Quixote

by Ilan Stavans

  To which don Quijote replied, smiling un poco:

  “Leoncitos to me? To me leoncitos and at such hours? Pues Dios will show those señores bringing them along if yo soy a man who is frightened by leones! Move aside, good hombre, and if you are the leonero, open those jaulas and let the beasts salir afuera, for in the middle of this campaña I shall let them know who es don Quijote de la Mancha, in spite and in defiance of the encantadores who have sent them a mí.”

  EPILOGUE

  CRITIC: n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

  The universe itself contained in its pages? Am I kidding? The Bible of humanity? (Is not the Bible itself “the Bible of humanity”?) These are nothing but exaggerations, hyperboles. El Quijote is just another novel, in spite of its echoes.

  Still, hyperboles are what literature is about. The central tenet of El Quijote is that one must live life in a genuine way, passionately, in spite of what other people think.

  Yet passion can cross the line into out-of-control behavior. Cervantes’s novel deliberately cautions us against it. Beware of following your own dreams because, although they might set you free, the freedom you get from them is illusory. And beware of a passion for books, since too much reading is dangerous. It blindfolds you. It makes you doubt reality. It makes you believe the world is under a spell. It dries up your brains.

  Here is a personal example. Not long ago, while on a trip to Japan, I stumbled upon a store that could have been the product of a hallucination. It was located near my Tokyo hotel, its name flashing in neon lights simultaneously in Japanese and English: and Don Quixote. (The store is often referred to in Japan by the shortened Donki [].)

  An entire market dedicated to my favorite novel? What other literary character has his own retail business? Would I find action figures of the knight-errant and his squire, their horse and donkey, Dulcinea, bachelor Samson Carrasco, the priest and the barber? Or some of the scores of manga inspired by the novel, illustrating with Japanese-looking characters different segments of Don Quixote’s adventures? Or some theme-related lunch boxes, T-shirts, and video games? Would there be a child-friendly area with knights and lions, windmills and castles?

  I entered in ecstasy. But at first I found nothing: nada. Lots of items, zillions of them: soap bars, baseball uniforms, boxes of cereal, shoelaces, yogurt, hammers, pencils, wallets, Q-tips, air conditioners . . . but nothing connected to the novel.

  I asked an employee, but he didn’t speak English. He called a manager. He in turn had an English-language vocabulary of less than fifteen words, not enough for me to understand a thing. Ay, how I wished I knew even some rudimentary Japanese. The manager did give me a brochure in English, though. I found out that there are more than 160 Don Quixote branches throughout the country, as well as several more in Hawaii. The brochure offered an array of photos of various items, a list of addresses, and a website. It stated that the first retail store, known as Just Co., opened in the Suginami neighborhood of Tokyo in 1980. A couple of years later, it became a wholesale business.

  But why this name? No one knows. I called a number listed in the brochure: no one could tell me. Another customer helped by giving me a loose translation of the word donki. Nothing in his explanation related to the actual novel.

  Was all this a sign of apathy and disregard toward the source, even an outright affront? I don’t know Japanese, but I knew that Japan had a peculiar relationship with the novel. A friend and colleague at Doshisha University in Kyoto had told me that the first partial rendition, by Shujiro Watanabe, was released in 1887 but wasn’t based on the original Spanish. It took another sixty years until Hirosada Nagata first translated El Quijote from Cervantes’s Spanish. That translation was published beginning in 1948, but Nagata never finished it. A Don Quixote Picture Book (Ehon Don Kihte), by stencil-dyer Serizawa Keisuke, a gorgeous example of papermaking craftsmanship done in the tradition of mingei folk art, published in Kyoto in 1937, turns the knight into a samurai. While I have never seen the actual book, several collectors have highly praised it to me.

  Anyway, the store Donki can obviously not be taken as a sign that Japan has been quixotized by the novel, by which I mean it has been enchanted by the story, the way other civilizations have for centuries.

  I like the word quixotized: it is unlike quixotic and Quijitismo, suggesting instead a form of acclimation, the effort of becoming adjusted to a certain literary mode, a way of looking at things. To be quixotized is to become sensible to the double consciousness of things, to recognize that yes is not the opposite of no but its complement.

