interspersed that serve to distract attention from the main plot. Entertaining and entertaining conversations take place between knight and squire, in which it is perceived how Don Quixote progressively loses his ideals, influenced by Sancho Panza. He is also transforming his self-designation, going from Knight of the Sad Figure to Knight of the Lions. On the contrary, Sancho Panza gradually assimilates the ideals of his lord, which becomes a fixed idea: to become governor of an island.

On October 31, 1615, Cervantes dedicated this part to Pedro Fernández de Castro y Andrade, VII Count of Lemos.

Interpretations of Don Quixote

Don Quixote according to Honoré Daumier (c. 1868).

Don Quixote has suffered, like any classic work, all kinds of interpretations and criticisms. Miguel de Cervantes provided in 1615, through the mouth of Sancho, the first report on the impression of the readers, among which "there are different opinions: some say: 'crazy, but funny'; others, 'brave, but wretched'; others, 'polite, but impertinent'» (chapter II of the second part). Opinions that already contain the two subsequent interpretive trends: the comic and the serious. However, the novel was received in its time as a book, in the words of Cervantes himself, "entertainment," as an exhilarating book of jokes or as a hilarious and withering parody of the books of chivalry. Intention that, after all, the author wanted to show in his prologue and in the final paragraph of the second part, although it was not hidden from him that he had actually touched on a much deeper topic that was out of all proportion.

All of Europe read Don Quixote as a satire. The English, from 1612 in the translation of Thomas Shelton. The French, since 1614 thanks to the version by César Oudin, although in 1608 the story The Curious Impertinent had already been translated. The Italians since 1622, the Germans since 1648 and the Dutch since 1657, in the first illustrated edition. The comedy of the situations prevailed over the good sense of many parliaments.

The dominant interpretation in the 18th century was didactics: the book was a satire of various defects in society and, above all, it tried to correct the taste spoiled by books of chivalry. Along with these opinions, there were those who saw in the work a comic book of entertainment without major significance. The Enlightenment endeavored to carry out the first critical editions of the work, the most outstanding of which was not precisely the work of Spaniards, but of Englishmen: the magnificent one by John Bowle, which shamed all Spaniards who boasted of being Cervantes, who They ignored as best they could this summit of Cervantes's ecdotic, even though they took full advantage of it. Neoclassical idealism made many point out numerous defects in the work, especially attacks against good taste, as Valentín de Foronda did; but also against the orthodoxy of good style. The neoclassical Diego Clemencín stood out in a very special way in this facet in the xix century.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Soon the deep, serious and esoteric readings began to arrive. One of the most interesting and still little studied is the one that affirms, for example, that Don Quixote is a parody of the Autobiography written by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, which circulated in handwritten form. and that the Jesuits tried to hide. This resemblance did not escape Miguel de Unamuno, among others, who did not try, however, to document it. In 1675, the French Jesuit René Rapin considered that Don Quixote contained an invective against the powerful Duke of Lerma. The attack against the mills and the sheep by the protagonist would be, according to this reading, a criticism of the Duke's measure of lowering, by adding copper, the value of the silver and gold coins, which since then became known as gold coins. mill and fleece. By extension, it would be a satire of the Spanish nation. This reading that makes Cervantes from an unpatriotic to a critic of idealism, military commitment or mere enthusiasm, will reappear at the end of the xviii century in the trials of Voltaire, D'Alembert, Horace Walpole and the intrepid Lord Byron. For the latter, Don Quixote had dealt a fatal blow to the cavalry in Spain with a smile. By then, luckily, Henry Fielding, the father of Tom Jones, had already turned Don Quixote into a symbol of nobility and an admirable model of narrative irony and censorship of social mores. The best eighteenth-century interpretation of Don Quixote is offered by the English narrative of that century, which is, at the same time, that of the enthronement of the work as an example of aesthetic, balanced and natural neoclassicism. Something had to do with the Valencian Gregorio Mayans y Siscar who in 1738 wrote, as a prologue to the English translation of that year, the first great biography of Cervantes. The initial gusts of what would be the romantic hurricane heralded with all clarity that a transformation of taste was approaching that would divorce vulgar reality from ideals and desires. José Cadalso had written in his Moroccan Letters in 1789 that in Don Quixote “the literal meaning is one and the true meaning is very different”.

Heinrich Heine.

German Romanticism tried to decipher the true meaning of the work. Friedrich von Schlegel assigned Don Quixote the rank of the forerunner and culmination of Romantic art in his Dialogue Concerning Poetry of 1800 (an honor shared with the Hamlet of Shakespeare). A couple of years later, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, in his Philosophy of Art, established the terms of the most influential modern interpretation, based on the confrontation between idealism and realism, by which Don Quixote was turned into a tragic fighter against rude and hostile reality in defense of an ideal that he knew was unrealizable. From that moment on, the German romantics (Schelling, Jean Paul, Ludwig Tieck...) saw in the work the image of pathetic heroism. The poet Heinrich Heine recounted in 1837, in the lucid prologue to the German translation of that year, that he had read Don Quixote with sorrowful seriousness in a corner of the Palatine Garden in Düsseldorf, secluded on the avenue of the Sighs, moved and melancholic. Don Quixote went from making people laugh to moving, from the burlesque epic to the saddest novel. The philosophers Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer projected their metaphysical concerns onto Cervantes' characters.

Romanticism began the figurative or symbolic interpretation of the novel, and the satirical reading passed into the background. "Beating the gentleman to the ground" no longer amused the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Don Quixote seemed to him to be "a substantial living allegory of reason and moral sense", doomed to failure for lack of common sense. Something similar was opined in 1815 by the essayist William Hazlitt: "The pathos and dignity of sentiments are often disguised by the jocularity of the subject, and provoke laughter, when in reality they should provoke tears." This sad Don Quixote continues until the dawn of the xx century. The poet Rubén Darío invoked him in his Litany of Our Lord Don Quixote with this verse: "Pray for us, lord of the sad" and makes him commit suicide in his story DQ, composed the same year, personifying the defeat of 1898. It was not difficult for the romantic interpretation to end up identifying the character with its creator. The Quixotic misfortunes and troubles were read as metaphors for Cervantes' battered life and in Don Quixote's mask it was intended to see the features of his author, both old and disenchanted. The French poet and playwright Alfred de Vigny imagined a dying Cervantes who declared in extremis that he wanted to paint himself as his Knight of the Sad Face.

Part of monument IV centennial Don Quixote de la Mancha Alcalá de Henares.

During the 19th century, the character from Cervantes became a symbol of goodness, solidarity sacrifice and enthusiasm. He represents the figure of the entrepreneur who opens new paths. The Russian novelist Iván Turgénev will do so in his essay Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860), in which he confronts the two characters as antagonistic human archetypes: the extroverted and bold versus the self-absorbed and reflective. This Don Quixote embodies a whole morality that, more than altruistic, is fully Christian.

Before W. H. Auden wrote the essay "The Ironic Hero", Dostoyevski had already compared Don Quixote with Jesus Christ, to affirm that "of all the figures of good men in Christian literature, without a doubt, the most Perfect is Don Quixote". Prince Mishkin of The Idiot is also forged in the Cervantine mould. Gogol, Pushkin and Tolstoy saw in him a hero of extreme goodness and a mirror of the world's evil.

Tribute to the IV Centenary of Quixotein front of Miguel de Cervantes' home in Alcalá de Henares.

The romantic century not only established the serious interpretation of Don Quixote, but also pushed him into the realm of political ideology. Herder's idea that the spirit of a people is manifested in art (the Volksgeist) spread throughout Europe and is found in authors such as Thomas Carlyle and Hippolyte Taine, for whom Don Quixote reflected the traits of the nation in which he was engendered, for the conservative romantics, the renunciation of progress and the defense of a time and some sublime although obsolete values, those of medieval chivalry and those of the imperial Spain of Philip II. For the liberals, the fight against the intransigence of that gloomy Spain without a future. These political readings remained valid for decades, until the regime that emerged from the Civil War in Spain favored the former, imbuing history with traditionalist nationalism.

The xx century recovered the humorous interpretation as the one that best suited that of the first readers, but it did not stop delving into the symbolic interpretation. Esoteric and crazy readings grew and many creators formulated their own approach, from Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges to Milan Kundera. Thomas Mann, for example, invented in his Voyage with Don Quixote (1934) a gentleman without ideals, surly and somewhat sinister fed by his own celebrity, and Vladimir Nabokov, with anachronistic glasses, tried to put dot the i's in a famous and controversial course.

Perhaps the main problem is that Don Quixote is not one, but two books that are difficult to reduce to a unit of meaning. The madman of 1605, with his cardboard helmet and his stupidities, causes more laughter than sighs, but the sensible old man of 1615, perplexed by the deceptions that everyone plots against him, demands that the reader transcend the meaning of his words and adventures a lot. beyond the primary comedy of sticks and jokes. Panegyric and philosophical interpretations abound in the 19th century. Esoteric interpretations began in that century with the works of Nicolás Díaz de Benjumea La estafeta de Urganda (1861), El correo del Alquife (1866) or El Merlin's Message (1875). Benjumea leads a long series of impressionist readings of Don Quixote completely out of focus; he identifies the protagonist with Cervantes himself, making him a republican freethinker. Benigno Pallol, better known as Polinous, was followed by Teodomiro Ibáñez, Feliciano Ortego, Adolfo Saldías and Baldomero Villegas. From 1925 the dominant trends in literary criticism are grouped into various branches:

1. Perspectivism (Leo Spitzer, Edward Riley, Mia Gerhard).
2. Existentialist criticism (Américo Castro, Stephen Gilman, Durán, Luis Rosales).
3. Narratology or socio-anthropology (Redondo, Joly, Moner, Cesare Segre).
4. Stylists and related approaches (Helmut Hatzfeld, Leo Spitzer, Casalduero, Rosenblat).
5. Research of the sources of the brain thought, especially in its "disident" aspect (Marcel Bataillon, Vilanova, Márquez Villanueva, Forcione, Maravall, José Barros Campos).
6. The contradictors of Américo Castro from diverse points of view, to the modernizing impulse that manifests The Thought of Cervantes de Castro (Erich Auerbach, Alexander A. Parker, Otis H. Green, Martín de Riquer, Russell, Close).
7. Renewed old critical traditions: the investigation of Cervantes' attitude to the Cavalry tradition (Murillo, Williamson, Daniel Eisenberg); the study of the "errors" of the Quixote (Stagg, Flores) or his tongue (Amado Alonso, Rosenblat); the biography of Cervantes (McKendrick, Jean Canavaggio).

Realism in Don Quixote

Windmills in Campo de Criptana in La Mancha.

