Don Quixote
March 31, 2008
Edith Grossman’s definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven’t experienced Don Quixote in English until you’ve read this masterful translation.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
Customer Review: Don Quixote is my Spanish Bible.
“Time ripens all things. No man is born wise.”
Don Quixote is one of my ten favorite novels, and I confess I read it as my Spanish Bible. Miguel de Cervantes’s novel follows a disconnected series adventures of the self-proclaimed “Don Quixote de la Mancha,” a fifty-year-old country gentleman named Alonso Quixano, who has an obsession for reading books. Eventually, because he has lost so much sleep reading books, he deludes himself into believing he is a knight errant. He puts on an old suit of armor, mounts his skinny horse Rocinante, and then sets out with his dull-witted neighbour, Sancho Panza, “for there were evils to undo, wrongs to right, injustices to correct, abuses to ameliorate, and offenses to rectify” (p. 24). Don Quixote’s muse and courtly love interest is Dulcinea del Toboso (a neighbouring peasant girl, Aldonza Lorenzo), who is totally oblivious of Quixote’s feelings for her. She never actually appears in the novel. Soon we find Quixote attacking windmills, believing they are giants. On his Quixotic quest, he repeatedly becomes the butt of outrageously cruel practical jokes, all because of his self-deception. Even his humble squire Sancho is forced to play along with Quixote’s delusions. Although Quixote’s quest for adventure leads him to complete disillusionment, melancholia, and to the renunciation of chivalry, ultimately (as Harold Bloom suggests in his excellent Introduction) Cervantes’ novel may be read as a lesson in Quixotism (note the capital Q), the act of being caught up in idealism or in the romance of noble deeds, and the pursuit of unreachable goals (fighting with the Windmills of one’s own Head).
Dostoyevsky called Don Quixote “the ultimate and most sublime work of human thinking.” There are many translations of Don Quixote (at least twenty in English), the two most recent by John Rutherford and by Edith Grossman. While I am not qualified to say Grossman’s is the definitive edition of Don Quixote, there are several reasons to read her translation. First, she is an award-winning translator respected for her previous translations of Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude;Love in the Time of Cholera). “Fidelity is surely our highest aim,” she has said about the art of translation; “but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation.” Her translation of Don Quixote has been praised by such writers and as Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom, and is quite readable. Second, Grossman’s translation includes an insightful introduction by Bloom, making this a highly-recommended edition, if not a definitive edition of Don Quixote.
G. Merritt
Customer Review: Such a Beautiful Book
This is the book to answer to all books. It is the book that makes all other books question their bookness. It is the essence of book.
No, but really.. I feel like Don Quixote was a real turning point in my life as a reader. It changed me from a person who loved books into a Reader, and by Reader I mean a person who reads as an artform, like a painter paints or a musician plays. Can a person read creatively? Can they actively express themselves through the act of reading? Yes. Buy from here…
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