  Things are never what they seem. What, then, if I was being deceived? What if Donki was an enchanter’s store, the knight-errant nowhere to be found precisely because his entrepreneurial spirit was hidden everywhere in the merchandise? In the First Part, chapter XVII, Don Quixote tells Sancho, “Either I know little, or this castle is enchanted.” Dumbfounded, I wandered around the store, feeling re-energized. Could the tricycle in front of me be the knight-errant’s horse Rocinante in disguise? Might that Cabbage Patch doll be Dulcinea? And that huge plastic tray the yelmo de Mambrino, a bassinette the knight-errant believes to be his helmet?

  Aha!

  I felt empowered, exhilarated. I was suddenly convinced I had broken the code.

  I tried opening the Q-tips, sure the container held the nails used in the novel to seal a sarcophagus. I would rub these until they revealed their true identity.

  “What are you doing? You can’t open that, Ilan!” my wife Alison said to me. She had just emerged from a parallel aisle. “We have to pay for it first.”

  “But . . . ”

  I was about to explain to her the rationale behind my effort, how I was able to see Donki for what it was. I was in a gallery of concealment, a place at the mercy of Magician Friston. I was inside the world’s largest collection of Quixotalia, although each of the items had been magically transformed to look like insipid merchandise.

  I was sure Alison wouldn’t understand. I was sure she would say that I had lost my wits. Still, I felt content with my private truth.

  THE TALMUD SAYS THAT every man should accomplish three tasks in life: plant a tree, have a child, and write a book.

  In my case, the last task needs to be qualified: to write a book about the book.

  I’m a lover of Hispanic civilization. I have written profusely about it. (Too much, perhaps!) Delving into a well of topics, I always come back to a single thought: among the infinite number of items that constitute that civilization, one alone holds its clues, its essence, the blueprint of its DNA: El Quijote. Everything begins and ends with it.

  All my life I have said to myself, No later than when you turn fifty, you must write about Don Quixote and Sancho. It is a challenge you must meet.

  In all honesty, despite having justified it to myself in countless ways, as I’ve done in the preceding pages, I still don’t know why I keep rereading this novel. With very rare exceptions, I really don’t like reading long novels. I lose patience; my attention wanders. I particularly dislike psychological novels because of the way they defy logic (Crime and Punishment, ouch!). I’m allergic to social narratives with a yen for romance (ay, how can the attraction between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw be so destructive?). And I stay away from anything that looks like stream of consciousness (thanks, Clarissa, but I do not do suicide parties!).

  I already hear someone saying in the background, “A literary critic who doesn’t like novels. I told you so. . . . The horror! The horror!”

  Except El Quijote.

  So I built a shrine for it. I started to buy all sorts of specimens, old and new, traditional and cutting-edge. I have translations into Nahuatl, Yiddish, Swahili, and Korean. I have collectors’ editions of Gustave Doré’s engravings. I have a first edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s stage adaptation Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts: Tak
en From Cervantes’ Novel of That Name of 1876. I have an early paperback of François Filleau de Saint-Martin’s incomplete French translation, Histoire de l’admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche. And a volume with all of Borges’s musings on Cervantes.

  By carefully organizing my Quixote volumes on the shelves, I can make a map of my intellectual associations. In its heyday, my collection had close to five hundred books. But the whole endeavor became burdensome. There are never enough shelves. In the First Part, chapter XVII, Sancho offers Don Quixote a wise piece of advice: “I hate keeping things long, and I do not want them to grow rotten with me from over-keeping.” I have thought of getting rid of my shrine. But I can’t.

  “You’re just a poser, Ilan, an impostor.” A close friend of mine says my fascination with El Quijote is a cliché. “You actually don’t like Don Quixote, let alone love it. You simply want to be associated with it.”

  Maybe he is right. Not long ago, more than halfway through the completion of the manuscript of this book, I had a dream of Cervantes. The dream was made of two scenes, one short, one long. I must have had the dream in the early morning hours, just before I was about to get up, because those are the dreams I remember most vividly.