The first part represents a considerable advance in the art of storytelling. It constitutes a fiction of the second degree, that is, the character influences the facts. The usual thing in the books of chivalry until then was that the action mattered more than the characters. These were brought and carried at will, depending on the plot (fictions of the first degree). The facts, however, appear little intertwined with each other. They are embedded in an inhomogeneous, motley and varied structure, typically Mannerist, in which barely adapted hors d'oeuvres, inserted exemplary novels, speeches, poems, etc. can be recognized.

The second part is more baroque than mannerist. It represents a much greater narrative advance by Cervantes in terms of novel structure: the facts are presented more closely amalgamated and it is already a third degree fiction. For the first time in a European novel, the character transforms the facts and at the same time is transformed by them. The characters evolve with the action and are not the same at the beginning as at the end.

As the first truly realistic novel, when Don Quixote returns to his town, he assumes the idea that not only is he not a hero, but that there are no heroes. This hopeless and intolerable idea, similar to what nihilism would be for another Cervantist, Dostoyevski, will kill the character who was, at the beginning and at the end, Alonso Quijano, known by the nickname El Bueno.

Theme

Pastor Marcela in an illustration of Cecilio Pla. This female character defends its independence within a patriarchal society.

The thematic richness of the work is such that, in itself, it is inexhaustible. It supposes a rewriting, recreation or specular worldview of the world in his time. However, some main guidelines can be drawn that can guide your reader.

The theme of the work revolves around whether it is possible to find an ideal in the real. This main theme is closely linked to an ethical concept, that of freedom in human life, as Luis Rosales has studied; Cervantes was imprisoned in Algiers trying to escape several times and fought for the freedom of Europe against the Ottoman Empire. What should man abide by about reality? What idea can be made of it through the exercise of freedom? Can we change the world or does the world change us? What is the most sane or the least crazy? Is it moral to try to change the world? Are heroes possible? From this main theme, closely linked to the Erasmian theme of madness and the very baroque theme of appearance and reality, other secondary ones derive:

1. The literary ideal: the subject of literary criticism is constant throughout the entire work of Cervantes. They are in the work critics of cavalry books, the novels pastoriles the new theatrical formula created by Félix Lope de Vega.
2. The ideal of love: The main couple (don Quixote and Dulcinea) does not happen, that is why there are different stories of love (most among young couples), some misfortunes for life conceptions rigorously linked to freedom (Marcela and Grisóstomo) or for a pathological insecurity (new inserted from the curious impertinent) and those that are happily realized (Basil and Quiteria in Camas). Also appears the theme of jealousy, very important in Cervantes.
3. The political ideal: the topic of utopia appears in fragments such as the Sancho government in the Baratarian insula, the quimeric dreams of Don Quixote in the cave of Montesinos and others.
4. The ideal of justice: as in the adventures of Andresillo, the galeotes, etc.

Originality

Battle drill on sale.

In terms of literary work, it can be said that it is the masterpiece of humor literature of all time. It is also the first modern novel and the first polyphonic novel, and will exert an overwhelming influence on all subsequent European narrative.

Firstly, he contributed the formula of realism, as it had been tried and perfected in Castilian literature since the Middle Ages (Cantar de Mio Cid, Conde Lucanor, Celestina and continuations, Lazarillo, Guzmán de Alfarache...). Characterized by the parody and mockery of the fantastic, social criticism (very veiled and very deep), the insistence on psychological values and descriptive materialism.

Secondly, he created the polyphonic novel, that is, the novel that interprets reality, not according to a single point of view, but from several that overlap at the same time, creating such a rich and confusing vision of reality. that she can have for herself. Cervantes never renounces adding levels of interpretation and blurs the image of the narrator by interposing several (Cide Hamete, the translator, the indefinite "Anales de La Mancha, etc.) and resorts to the topic of the found manuscript so that the story appears autonomous in itself and without "literariness", suspending the disbelief of the reader. He turns reality into something extremely complex that he not only tries to reproduce, but in his ambition he even tries to replace it. The modern novel, as conceived by Quixote, is a mixture of everything that does not renounce anything. As the author himself affirms through the mouth of the priest, it is an "unleashed writing": epic, lyrical, tragic, comic genres, prose, verse, dialogue, speeches, jokes, fables, philosophy, legends... and the parody of all these genres through humor and metafiction.

The voracious modern novel represented by Don Quixote tries to replace reality, even physically: it lengthens the narrative longer than usual and thus transforms the work into a cosmos.

Narrative techniques

Scene of "The Infallent Curious": an independent story that Cervantes inserts in the first part of the novel.

In the time of Cervantes, the epic could also be written in prose. The narrative techniques that Cervantes tries out in his architecture (and that he carefully hides to make the work seem more natural ) are several:

• The recapitulation or periodic summary every certain time of events, so that the reader will not be lost in such a long narrative.

• The contrast between the idealized and the real, which is given at all levels. For example, in the style, which sometimes appears pertreated with all the elements of rhetoric and sometimes appears severely girded to the imitation of popular language.

• There is also the contrast between the characters, to which Cervantes likes to place in couples, so that each one will help to build another different through dialogue. A dialogue in which the characters are heard and understood, helping them to change their personality and perspective: Don Quixote is sanchifies and Sancho is quijotiza. If the lord is obsessed with being a walking knight, Sancho becomes obsessed with being governor of an insula. So deluded they become like each other. Conversely, Don Quixote is becoming increasingly aware of the theatrical and finite of his attitude. For example, after his dream in the cave of Montesinos, Sancho will mock him the rest of the way. This mixture and overlap of perspectives is called perspectivism.

• Humor is constant in the play. It is a very characteristic humor, provided with a fine irony that respects the human dignity of the characters, and that draws sparks from the contrast between the idealized and the vulgar.

• A first form of narrative counterpoint: a compositive structure in the form of tapestry, in which the stories are happening to each other, intertwining and continually retouching.

• The suspension, that is, the creation of riddles that "draw" from the narrative and the interest of the reader until its logical resolution, when another riddle has already been formulated to continue beyond.

• 

  There's a contrast between the characters. In the dialogue the characters are heard and understood, Don Quixote sanchifies and Sancho Panza quijotiza.
  Linguistic and literary parody of genres, languages and social roles as a formula for mixing the views to offer the same confusing vision that provides the interpretation of the real.

• The orality of the Cervantes language, a vestige of Cervantes' deep theatrical obsession, and whose vivacity extraordinarily approximates the reader to the characters and realism by facilitating their identification and complicity with them: in the novel according to Cervantes dialogue is an essential element and occupies a more important place than in any previous fiction.

• Perspectivism makes every fact described by each character according to a different cosmovision, and according to this reality becomes suddenly complex and rich in suggestions.

• Related to the above is the skilled simulation of imprecisions (something noted by Jorge Luis Borges) in the names of the characters and in the unimportant details, so that the reader can create his own image in some aspects of the work and feel his ample in it, suspending his critical sense. This calculated ambiguity, also related to the fine irony of cervantine, makes fiction look more or more usurpe to the same reality, of which so many unexpected things we can expect.

• It uses metaphysical games to diffuse and make the figure of the author disappear through continuous narrative intermediaries (Cide Hamete Benengeli, the supposed Anales de la Mancha, etc.) they do, so, less literary and more realistic the work taking advantage of its perfect and finished character.

Transcendence: Cervantism

Photo composition of Luis de Ocharan.

Although the influence of Cervantes's work is obvious in the procedures and techniques that the entire subsequent novel tried out, in some European works of the xviii century and xix that resemblance is even more perceptible. It has even been said that every subsequent novel rewrites Don Quixote or contains it implicitly. Thus, for example, one of the readers of Don Quixote, crime novelist Jim Thompson, stated that there are a few novel structures, but only one theme: "things are not what they seem." That is an exclusively Cervantine theme.

In Spain, by contrast, Cervantes did not manage to have a following, apart from María de Zayas in the 17th century and José Francisco de Isla in the the xviii. The narrative genre had plunged into a great decline due to its contamination with alien moralizing elements and the competition that the baroque theater made it, as entertainment.

Cervantes was only reborn as a novelistic model in Spain with the advent of realism. Benito Pérez Galdós, a great connoisseur of Don Quixote , of whom entire chapters were known, will be an example of this with his abundant literary production. At the same time, the novel gave rise to a large number of translations and studies, giving rise to an entire branch of Hispanic Philology studies, national and international Cervantism.

Continuations of Don Quixote

In addition to the Second Volume by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, there are several continuations of Don Quixote. The first were three French works: the two parts of the History of the Admirable Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Francois Filleau de Saint-Martin and Robert Challe, and the anonymous New and True Continuation of the history and adventures of the incomparable Don Quixote of La Mancha.

Two of the Spanish continuations of the work date from the 18th century, which attempt to tell what happened after the death of Don Quixote, such as the Additions to the history of the ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Jacinto María Delgado, and the History of the most famous squire Sancho Panza, in two parts (1793 and 1798), by Pedro Gatell y Carnicer.

In 1886, the work by the Galician Luis Otero y Pimentel Semblanzas caballerescas o las nuevas aventuras de don Quixote de la Mancha was published in Havana, whose action takes place in Cuba at the end of the century xix. Several more sequels appeared in the xx, among them a very funny one, The new departure of the valiant knight D. Quixote of La Mancha: third part of the work of Cervantes, by Alonso Ledesma Hernández (Barcelona, 1905) and El pastor Quijótiz by José Camón Aznar (Madrid, 1969). Al morir don Quijote (2004), the most recent novel that continues the story, is the work of the Spanish Andrés Trapiello. There are also Spanish-American continuations, among them Chapters that Cervantes Forgotten, by Juan Montalvo and Don Quixote in America, that is, the fourth outing of the ingenious Hidalgo of La Mancha, by Don Tulio Febres Cordero, a book published in 1905 (commemorative edition 2005, ULA).

The place of La Mancha

First exit from Don Quixote.

The first words of the novel don Quixote de la Mancha are:

In a place of the wick, whose name I do not want to remember, there is not much time that lived a hidalgo of the lances in shipyard, ancient adarga, skinny dew and galgo corridor.

But in reality those first words are «Unoccupied reader»: it is the interpellation with which the «Prologue...» begins, before the preliminary poems. In 2004, a multidisciplinary team of academics from the Complutense University of Madrid, disobeying Cervantes own indication (expressed in several places) to leave the name of the fictitious "place" of Alonso Quijano in the dark, carried out an investigation to deduce the exact place from La Mancha. They used no more than the distances to various towns and places, described by Cervantes in his novel, which took the form of days and nights traveled by don Quixote on horseback. Assuming that the place is in the Campo de Montiel region, and that the speed of Rocinante/Rucio is between 30 and 35 km per day, they concluded that Don Quixote's town of origin was Villanueva de los Infantes.. However, Villanueva de los Infantes was a town, not a place (the topographic designation that is found between a village and a village), so it could well be Miguel Esteban or any other place near El Toboso or, more accurately, none or all of them, because it is a fictional place.

Don Quixote in the rest of the world

Hispanic America

Quixote Iconographic Museum in Guanajuato.

Francisco Rodríguez Marín discovered that most of the first edition of Don Quixote had ended up in the Indies. At some festivities to mark the appointment of the Marquis of Montesclaros as viceroy of Peru, he alluded to Cervantes' masterpiece. On book shipments to Buenos Aires during the 17th and 18th centuries Quixotes and other works by Cervantes appear. In the novel La Quijotita y la prima de ella by the Mexican José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827) the Cervantine influence is evident. The Ecuadorian essayist Juan Montalvo (1832-1889) composed a continuation of the work with the ingenious title of Chapters that Cervantes Forgotten, and the Cuban Luis Otero y Pimentel wrote another with the title Semblanzas caballerescas or the new adventures of Don Quixote. de la Mancha, whose action takes place in a Cuba identified by the protagonist with the name of Enchanted Ínsula. Another canonical essayist, José Enrique Rodó, read the discovery, conquest and colonization of America in a Quixotic key, and Simón Bolívar, who one day gave the mocking order to shoot Don Quixote so that no Peruvian would ever imitate him, close and at the time of death. his death he had to pronounce, with more than one disappointment behind his back, these astonishing words: «The three great fools have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote and me». It is not strange, then, that Rafael Obligado, in his poem The soul of Don Quixote, identifies Bolívar and San Martín with The Knight of the Sad Figure. Also, from the Venezuelan Andes, the writer from Merida Tulio Febres Cordero wrote Don Quixote in America: that is, the fourth outing of the ingenious hidalgo from La Mancha published in the same city, in the Tip. El Lápiz, in 1905 (recently republished on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its publication).

One of the most important Spanish-American Cervantists was the Chilean José Echeverría, and Rubén Darío offered a decadent version of the myth in his short story DQ, set in the last days of the Spanish colonial empire, as well as in the Litanies to Our Lord Don Quixote, included in his Songs of Life and Hope (1905). The Costa Rican Carlos Gagini wrote a short story called "Don Quixote is leaving", and the Cuban Enrique José Varona the conference entitled "Cervantes". The Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego wrote the extensive poem For the soul of Don Quixote, which participates in the widespread sanctification of the Quixotic character. On the other hand, Alberto Gerchunoff (1884-1950) and Manuel Mujica Lainez (1910-1984) are habitual cultivators of what has come to be called cervantine gloss. The Cervantine influence has been observed in works of gaucho literature such as Martín Fierro, by José Hernández and in Don Segundo Sombra, by Ricardo Güiraldes. The Colombian historian and jurist Ignacio Rodríguez Guerrero published in Pasto his book The delinquent types of Don Quixote, an investigation that presents the different types of delinquents and terrorists persecuted by the laws of his time. The influence is perceptible Cervantino in the great historical novel by Enrique Larreta The Glory of Don Ramiro, and Jorge Luis Borges has as complex a relationship with fiction as Cervantes's, since it was not for nothing that he read the work as a child and he glossed essays and poems, and was inspired by it to write the story "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" included in his anthology Fictions.

Cervantes is present in the great works of the Latin American boom, such as Los Pasos Perdidos, by Alejo Carpentier, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez.

Don Quixote was banned in Chile during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The dictator saw in Cervantes's book "a defense of freedom that was inconvenient for his interests," as well as "a plea in defense of personal freedom and an attack on conventional authority."

United Kingdom

Don Quixote in England. Comedy. As it is acted at the New Theatre in the Hay-Market (1734) of Henry Fielding.

The English was the first translation made in Europe of the first part of Don Quixote, thanks to Thomas Shelton (in 1612), who would later also do the second; although his translation has errors, it has great vivacity. More accurate, however, would be that of Charles Jarvis in 1742, but at the cost of the great inspiration of his predecessor. English Cervantism is also responsible for two of the first critical contributions to the establishment of the text of Don Quixote in its original language during the xviii: the 1738 edition, extremely luxurious and beautifully illustrated, whose text was in charge of Pedro Pineda, and that of John Bowle in 1781. The imprint of Cervantes' work was almost as deep in England as in Spain. Already in the theater of the 17th century: Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher represented in 1611 a heroic-burlesque drama entitled The Knight of the Hand of flaming pestle inspired by the first part, and translated as early as 1612 by Thomas Shelton; Shortly after, Shakespeare and Fletcher himself wrote another work in 1613 on the "History of Cardenio" collected in Don Quixote, Cardenio, which has been lost. Samuel Butler's Hudibras is also inspired by Don Quixote as a reaction against puritanism. In 1687 a new translation was made, that of John Milton's nephew, John Philipps, which achieved enormous diffusion, although it was followed by eighteenth-century translations by Anthony Motteux (1700), Jarvis (1724) and Smollet (1755).

There are traces of Don Quixote in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and, even more so, in the works of Henry Fielding: he wrote Don Quixote in England (1734) and one of the characters in his novel Joseph Andrews, written, according to the author, «in the manner of Cervantes», it is Abraham Adams, «quixotic priest of the xviii century», in whom a kind of sanctification of the Cervantine hero begins. The novelist Tobias Smollet noted the imprint of the novel that he had translated in his novels Sir Launcelot Greaves and Humphry Clinker . Laurence Sterne was a brilliant disciple of Cervantes in his Tristram Shandy. Charlotte Lennox published her Woman Quixote in 1752 and Jane Austen experienced her influence in her very famous Northanger Abbey, already from 1818. The creator of the romantic historical novel, the Scottish Walter Scott, saw himself as a kind of Don Quixote. Byron believes he sees in his Don Juan the cause of Spain's decline in Don Quixote , because in his eyes this book had made chivalrous virtues disappear in this country. Wordsworth, in the book V of his Prelude (1850), synthesizes in his hermit a new Don Quixote and another lakista poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, assuming the ideas of the German romantics, comes to consider Don Quixote the personification of two opposing tendencies, the soul and common sense, poetry and prose.

Lastly, the masters of the English romantic essay, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, dedicated still fresh critical pages to this classic work of universal literature. Already in the realism of the Victorian period, Charles Dickens, for example, imitated the novel in The Posthumous Documents of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837), where Mr. Pickwick represents Don Quixote and his inseparable Sam Weller to Sancho Panza; his Cervantism went so far as to make the character of Fagin in his Oliver Twist a kind of Monipodio; his competitor William Makepeace Thackeray, imitated the novel in his The Newcomers, as well as George Gissing, who in his work The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft makes his protagonist ask to read in his deathbed Don Quixote. At the end of the century, three new translations appeared: Duffield's (1881), Ormsby's (1885) and Watt's (1888). James Fitzmaurice-Kelly would later collaborate with Ormsby in the first critical edition of the Spanish text (London, 1898-1899) and they are already what we can call members of what has come to be called international Cervantism.

English «quixotism» continued through the xx century. Gilbert Keith Chesterton remembers Cervantes at the end of his poem "Lepanto" and in his posthumous novel The Return of Don Quixote he transforms the librarian Michael Herne into Alonso Quijano. Graham Greene assumes the Cervantine tradition of Fielding in his Monseñor Quixote through the protagonist, the parish priest of El Toboso, who believes he is descended from the Cervantine hero. W. H. Auden considers, on the other hand, the Quixote-Sancho couple the greatest of the couples between spirit and nature, whose relationship consists of what he calls Christian closeness .

United States

Mark Twain.

Among the first American readers of the novel was founding father Thomas Jefferson, a humanist and polymath as well as a politician and the nation's third president. Don Quixote was one of his favorite readings and he had a copy in Spanish of the Royal Spanish Academy edition of 1781, which is currently kept at the US Library of Congress.

The influence of Don Quixote on Herman Melville's Moby Dick has been appreciated. Mark Twain was also an admirer of the novel and embraces aspects of the novel in Huckleberry Finn; William Faulkner declared that he rereads Cervantes's work every year and authors like Saul Bellow, whose first and his most acclaimed work, The Adventures of Augie March (1935) owes him a lot; Thornton Wilder, in My Destiny, (1934); and John Kennedy Toole, in A Confederacy of Dunces. As a critic, however, Vladimir Nabokov did not come to understand the work and, on the other hand, it is clear, although hardly studied, the influence of Cervantes in more recent authors such as Jim Thompson, William Saroyan or Paul Auster. The impact of Don Quixote even appears in science fiction novels. For example, Rocinante becomes a spaceship, the windmills a metaphor for war, and Julie Mao a new Dulcinea in Leviathan Wakes (2011) by James S. A. Corey. The recent translation into less archaic English, that of Grossmann, has once again popularized the work in the US, which, it is true, had never declined due to adaptations such as the musical Man of La Mancha. The important critic Harold Bloom has dedicated pages and books of comparative literature to the work.

Germany and Benelux

In the Netherlands, the land of windmills, Don Quixote was widely read as a satirical work on Spain that had clashed with the Protestant power, a rival on the seas. Pieter Arentz Langedijk, an important author of the first half of the 18th century, wrote a comedy that is still performed today, Don Quixote in the Camacho's Wedding (1699). Hispanist Barber van de Pol translated the work into Dutch again in 1997 with great success.

Thomas Mann.

In Germany the influence of Don Quixote was late and less than that of authors such as Baltasar Gracián or the picaresque novel during the xvii centuries and xviii, in which the influence of French rationalism predominated. The first partial translation (containing 22 chapters) appears in Frankfurt, in 1648, under the title Don Kichote de la Mantzscha, Das ist: Juncker Harnisch auß Fleckenland/ Aus Hispanischer Spraach in hochteutsche ubersetzt; the translator was Pahsch Basteln von der Sohle. Bertuch published a translation in 1775, but in 1764 Christoph Martin Wieland had already published his Don Sylvio von Rosalva in imitation of Cervantes, which came to constitute the model of the modern German novel (Der Sieg der Natur über die Schwärmerei oder die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva, Ulm 1764). Herder, Schiller and Goethe will echo the great Cervantine novel and the works of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Romanticism, in effect, supposes the acclimatization of Cervantism, Calderonism and Gracianism in Germany: the today classic translations of Ludwig Tieck and Soltau come to light. The brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, the aforementioned poet Tieck and the philosopher Schelling deal with all of Cervantes' work, and not just Don Quixote. This list of Cervantists is completed by Verónica Veit, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Juan Pablo Richter and Bouterwek in what constitutes the first generation of German romantic Cervantists. Then the philosophers Solger, Hegel and Schopenhauer will follow, as well as the poets Joseph von Eichendorff and E. T. A. Hoffmann.

The general vision of the German romantic Cervantists, already outlined by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, consists in perceiving in the knight a personification of the forces that fight in man, of the eternal conflict between idealism and prosaism, between imagination and reality, between verse and prose. In this sense, Heinrich Heine's prologue to the French edition of Don Quixote also points; We must not forget, on the other hand, his sinister omen that the peoples who burn books will end up burning men, contained in his dramatic piece Almansor . For this author, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe constitute the poetic triumvirate of modernity. It was cited by Arthur Schopenhauer as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Heloïse, and Wilhelm Meister. On the other hand, Franz Grillparzer subscribes to Lord Byron's judgment on Spanish decadence and Richard Wagner admires the resurrection of the medieval heroic spirit in the book. Richard Strauss renews the theme with the symphonic poem Don Quixote. Fantastic Variations on a Chivalrous Theme (1897). Already in the 20th century, Franz Kafka composed his apologist The truth about Sancho Panza and, in May 1934, the novelist Thomas Mann chose Tieck's translation of Don Quixote as his traveling companion to the United States, an experience that will be reflected in his essay On Board with Don Quixote, in which the author outlines a defense of the values of European culture threatened by a growing fascism. Finally, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in some memorable pages of his work Gloria, (1985-1989), sees in the comedy of Don Quixote the comedy and Christian ridicule: "Attack at every step, modestly, the impossible." The illustrious Hispanist and Cervantes scholar Friedrich Schürr also opted in this sense, in his 1951 conference Don Quixote as an expression of the Western soul (“Der Don Quixote als Ausdruck der abendländischen Seele »).

Russia

Fiódor Dostoyevski. Portrait by Vasili Perov, 1872.

Unamuno stated that the countries that had best understood Don Quixote were England and Russia. It is true that in the Slavic country he enjoyed great prestige, dissemination and literary influence, but it is also true that in his most eminent authors, such as Fiódor Dostoyevski or Lev Tolstoy, the true Don Quixote is the one in the last chapter, Alonso Quijano, the Well.

As Vsévolod Bagno recounts in Don Quixote lived by the Russians (Madrid: CSIC — Diputación de Ciudad Real, 1995), Pedro I had already read the work, as can be deduced from an anecdote included in Nartov's Tales of Peter the Great:

The zar, leaving for Dunkirk, seeing a lot of mills laughed and said to Pavel Yaguzinski: "If Don Quixote was here, he would have a lot of work."

In the middle of the century, the opening of the country to the West allowed a greater and less selective knowledge of the work of Cervantes. The scientist and writer Michael or Mikhail Lomonosov owned a copy of Don Quixote from the German translation of 1734. Vasily Trediakovsky in his Dialogue between a foreigner and a Russian on the old and new spelling recommends that the dialogues be as natural as those held by the knight-errant Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza, "despite their extraordinary adventures," and finds nothing similar in Russian literature. Sumarókov distinguished in his article "On reading novels" (1759) Don Quixote from all the avalanche of adventure novels that fell on Russia, evaluating it as an excellent satire. Aleksandr Radishchev, in one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century Russian literature, Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow (1790), compares one of the events on the way to the battle between the hero and the herd of sheep. In other of his works this trace appears more clearly. Vasili Leovshín made a knight walk with a sanchopancesque friend in The Evening Hours, or the Ancient Tales of the Drevlian Slavs (1787). At the end of the xviii there is a Quixote that goes from one nonsense (so they say) to another also in an anonymous novel, Anísimich. A new Don Quixote; the usual purpose of these works was "to make clear the petty passions of rural nobility."

The fabulist Ivan Krylov in a letter from his Spirit Mail compares the protagonist of the tragedy Rozlav of Kniazhnin with the Knight of the Sad Countenance; in other passages it is clear that he considered her an anti-hero, although with great ideals. Iván Dmitriev composed the first work inspired by the character, his apologist Don Quixote, where Quixoticism is interpreted as an extravagance. None other than Tsarina Catalina II commissioned a selection of Sancho's sayings and composed a Tale about the sadly famous paladin Kosometovich to ridicule the quixotism of his enemy Gustavo III of Sweden; What's more, a comic opera inspired by this tale was staged, Sadly Famous Paladin Kosometovich (1789), with music by the Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler, who lived in Saint Petersburg during the years of his greatest fame. of the. In it the imprint of Cervantes iconography is evident.

In the xviii and xix Russian intellectuals read Don Quixote preferably in French, or even in Spanish, and they put foreign translations before the Russian versions, made on top of those same translations and not directly from the original; the book was so common that at least one could be found in every town, according to the aforementioned Dmitriev. The general disdain for the Russian language had little to do with it, until Pushkin gave it real literary status.

In the second half of the 18th century two incomplete versions appeared in Russian and translated from French; the first is from 1769, from the French translation by Filleau de Saint-Martin, and was made by Ignati Antónovich Teils, a German teacher at a military school for cadets of the nobility; Although he is considered a womanizer in the adventure of the sale with Maritornes, one eye blind and the other not very healthy, and he speaks of her "fertile nonsense", he sometimes manages to be adequate. The following was from the French adaptation of 1746 and was made by Nikolai Osipov in 1791; It is a version also enriched with scenes that Cervantes never wrote and it is generally a very tacky adaptation. In every Russian library it was one of those essential books, now in French, now in the translation from French made by the pre-romantic Zhukovsky. At that time the protagonist was understood as a caricatural character, but soon the romantic Germanic interpretation appeared.

M. N. Muriatov identifies himself with Don Quixote as a consequence of his disappointments and his reasoning about the separation of reality and ideals, and shows it in his letters to his sister F. N. Lunina; The eighteenth-century interpretation is not, then, the only one. There is also a sentimental interpretation in The Reply to Turgenev (1812) by Konstantin Bátyushkov, one of the most important Russian poets and precursor of Aleksandr Pushkin, where Don Quixote "passes his time dreaming / lives with chimeras, / chat with the ghosts / and with the meditative moon». In this sentimental interpretation Nikolai Karamzin is the one who suffers a deeper impression, which appears already in a letter of 1793 addressed to Ivan Dmitriev, in the poem To a poor poet (1796) and, above all, in The Knight of Our Time (1803); The protagonist is compared to Don Quixote because his inclination to read and natural impressionability exercised in him the "quixotism of the imagination" and dangers and heroic friendship become his favorite dreams:

You, painless phlematics, who do not live, but you sleep and weep in the desire to yawn, certainly you never dreamed so in your childhood. And neither do you, selfish judgments, who do not deal with men, but take them by prudence as long as this relationship is useful to you, and doubtless turn your hand away if men become an obstacle.

Ivan Turgenev stated in 1860 that there was no good translation of Don Quixote in Russian, and it is regrettable that he did not keep his repeated promise to translate it completely, which was already imposed in 1853 and still in 1877 he was still determined to comply; the playwright Aleksandr Ostrovski had already translated the hors d'oeuvres and wanted to translate some chapters of the play; The point is that Turgenev deliberately ignored the translation by Vasily Zhukovsky, Pushkin's teacher, which he began in 1803 and which he published in six volumes between 1804 and 1806. This was because it did not correspond to Turgenev's notion of translation; but Zhukovsky's work was crucial for the development of Russian prose in the xix, since it was produced by a great writer, of a level comparable to that of Ludwig von Tieck, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian or Tobias Smollet. It offers a psychological-philosophical interpretation of the work, in which the protagonist is undoubtedly the Knight of the Sad Countenance. Since he did not know Spanish, he used Florian's French version, which is quite good, since Voltaire's nephew knew the language well and had been in Spain and dealt with the Spanish enlightened people, but he also knew, although he did not use it, the German version. by Tieck (1799), which already offered the romantic interpretation of the character. However, he used Florian's documented foreword to guide his translation, as he was a more prestigious man than the then upstart Tieck. To begin with, he omits entire chapters and abbreviates long passages, naturalistic episodes that did not meet the taste of the time, and diverting interspersed stories; of his harvest he brings a folkloric accent that the French version lacked and replaces the sachopancesque paremiology, literally poured by Florian, with equivalent Russian proverbs, and to understand the merit of his translation in these details it is enough to compare it with Osipov's. In general, Zhukovsky's translation avoids episodes in which the hero is minimized and emphasizes poetic elements. Zhukovsky's retranslation had a second edition in 1815, with no significant changes other than punctuation, which is better than the first, spelling, and cleaning up of errata. This version excited Pushkin and was shamelessly imitated by that of S. Chaplette, also on that of Florian (Saint Petersburg, 1831); by then a certain preference was already being felt for Tieck's more precise German translation, and a direct version from Spanish was beginning to feel inevitable, which arrived in the era of Realism, when the translations of K. P. Masalski (1838) were published.) and that of V. A. Karelin (1866); but the popularization of the myth in Romanticism came mainly through Zhukovsky's version.

Representation in 2015 in Russia of an adaptation of Quixote.

Cervantes is present in Aleksandr Pushkin, Gogol, Turguenev, Dostoyevsky, Leskov, Bulgakov and Nabokov, just to name a few of the greats.

Aleksandr Pushkin had in his library a Quijote in Spanish published in Paris, 1835, and he learned the language in 1831 and 1832 to read it in the original; Inverse translations of La Gitanilla from its French version into Spanish have also been preserved to compare the result with the Cervantes original; he also encouraged Gogol to undertake a narrative work of great spirit in the manner of Cervantes, and he composed Dead Souls . Turgenev in his lecture Hamlet and Don Quixote compares the thoughtful and irresolute Hamlet with the thoughtless and daring Don Quixote, and finds nobility in both characters. But the influence on Fyodor Dostoevsky was deeper; he comments on the work many times in his correspondence and in his Diary of a Writer (1876), where he refers to it as an essential piece of universal literature and as belonging "to the set of books that gratify to humanity once every hundred years»; he finally writes:

All over the world there is no more deep and stronger fiction work than that. Until now it represents the supreme and supreme expression of human thought, the most bitter irony that man can formulate and, if the world is over and someone asks men: "Let us see, what have you brought out in the clean of your life and what definitive conclusion have you deduced from it?" Quixote and then say, "This is my conclusion about life and... could you condemn me for it?"

From the point of view of the Russian writer, the novel is a conclusion about life. The first mention of his work appears in a letter from 1847, but it is in 1860 when he truly obsesses the writer; he imitated her in The Idiot, whose main character, Prince Mishkin, is as idealistic as the Manchego hero, but, stripped of his ridiculous heroism, is actually the final character of the work, Alonso Quijano, the good, and an imitator of Jesus Christ; his monologue “To the health of the sun” is clearly inspired by the discourse on the Golden Age. Dostoyevsky wrote in his Diary of a Writer that “books like that are no longer written. You will see in Don Quixote, on each page, revealed the most arcane secrets of the human soul». On the other hand, in 1877, the chapter of the Diary of a Writer "Lies are saved by lies" deliberately imitates the Cervantine style, to the point that an episode imagined by Dostoyevsky passed off as genuine. Cervantes for a long time.

Nikolai Leskov's novel Three Men of God is a curious precursor to Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote; its protagonist, the prior Saweli Tuberosov, is an idealist who, in his fifties, considers telling the truth, and fights with the harsh and pure contrary circumstances of his environment in the company of a Sancho, the deacon Ajila, and a Samson Carrasco, Tuganov; Due to his inflexibility, he becomes incomprehensible and often ridiculous before others, and in the end he is deprived of speech, they prohibit him from pronouncing more sermons and, unable to fulfill his destiny like the Cervantine hero, he dies of grief. But the influence of Cervantes even extends to the type of hero that Leskov presents in almost all of his novels, and particularly in A family in decline, starring a recognizably thin and poor landowner named Dormidont Rogozin, at the same time. who is accompanied by his inseparable squire Zinka, in the company of which he travels the contours "sensing grievances". His novels The Solitary Thinker and The Disinterested Engineers also clearly show the influence of Don Quixote.

Although for Tolstoy Cervantes's novel was not as important as for Turgenev, Dostoyevsky or Leskov, the truth is that its mark is perceptible and visible; in What is art? he declares as his favorite novel Don Quixote for its "interior content", for its "good vital art of the world"; in the drafts of this work his intention is clear: it is a work that expresses the noblest feelings for all times, understandable to all; in some of his works he assumes the Cervantine heritage; mainly in her novel Resurrección, where she considers who is crazy, the world or the hero, and where Katerina Máslova is an Aldonza who, when being wanted by the prince who dishonored her starting her career as a prostitute, she does not want to be the Dulcinea of the hero, in which there are echoes of the symbolist poet Sogolub, of whom we will speak shortly; there are also echoes of the enchantments and the episode of the galley slaves.

The poets of Russian symbolism, especially Fyodor Sologub, are seduced by the myth of Dulcinea. He wrote an essay about it, El ensueño de Don Quixote, in which he affirms that by rejecting Aldonza and accepting her as Dulcinea, Don Quixote is realizing the final claim of all lyrical poetry, a more lyrical feat. How chivalrous, to turn reality into art, into something that can be endured. The quixotic attitude is a synonym of «lyrical notion of reality». This idea of a lyrical feat is reiterated in other of his works, such as Los demonios y los poetas and the prologue to the piece La victoria de la muerte, or in the work The hostages of life. After the figure of the hallucinated madman appeared in his novel El trasgo, the theme of Dulcinea reappears in his verses between 1922 and 1924, dedicated to his wife, Anastasiya Nikolayevna Chebotarevskaya, who committed suicide in 1921. From Sogolub the myth of Dulcinea passes to other symbolist poets, such as Igor Severianin or Aleksandr Blok; the latter deepens it and transforms it in a very original way in Verses to a beautiful lady.

After the Revolution, Mikhail Bulgakov, one of the writers not so much persecuted as supported by Stalin, like Boris Pasternak himself, and therefore quite lucky, since he was not a Soviet writer, he was able to survive by being allowed to be an assistant theater stage director and being able to feed himself through the birth of continuous translations, such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak; he instilled the quixotic philosophy of the struggle despite the full awareness of defeat, similar to Unamuno's quixoticism, in his masterpiece, the novel El maestro y Margarita ; in the peak years of Stalinist repression, in 1937, he writes in a letter that he continues to compose theater despite the fact that it will never be staged or published due to mere quixotism and he vows not to do it again, but... he does it again, studying the work of the "king of Spanish writers" with such passion that some of his letters to his third wife, Elena, are partially written in Spanish and which, according to his own admission, "Don Quixote attacked >». His modest Quixote is not out of place with his surroundings, he is a normal person who fights like everyone else; only at the end is he contemplated being a hero when he dies, when the author himself was also dying:

Ah, Sancho, the damage caused by your steel is insignificant. Neither did the soul defigurate me with their blows. But I'm afraid to think that he cured my soul and, by healing it, he withdrew him without changing me for another. He took away the most precious gift of how much man is gifted, he took my liberty! Sancho, the world is full of evil, but the worst thing is captivity! He chained me, Sancho! Look: the sun is cut in half, the earth goes up and rises and devours it. The earth approaches the captive! It'll absorb me, Sancho!

Anatol Lunacharski (1875-1933), Russian man of letters and politician, first commissar of education and culture after the October Revolution (1917), patron of Meyerhold and Stanislavski, wrote some historical dramas, including a Don Quixote released (1923). Vladimir Nabókov, however, in his Course on Don Quixote reduces the greatness of the work solely to that of the main character.

Eastern Europe

The first Bulgarian translation was made from a Russian translation and as late as 1882, barely four years after Bulgaria reappeared on the map of Europe. Its main scholar was Efrem Karamfilov. But it is in the Bulgarian poetry of the xx century where the figure of the knight appears more as a symbol of the indefatigable fighter, champion of goodness, courage, faith and justice: Konstantin Velíchkov, Christo Fótev, Asén Ratzsvétnikov, Damian Damianov, Nicolai Rainov, Parván Stéfanov, Blaga Dimitrova and Pétar Vélchev.

Litography of the Slovak Cyprián Majerník.

The first complete translation into Czech was the work of J. B. Pichl (1866, first part) and K. Stefan (1868, second part), although as early as 1620 Cardinal Dietrichstein had read it in Spanish, having been educated in the Iberian peninsula. It was widely read in Bohemia and was very popular in the 18th century, but more in Italian and French versions than in other languages. Already in the xx century, Milan Kundera affirms, like Octavio Paz, that humor is not something innate in man, but a conquest of modern times thanks to Cervantes and his invention, the modern novel.

The first translation of Don Quixote into Polish is from the years 1781-1786 and is due to Count Franciszek Aleksander Podoski, based on a French version. For the Polish enlightened people it was a fundamentally comic work and not only pleasant to read, but also useful for its criticism of the pernicious for good sense chivalric novels. That is the interpretation of Bishop Ignacy Krasicki and Duke Czartoryski, who, however, already perceives the complexity of the work in their Reflections on Polish Literature, 1801. In the forties of the xix, the polygraph Edward Dembowski delves into the tragic German interpretation of Don Quixote as a symbol of the struggle of the ideal against the harsh reality of the surrounding world. The figure of the knight is found in the works of the great Polish romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, as well as in the realist novelist Bolesław Prus' masterpiece The Doll. Already in the 20th century, we must highlight the Don Quixote by Bolesław Leśmian, which represents the tragedy of the loss of faith, Trial on Don Quixote by Antoni Słonimski, where the episode of Sancho's government on the Barataria island is adapted to satirize totalitarianism, Don Quixote and the nannies, by Maria Kuncewiczowa, chronicle of a trip to Spain in search of Don Quixote, and In the beauty of others, by Adam Zagajewski, with Don Quixote in the library.

Between 1881 and 1890, 61 chapters of Don Quixote were published in Romanian, edited by Stefan Vîrgolici. The first complete translation into Romanian was done in 1965 by Ion Frunzetti and Edgar Papu. In 2005, the Cervantes Institute in Bucharest promoted a new translation that was carried out by the Romanian Hispanist Sorin Marculescu.

France

Gustave Flaubert seen by Giraud.

In France, Don Quixote did not have as extensive an influence as in England or Russia, although his imprint was also generous in great works and authors of the xix and many nations became aware of the work through French translations or retranslations from the text in this language. The first translation is barely a year later than Shelton's English, in 1614, by César Oudin. In 1618 the second part was translated by François de Rosset and from 1639 both parts marched together. It is the first translation into French, followed by dozens more, including those by Filleau de Saint-Martin (1677-1678) and that of the gentleman Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1777), a Hispanist trained in his childhood in Spain and nephew of Voltaire, who will be widely publicized throughout Europe.

Filleau de Saint-Martin's translation was published under the title Historia del admirable don Quixote de la Mancha and with the addition of a continuation written by the translator himself, for which he altered the end of the original work and kept Don Quixote alive and capable of embarking on new adventures. In turn, this continuation was extended by another French writer of some renown, Robert Challe. The series of continuations does not end there: an unknown author extended Cervantes's work with another supplementary part entitled New and true continuation of the history and adventures of the incomparable Don Quixote of La Mancha.

One of the many illustrations made by the artist Gustave Doré for the Quixote.

Simonde de Sismondi lays the first stone of the romantic interpretation of the hero. Louis Viardot translates the work very faithfully between 1836 and 1837. Chateaubriand sees himself as a Cervantes and a Quixote, and in his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem (1811) extols the Knight of the Sad Countenance, who also occupies his place in The genius of Christianity as the noblest, the bravest, the kindest and the least crazy of mortals. There is a lot of Cervantes in that frustrated romantic soldier that was Alfred de Vigny. The travelers Prosper Merimée and Théophile Gautier fill their travel diaries with allusions to Cervantes. For the critic Sainte-Beuve, Don Quixote is a book that begins by becoming a satire of the books of chivalry and ends by becoming a mirror of human life. Victor Hugo, who spent some of his childhood years in Spain as the son of General Hugo, considers Cervantes the poet of the contrast between the sublime and the comic, the ideal and the grotesque, and perceives the influence of La gitanilla in his novel Our Lady of Paris. Henri Beyle, known as Stendhal, who was ten years old when he first read Don Quixote , wrote that "the discovery of that book was perhaps the greatest epoch of my life."

Honoré de Balzac represented Don Quixote almost more in his life than in his writings and Gustave Flaubert assumed this spirit in his two novels Bouvard and Pecuchet, posthumous and unfinished, whose two main characters go crazy reading books that they cannot assimilate, and his Madame Bovary, whose protagonist is actually a quixotic lady who loses her senses reading sentimental novels, as José Ortega y Gasset already appreciated ("it is a Quixote with skirts and a minimum of tragedy on his soul"). Gustave Doré illustrated an edition of Don Quixote in 1863 with engravings. Quixotic characters are, on the other hand, the Tartarin of Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet and the Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. In 1932, Maurice Ravel and Jacques Ibert composed songs based on Paul Morand's poems entitled Don Quixote to Dulcinea. In Les oiseaux de la lune or The Birds of the Moon (1956), by Marcel Aymé, a school inspector acquires the power to transform bores into birds of both read novels, which seems to be a comic parody of the madness of don Quixote de la Mancha and the magicians who transform his disappointments.

The writer Monique Wittig, on the other hand, in her novel Le voyage sans fin (1985) reworks Cervantes's Quixote substituting two women for the knight and squire. In 1968 Jacques Brel composed and recorded a music album, L'Homme de la Mancha. And to close a list that could go on too long, we will mention only Léon Bloy, Tailhade, Henri Bergson, Maurice Barrès, Alfred Morel-Fatio, Paul Hazard, André Maurois and André Malraux.

Islamic World

The presence of references to the character of Cervantes —called Dūn Kījūtī or Dūn Kīshūt— in the contemporary Arab imagination, and especially in his literature, is very common. This is often pointed out as paradoxical, since the first translations of Don Quixote into Arabic were published as late as the 1950s and 1960s xx.

The first extensive work in Arabic on Cervantes was published in 1947, on the occasion of the fourth centenary of his birth, by the Lebanese Hispanists Nayib Abu Malham and Musa Abbud in Tetouan, the capital of then Spanish Morocco: Cervantes, prince of Spanish letters. It is an essay of more than four hundred pages that aroused so much interest in literary and intellectual circles that the Arab section of Unesco commissioned the two Hispanists to translate Don Quixote. This translation was started, but for unknown reasons it was never published. Between 1951 and 1966 another translation was made in Morocco that also remained unpublished (the manuscript is preserved), made by the ulema Tuhami Wazzani, who published some chapters in the newspaper he directed, Rif .

The work of Abu Malham and Abbud served to increase the interest of Arab intellectuals in Cervantes' work, which they accessed through its editions in other languages, until in 1956 the translation of the book was published in Cairo. First part of Don Quixote. It was not necessary, however, to wait until 1965 to see the complete work published, in a new translation, this time by the Hispanist Abd al-Rahman Badawi, who contextualized the novel in an intense preliminary study. Five years earlier, a children's version of Don Quixote had been published in the Egyptian capital and continued to be reprinted for decades, which gives an idea of the diffusion that the nobleman's adventures quickly reached. Badawi's translation has been the classical translation, the most widely read, at least until the appearance in 2002 of two new translations, one again Egyptian, by the Hispanist Sulayman al-Attar, and another from Syrian Rifaat Atfe.

Before the translations, however, the novel had been the subject of various critical studies, apart from the aforementioned by Abu Malham and Abbud, which contributed to awakening literary interest in the figure of Don Quixote. This is fully integrated into the Arab imaginary: many see in Quixotism a symbol of the contemporary evolution of the Arab peoples, loaded with idealism and rhetoric, but powerless before the overwhelming force of reality. References to Don Quixote appear frequently in the works of writers such as Nizar Qabbani, Naguib Surur, Yusuf al-Jal, Mahmud Darwish, Assia Djebbar, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Gamal al-Guitani and many others..

On the other hand, Quijote, as well as the rest of Cervantes' work, is also the object of special interest and study due to its multiple references to Islam and the Moorish, which are more visible to Arabo-Muslim readers.

At the UN

Volume XV of the United Nations literary review, Ex Tempore (ISSN 1020-6604), December 2004, is dedicated to Don Quixote, with a prologue by Alfred de Zayas and the poem Elogio de la Locura by Zaki Ergas, both members of the Swiss PEN Club.

Editions of Don Quixote

Editions in Spanish

Until the Age of Enlightenment, the editions of the masterpiece from the Spanish Golden Age generally degraded the text, except for the very careful Brussels edition by Roger Velpius of the first part in 1607. They are usually considered classic editions of Don Quixote, in the 18th century, Life and facts of the ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, London: J. and R. Tonson, 1738, 4 vols., an edition published by Lord Carteret illustrated with 68 exquisite chalcographies dedicated to the Countess of Montijo, wife of the Spanish ambassador during the reign of George II of Great Britain; the text was entrusted to an enthusiastic Cervantist, the London-based Sephardic Jew Pedro Pineda. It was a critical and scholarly work worthy of the Age of Enlightenment, and Gregorio Mayans y Siscar included in it a Life of Cervantes that is considered the first rigorous biography of the author. Stung in its pride, the Royal Spanish Academy made another in four volumes (1780) that was reissued several times with numerous modifications and rectifications and where the editors included a critical introduction with a biography of the author, an essay on the novel, Analysis of Don Quixote, which establishes the classic interpretation of the work as the happy conjunction of two perspectives, two literary traditions and two worldviews, a chronological-historical study of Don Quixote's adventures, a series of engravings and a map from Spain to follow the itinerary of Don Quixote. Vicente de los Ríos, the main person in charge of this edition of the Royal Spanish Academy, corrected the textual errors of the previous editions. Again another English Cervantist, the Anglican Reverend John Bowle, scrupulously examined the text for the first time and purged the errors, including lists of variants, in his 1781 edition, which is also a monument of scholarship and surpasses all previous ones; Bowle was the first to note that there were two editions in 1605, to number the lines, to systematically annotate the work, to prepare an index to the work. All subsequent editors took advantage of his scholarship and generous effort, often without acknowledging his contribution. Then followed the five-volume book by don Juan Antonio Pellicer (1797-1798), with abundant notes and careful attention to textual variants. On the other hand, Agustín García Arrieta published in France some Selected Works of Cervantes in ten volumes (Paris, Librería Hispano Francesa de Bossange senior, 1826, reprinted by Firmin Didot, 1827). This great work included the Quixote (I-VI), the Exemplary Novels (VII-IX) and the Theater (X). The edition of Quijote is perhaps the best so far.

In the 19th century came the prolix and very eruditely annotated (triple the number of Pellicer's notes) by Diego Clemencín (6 vols., 1833 -1839); It has, however, not a few defects in the philological field that the notes of Juan Calderón and Luis de Usoz tried to correct, in the Cervantes vindicated in 115 passages (1854) written mainly by the former; Also important are the editions by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, one in Argamasilla de Alba, 1863, IV vols., and another in Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes ; Madrid, Printing of Manuel Rivadeneyra, 1863; To this last one, it is worth adding a group of notes that Hartzenbusch prepared for a second edition that did not come to fruition and that were printed with the title The 1633 notes put by... D. J. E. Hartzenbusch to the first edition of «The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha», Barcelona: Narciso Ramírez, 1874.

At the end of the xix Clemente Cortejón ambitiously prepared an edition that he wanted to be the first truly critical of the work, comparing no less than 26 different editions, but the author died in 1911 without seeing his work finished, the last volume of which was written by Juan Givanel and Juan Suñé Benages and finally came out in Barcelona (1905-1913) in six volumes, without the promised Cervantes dictionary and with very noticeable defects. derived from the author's prejudices against previous Cervantists such as Clemencín and the scant clarification of his ecdotic and philological criteria; It was, therefore, highly disputed by the Cervantes, who noticed the extemporaneous mess of many of his notes, the unjustified readings that he forced, the errors in attributing merits that belonged to others, and the general lack of explanations and justifications for his changes. conjectures and modernized readings, among other reasons that make the use of its edition very uncomfortable. After him, the editions prepared by Francisco Rodríguez Marín were very famous (in part due to the exclusive attitude of its author with respect to other Cervantists), who used at least one methodology, that of positivism, each one more and better annotated than the previous one: that of Classics The Reading in eight volumes (1911-1913); the supposed "critical edition" in six volumes (1916-1917) and the "new critical edition" in seven volumes (1927-1928). The last one was reissued posthumously, with corrections and new notes, in ten volumes (1947-1949) with the title New critical edition with revised and improved commentary and more than a thousand new notes); however, it has the methodological ballasts of positivism in terms of its abusive carrying of documentary information and, as the author lacked philological training, they are not true critical editions, since he did not refine the text by comparing all the authorized editions, nor did he even indicate their changes in the text; that of Rudolph Schevill and Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (1914-1941), has, however, an adequate philological and ecdotic rigor and extends to all the known work of Miguel de Cervantes; that of Martín de Riquer (the last corresponds to 1996) is the masterpiece of a humanist expert in medieval chivalrous life and that of the Instituto Cervantes, carried out by a team directed by Francisco Rico (1998 and 2004), is the last and for therefore the most authoritative because of the large number of sources consulted to refine the text and comment on it. They are also important, for different aspects, among a very large number of estimable editions, those of Emilio Pascual (1975), Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (1979), John Jay Allen (1984), Vicente Gaos (1987), that of Luis Andrés Murillo (1988), and the different ones, some of them digital, by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo (2001).

In 1987 an edition illustrated by Antonio Saura (don Quixote de la Mancha, Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona, 1987, 2 vols.) was published with 195 pen and Chinese ink drawings (125 of them) and another 70 using mixed techniques.

In 2005, the IV Centenary of Don Quixote was celebrated, which is why the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Spanish Language Academies promoted a popular edition based on that of Francisco Rico and the Instituto Cervantes published by Editorial Alfaguara with 500,000 copies.

Editions in other languages

Don Quixote in German

Don Kichote de la Mantzscha (Frankfurt, 1648).

The first translation into German, Don Kichote de la Mantzscha, was produced in 1621 by Pahsch Basteln von der Sohle; however, best known today is Ludwig Tieck's translation of 1799-1801. Ludwig Braunfels's translation has been considered the most faithful to the original and the most erudite. In 2008 the work appeared in a new translation by Susanne Lange, which was highly praised by literary critics.

Don Quixote in Asturian

There is a complete version of Quijote in the Asturian language, translated by Pablo Suárez García, PhD in Philology from the University of Oviedo in 2010, deposited at the Cervantino Museum in El Toboso in June 2014, and that it is available to visitors to this Museum. Although the work has not yet been published due to lack of funds, the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana has shown great interest in its publication. On the other hand, the Asturian writer Esther García López published in 2005 a selection of texts from Quijote, entitled Aventures del Quixote. It was edited by Madú and illustrated by cartoonist Neto. In addition, Pedro Lanza Alfonso published in 2004 and with VTP, El Caballeru de la Murnia Figura, a play based on the texts of the Spanish classic.

Don Quixote in Catalan

The Majorcan Jaume Pujol carried out his unpublished translation between 1835 and 1850. Eduard Tàmaro translated the first part of Don Quixote into the language of Verdaguer (Barcelona: Estampa de Cristófol Miró, 1882). The first virtually complete printed translation of the xix was produced in 1891 by the academic Antoni Bulbena i Tussell under the title L'enginyós cavallier Don Quixot of La Mancha; it was reprinted in 1930 and in 2005. The Mallorcan priest Ildefonso Rullán first translated it into the Mallorcan dialect (L'enginyós hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, Felanitx, Imprempta d'en Bartoméu Rèus, 1905-1906). Octavi Viader, in 1936, also made a translation and Joaquim Civera i Sormaní made another in Barcelona: Editorial Tarraco, S. A, 1969. However, the only total translation, which even includes some poems left in Spanish by the previous translators, It is that of the Majorcan lawyer and great Cervantist José María Casasayas, who dedicated forty-four years to it, rewriting it twenty times; he printed only eight copies of it that he gave to each of his grandchildren, since no publisher wanted to print it for the general public. It combines the different Catalan dialects and has a wide annotation.

Don Quixote in Chinese

Chinese porcelain dish with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The first versions of Quijote into Chinese were not always faithful retranslations and adaptations. Theatrical versions were first released in the 1920s, then in the 1930s, and twice more during Maoism (in 1950 and after the economic reform started in 1978). Dai Wangshu tried to translate the complete Quixote from the original language, which he knew well, but his manuscript was lost in the war. In 1979, shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the publishing house of People's Literature published a direct translation of the original by Yang Jiang, which has been the most widely read to date, and the full and complete translations are already available. Directly from Dong Yansheng (1995, by the Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, revised in 2006; the result of three years of work, she was awarded the Lu Xün "Rainbow" Prize for Literary Translation in 2001), from Tu Mengchao (1995, by Yilin publishing house), by Liu Jingsheng (1995, by Lijiang publishing house), by Tang Minquan (2000, by Shanxi People's publishing house), by Sun Jiameng (2001, by Literature and Beijing October Art (received the Best Foreign Literature Book Award) and Zhang Guangsen (2001, by Shanghai Yiwen Publishing). Cervantism has been a very fruitful current of Hispanicism in this country, with scholars such as Zhou Zuoren, Chen Yuan, Lu Xün and Qu Qiubai, who argued with each other, and others such as Tan Tao and Qian Liqun. On the other hand, Cervantes influenced writers such as Zhang Tianyi and Fei Ming. In 1996 the publisher of People's Literature published the Complete Works of Cervantes in eight volumes. The Chinese translator Yang Jiang first translated the entire Don Quixote into Chinese from the original language in 1978. In 2009 an adaptation was performed with great success at the National Theater in Beijing and another version in September directed by Meng Jinghui at the Tiananmen National Center for the Performing Arts that combines musical parts with both experimental and classical staging, performed by actors Guo Tao and Liu Xiaoye. The script was written by Meng along with fellow Chinese playwright Kang He, who had already written a screenplay for the story 10 years ago.

Don Quixote Croatian

The translation of Iso Velikanović into Croatian, and Alexey Reshevnikov into Russian, stands out.

Don Quixote in Esperanto

There is a complete translation published in 1977, and several earlier partial attempts, some of some interest in their own right.

The first partial version is due to Vicente Inglada Ors, a polyglot scientist, geologist and member of the Academy of Sciences, who tried it as early as 1904. Other Esperantists who published versions of some chapters were the Catalan writer Frederic Pujulà i Vallès (1909), the well-known Republican soldier Julio Mangada (1927) and the activist Luis Hernández Lahuerta (1955).

The complete translation had to wait, however, until 1977, when the Esperanto Foundation published Fernando de Diego's version. The work, with Doré's classic illustrations, has been widely distributed worldwide, and has gained considerable prestige among connoisseurs of Esperanto culture.

Don Quixote in Guaraní

The Paraguayan poet Félix de Guarania translated the work into Guarani as Kuimba’e katupyry ño Quijote yvyunga, a collection of fragments.

Don Quixote in Hebrew

The first translation of Don Quixote into Hebrew was made in 1958 by Natan Bistrinsky and Nahman Bialik, and in 1994 the one considered the best of the two translations was published, by Beatriz and Luis Landau.

Don Quixote in Japanese

Between 1907 and 1917, the Spanish Japanologist Gonzalo Jiménez de la Espada led a group of Hispanists in Tokyo; it was made up of scholars such as Hirosada Nagata, who in 1948 would translate Don Quixote into the Japanese language.

Don Quixote in Quechua

In November 2005, the translation into southern Quechua was published under the name Yachay sapa wiraqucha dun Qvixote Manchamantan, made by Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui and with illustrations by Sarwa, typical and customary works on tablets. The edition was presented at the Guadalajara book fair.

Don Quixote Russian

Russian edition of 1815.

Although the influence of Don Quixote on Russian literature and culture was notable, it took a long time for a good translation to appear. In fact, the English, German and French versions circulated in the most educated circles. The first Russian edition of Don Quixote appeared in 1769: Istoria o slavnom La-Manjskom rytsare Don Kishote and covered only the first twenty-seven chapters; the translator was Ignati Teils (1744-1815), a German professor associated with the enlightened circles of the well-known progressive and Freemason Nikolai Novikov; it was based on the French translation by Filleau de Saint-Martin. Twenty-two years later, a new translation appeared in Saint Petersburg, which was republished in 1812 in Moscow under the title Don Kishot La-Manjsky; its author was the sworn interpreter Nikolai Osipov (1751-1799). In 1804 another translation was published by the poet Vasili Zhukovski (1783-1852), who translated from the French version by Jean Pierre de Florian; with his poetic skill he managed to embellish what would have been a mediocre and dry version, achieving great success among the public. But it was not until 1838, when the writer Konstantin Masalsky (1802-1861) published the first Russian translation of Don Quixote made directly from the original text of Cervantes; this work was completed in 1866 by V. Karelin. In 1907, under the title Ostroumno-izobretatelny idalgo Don-Kijot Lamanchesky, came the new direct translation from Spanish, made by the writer María Watson (1853-1932).

In Soviet times, very important translations took place, the first in 1929-1932, a complete version at the hands of the philologists Grigori Lozinsky (1889-1942) and Konstantin Mochulsky (1892-1948). But the best and most well-known translation of Don Quixote into Russian was made in 1951 by Nikolai Lubimov (1912-1992), for which he was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1978; It is considered the most classic and unbeatable translation into the Russian language.

Don Quixote in euskera

José Palacio Sáenz de Vitery, Álava writer of the 19th century born in Villarreal de Álava, lawyer and doctor of Philosophy and Letters, was a great Cervantist and Editor of Crónica de los Cervantistas. He managed to possess the best collection of Quixotes of his time and undertook the translation into Basque, but he died leaving his task incomplete. The Civil War made the manuscripts of the incomplete version disappear in Madrid in the family palace on Paseo del Cisne. Under the title Don Kijote Mantxa'ko, the two volumes of the first complete version of Cervantes's work in Basque were published in Zarauz (Guipúzcoa) by Editorial Itxaropena (1976, first part, 1985, second), being the author of the translation Pedro Berrondo and the promoter of the edition José Estornés Lasa.

Don Quixote in T9 (predictive text)

One of the great things about Don Quixote's text is that it represents, in essence, "making the impossible possible" and as part of this idea The ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha was the first translated work to predictive text that consists of transforming words into numbers and using mobile phone messages and an application installed on them, the T9, to transform those numbers, from 2 to 9, into the words and phrases written at the time by Miguel of Cervantes.

Don QuichotteJules Massenet's opera.

Don Quixote in music

Lucien Fugère representing Sancho Panza at the opera Don Quichotte of Jules Massenet (1910).

Don Quixote has served as an inspiration to numerous musicians since its publication. Even before the publication of the second volume of Quixote, on February 3, 1614, the ballet Don Quichotte dansé par Mme. Sautenir.

Among the most important works based on the Knight of the Sad Countenance we can mention the operas: The Comical History of Don Quixote, by Henry Purcell (1695); Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena, by Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (1719); Don Chisciotte in Venice, intermezzo, by Giovanni Antonio Giay (1752); Il curio del suo proprio danno (1755-56) and Don Chisciotte (1770), by Niccolò Piccinni; Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamace, by Antonio Salieri (1771); Don Chisciotte, by Manuel García (1826); Sadly Famous Paladin Kosometovich, by Vicente Martín y Soler (1789); Die Hochzeit des Camacho, by Felix Mendelssohn (1827); Il furioso all'isola di San Domingo, by Gaetano Donizetti (1835); Don Quixote, by Wilhelm Kienzl (1897); Don Quichotte, by Jules Massenet (1910); The altarpiece of Master Pedro, by Manuel de Falla (1923); Don Quichotte, by Cristóbal Halffter (2000) and Don Quijotes Abenteuer, by Jean Kurt Forest (in 2011 not yet released). One can also remember the zarzuela La venta de Don Quijote, by Ruperto Chapí (1902).

Scene of a ballet Don Quixote.

Don Quixote also inspired various concerts, ballets, symphonic suites and chamber music. Among the most significant orchestral works we could point out the symphonic poems, such as Don Quixote, by Richard Strauss, from 1895; Don Quixote, by Anton Rubinstein, from 1875; An Adventure of Don Quixote, by Jesús Guridi, from 1916; Don Quixote and Dulcinea, by Maurice Ravel, from 1932; or Don Quixote watching over his weapons, by Óscar Esplá, from 1962.

Also within rock music you can find music inspired by this work by Cervantes. The Spanish group Mägo de Oz published in 1998 an album completely related to Don Quixote and his adventures, entitled La leyenda de La Mancha, which contains songs such as "Molinos de viento", "Maritornes", "The balm of Fierabrás" or "The island of Barataria".

The rock group Tragicomi-K also published in 2006 «Niño siempre niño (Don Quijote en su delirio)» within their debut album "Tributos de amor y saña", the theme is interpreted a duet by its author José Riaza and the Latin Grammy-winning Mexican singer Jaramar Soto. The song narrates the adventures of Don Quixote and shows the power of his imagination as a creator of unusual and fantastic worlds just like those generated by the mind of a child. "Niño siempre niño (Don Quijote en su delirio)" was also included on the compilation album "Pedaceras"(2010) by Tragicomi-K and on the album of rarities "Cualquier tiempo pasado" (2014) by the Madrid singer-songwriter José Riaza.

Don Quixote in the cinema

• The First Film Experience Don Quixote de la Mancha wine from the French producer Gaumont in 1898. It was a brief title scene Don QuixoteBut no images are kept.

• The French producer Pathé made in 1903 Les Aventures de Don Quichotte de la Manche directed by Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca; a manually coloured version is produced in which several episodes of Don Quixote de la Mancha. In Spain it was projected in 1905 in the ruins of commemoration of the third centenary of the publication of the Prince edition.

• The oldest Spanish film based on the texts of Cervantes is The curious impertinent (1908), made by Narcis Cuyás, also director of the version for the silent cinema Don Quixote (1908). Some news is scarcely preserved.

• The late apparition of an organism responsible for monitoring and restoring the Spanish cinematographic legacy (until the creation in 1953 of the Spanish Filmoteca) allowed many silent cinema films, including the first cinematographic versions of the Cervantine works, to be disappeared. Only the criticisms appearing in the press are known on the occasion of their premiere and there are only short written references.
  

  Ricardo Puga and Leocadia Alba, as Alonso Quijano and MaritormesIn a scene Figures of the Quixote (1910), by Carlos Fernández Shaw, theatrical adaptation of the zarzuela The sale of Don QuixoteWith Ruperto Chapí music.

• One of the first appearances of the character in a film work was Don Quixote (1923), by the hand of British director Maurice Elvey, and who has two great actors of silent cinema such as Jerrold Robertshaw and George Robey, the latter known for his musicals on Broadway.

• One of the most successful film adaptations is Don Quixote from 1933, a Franco-British production led by Georg Wilhelm Pabst considered a classic of cinema and interpreted in his main roles by Feodor Chaliapin Jr., as Don Quixote, George Robey who already played Sancho Panza in the version of Maurice Elvey ten years earlier and Renee Valliers as Dulcinea.
• In 1947, a Spanish adaptation was carried out by Rafael Gil and starred at the duo of actors Rafael Rivelles and Juan Calvo. It was in his time the adaptation of the longest novel of his time (two hours and twelve minutes) and more reliable to the literary work, reverentially following his dialogues and the order of the episodes, unlike the 1933 version and the later Russian version of the film, in which the order of the adventures has been altered as the majority of the cinematographic versions carried out.^{1 2 3} In the cast were Fernando Rey as Sansón Carrasco and the popular actress Sara Montiel as Antonia, the niece of Don Quixote. The soundtrack for the film was composed by Ernesto Halffter, and the film was shot at various points of La Mancha and other Spanish regions.

• In 1955, Orson Welles began working on an adaptation of Quixote, project that had to leave on several occasions for lack of budget. Once the project was definitively abandoned and its director died, Jesús Franco made an edit with part of the original images and presented the film Don Quixote de Orson Welles (1992) at the Festival de Cannes. His protagonists are Akim Tamiroff in the role of Sancho — also intervened in Mister Arkadin (1955), You're wrong. (1958) and Campanadas at midnight (1965), of the same director, and Francisco Reiguera as Don Quixote.

• In 1957, U.S. producer United Productions of America hired Aldous Huxley as a screenwriter for a story based on Quixote and starring the famous animated character "Mr. Magoo".

• In 1957, in the Soviet Union, Grigori Kózintsev led Don Quixote. His original title is Don Kijot, and its main protagonists are Nikolái Cherkásov—known for interpreting Alexander Nevski and Ivan the Terrible in the homonymous films of Eisenstein—and Yuri Tolubéiev. However, the introduction of a subliminal message about class struggle, characteristic of many Soviet films of the time, and due to the hardening of the Cold War for the Bay of Pigs incident prevented it from being premiered in the United States until 1961. In this production he collaborated with sketches and escenographies the sculptor, painter and toledan scenographer exiled in the USSR after the Civil War Alberto Sánchez.

• Vicente Escrivá relied on the work of Gaston Baty and led Dulcinea In 1962, a co-production between Spain, Italy and Germany in which Millie Perkins interpreted Dulcinea.

• In 1969, it premiered in Mexico A stainless Quixote, film in which the actor Cantinflas is a lawyer who has as a model Don Quixote. Fight against the corruption of his time, defending the humble. In the film, many quotations are made from Quixote, among which: "Take the tears of the poor more compassion into you, but no more justice than the information of the rich." Instead of Rocinante, he has a white chiva called "Blanquita".

• The film version of the musical Man of La Mancha (The Man of the Blade, 1972), directed by Arthur Hiller, he had Peter O'Toole in the role of Don Quixote/Cervantes and Sofia Loren as Dulcinea. The theatrical version has been represented in more than 50 languages, one of the Spanish montages was played by actor José Sacristán and singer Paloma San Basilio in 1997.

• A free adaptation Quixote was the Hispanic-Mexican coproduction of comedy Don Quixote rides again (1973), directed by Roberto Gavaldón, on "the truth of what happened in that place of the Mancha according to Sancho", starring Fernando Fernán Gómez in the role of Don Quixote and Mario Moreno "Cantinflas" as Sancho.

• The dancers Robert Helpmann and Rudolf Nuréyev co-directed and staged the film Don Quixote (1973), a film adaptation of the ballet Don Quixote created in 1869 by choreographer Marius Petipa and composer Ludwig Minkus who shot himself in a hangar from Melbourne's Essendon Airport and lasted twenty days. In July of that year, he premiered at Sydney's opera.

• In 1988, the Georgian RSS film studios produced a 9 capitol TV miniserie led by Revaz Chjeídze and entitled Life of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

• The Secret of Don Quixote, documentary Alberto Martínez Flechoso and Raúl Fernández Rincón, Luca-films, Madrid, RTVE 2006 and DVD.

• In 2000, director Terry Gilliam started the shooting (in Navarra) The man who killed Don Quixote, with Johnny Depp interpreting Sancho and Vanessa Paradis to Dulcinea. A series of calamities, such as that of Jean Rochefort, which incarnated the ingenious hydalgo of La Mancha and suffered from a double discal hernia that prevented him from riding on horseback, and meteorological adversities, aborted the film. However, the documentary remains Lost in the Blade (2003), by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, who portrays all these fatalities and became the first documentary on how a film was not made.

• The gentleman Don Quixote (2002), led by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragon, won the City of Rome award for the best Latin film at the Venice International Film Festival that year. With Juan Luis Galiardo and Carlos Iglesias. This film can be considered as the second part of The Quixote of Miguel de Cervantesfilmed in 1991 for television.

• China prepared in 2010 the first Asian production in 3D on the figure of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The film shows the classic adventure of the novel, but set in China of the century xvii.

• Finally, in 2018, Terry Gilliam was able to finish his project The man who killed Don Quixote, starred this time by Jonathan Pryce on the role of Don Quixote and Adam Driver as Sancho.

Don Quixote on television

• In 1964 the French Jacques Bourdon, Louis Grospierre and Jean Marius Richard (known the latter through the pseudonym "Carlo Rim") made the television series in thirteen episodes and in black and white Don Quichotteco-produced between Spain (Hispamer Films P. C.), France (Franco London Film) and Germany (Deropa Films). With parts of this series the same directors performed a 98-minute film entitled Dulcinea del TobosoBut it didn't get commercial exploitation.

• In 1979, the Spanish animation studio formed by director Cruz Delgado and producer José Romagosa produced the first Spanish cartoon series, Don Quixote de la Mancha, composed of 39 episodes of half an hour each. The series won a great success and in addition to its original bent in Spanish (with Fernando Fernán Gómez as the Quixote and Antonio Ferrandis as Sancho) was bent to the following languages: French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Kurmanci, Portuguese, Valencian, Basque, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Thai, Thai, Afrikaans The adaptation of the text of Cervantes was carried out with the literary supervision of Guillermo Díaz-Plaja and counting on the team with the Cervantist Manuel Criado de Val. The song Quixote/Sancho, which accompanied the credit titles in the beginning of each episode, was composed and written by Antonio Areta and Juan Pardo and sung by the duo Buttons. This song obtained the title of Disco de Oro in 1980 (50 000 copies sold). In 1997 Romagosa International Merchandising, S. L., the producer of the series, carried out, by the director Cruz Delgado and the producer Santiago Romagosa, a reissue of the series in the form of two feature films, adapting each feature to one of the parts of the Quixote: Don Quixote I (92 min.) and Don Quixote II (94 min.). They are the first animation feature films made in Quixote adaptation.

• In 1980, the Japanese animation studio Ashi Productions made a series of cartoons for television based on Don Quixote de la Mancha; its original title was Zukkoke Knight: Don De La Mancha and in Spanish he Don Quixote and the stories of La Mancha. He was composed of 23 episodes, his animation director Noa Kawaii and the director of the Kunihiko Yuyama series.

• The theatre director Maurizio Scaparro, from a script written together with Rafael Azcona, made a television version of the novel in his Don Quixote of 1983, in which the group Els Comediants participated.

• In 1990 the producer Hanna-Barbera made a series of cartoons for television, divided into 26 episodes of 30 minutes duration, based on the Quixote that was titled Don Coyote and Sancho Panda.

• At the beginning of 1992, Spanish Television is an adaptation of five chapters that includes the adventures of the first book: The Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes, directed by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón and produced by Emiliano Piedra. With Fernando Rey and Alfredo Landa as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively.

• The actors Bob Hoskins and Isabella Rossellini starred in a controversial^{[chuckles]required]} television adaptation of the work of Miguel de Cervantes in Quixote (2000), led by Peter Yates.

• In 2016, the fiction series The ministry of time de Televisión Española dedicated a chapter to Cervantes and Don Quixote. In it, two travelers in time buy the manuscript of the work before its publication, after which the protagonists of the series should get it published to avoid changing the history of the literature of the present. In the chapter, in which Cervantes is interpreted by Pere Ponce, the work also appears The baths of Algiers and the playwright Lope de Vega.

Don Quixote in the comic strip

Don Quixote in Classic Comics.

Cervantes' work has been the subject of various adaptations to this medium. Among the most recent, it is worth mentioning Will Eisner's Quijote (2000) and in 2005, the year of his IV centenary, the album Collective Lanza en astillero, published by the Castilla-La Mancha Community Board, or Mortadelo de la Mancha by Francisco Ibáñez.

Don Quixote on the Internet

In September 2010, the YouTube video portal, in collaboration with the Royal Spanish Academy, launched a collective reading project for the work. Through this portal, users could upload videos in which they read an eight-line fragment offered by the system. In total, 2,149 people read continuously for 4,298 minutes or almost three days. The video was finally published on March 22, 2011, being able to choose the chapter or fragment of the work designated for each user.

In April 2015, the Francisco Marroquín University of Guatemala launched the first massive open online course (MOOC) on Don Quixote de la Mancha. The course, in Spanish and English, free and open to all audiences throughout the world, is presented by the prestigious American cervantist Eric Clifford Graf. The course consists of 52 chapters of the first part and 74 of the second, uploaded in their entirety to the YouTube video server.