  In the first scene, Cervantes was first sitting next to me in a large studio with wooden floors. He had thick makeup on his face. His mustache and beard looked fake. He was wearing King Philip II clothes. I had the feeling he was a cheap Shakespearean actor. In fact, he reminded me of the Russian Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels playing King Lear.

  And he smiled all the time.

  We had a conversation. It must have been in Spanish, although in my dreams, whenever people talk, I know what they are saying but I don’t hear their words.

  He said, “Soy tu prisionero,” I’m your prisoner. I didn’t understand what he meant.

  The second scene was at a hotel in what looked like a university campus. I was in my room with my wife. A sealed envelope arrived under the door. The letter inside said the topic of the lecture I was about to deliver needed to be changed. I would instead be having a public conversation with Cervantes.

  I was upset, but I told my wife it was fine to change the topic. Then she and I left the room and began to run toward the campus cafeteria. As we approached it, a number of students began doing pirouettes around us. This is a circus, I thought to myself.

  Next I was sitting onstage with Cervantes. The auditorium was packed. Each of us had his own chair with a microphone in front. A small table with two glasses of water separated us.

  I said, “I’m your prisoner now.”

  He replied, “Sí, lo sé.”

  Don Quixote marionette by Tony Sinnett.

  CHRONOLOGY

  The echoes of El Quijote are infinite. This inventory highlights the most influential contributions worldwide. A small fraction is mentioned in this book.

  1547 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, Spain.

  1605 The First Part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, by Cervantes, is published.

  1608 César Oudin renders Cervantes’s novella The Ill-Conceived Curiosity into French. Oudin will translate the First Part of El Quijote in 1614. His translation of the Second Part, which completed the rendition of the novel into French, appeared in 1618.

  1612 Thomas Shelton releases in London an English-language rendition of El Quijote, First Part. It is the first translation of Cervantes’s novel ever to be done. Thousands of translations will follow into every single standardized tongue as well as into dialects, jargons, and slangs. It supposedly took Shelton over a month in 1607 to finish his rendition, but he didn’t publish it until some five years later.

  1613 The History of Cardenio, a lost play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, is written. It shares with El Quijote the character of Cardenio, a nobleman in love who becomes mad and does penance in the Sierra Morena.

  1614 A fake sequel to El Quijote, under the title of Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, written by one Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, appears in Spain. Cervantes is furious. He uses the excuse to finish his own sequel. Avellaneda’s identity remains unknown.

  1615 Cervantes’s own sequel, known as the Second Part, is published.

  1616 Cervantes dies at the age of sixty-eight in Madrid. He is buried in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians.

  1622 Lorenzo Franciosini translates the First Part of the novel into Italian. The Second Part will appear in 1625.

  1677 François Filleau de Saint-Martin translates El Quijote into French as Histoire de l’admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche. He leaves the last chapter out in order to write a sequel of his own. He will die before finishing the task. One of Filleau de Saint-Martin’s students, Robert Challe, will complete it years later.

  1700 French-born English author, playwright, and translator Peter Anthony Motteux renders Cervantes’s novel into English. In abbreviated, recomposed, and modified versions, his remains the most frequently reprinted rendition.

  1734 Don Quixote in England, a play by English satirist Henry Fielding, is staged. It is designed as an attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole.

  1737 For the first time, the words Quixote, Quixotada, and Quixotería enter a lexicon. They are included in Spain’s Diccionario de autoridades.

  1742 In the title page of Joseph Andrews, Fielding notes that the novel is “written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote.” Three years after his death, the translation of El Quijote by Irish portrait painter and art collector Charles Jervas (misspelled in the title page as “Jarvis,” a typo forever stuck to the name) appears posthumously. It is considered the most accurate but is also described as stiff and without humor. It is reprinted frequently in the eighteenth century.

  1752 The Female Quixote: or, The Adventures of Arabella, a novel by Gibraltar-born, British poet and actress Charlotte Lennox, is published in England.

  1755 After several publication delays, Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett releases in London his own translation of El Quijote, known as The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. He is immediately accused of not knowing a word of Spanish, and his translation is criticized as being a commissioned job wholly done by a group of hired translators who plagiarized portions from previous versions.

  1759 The character of Uncle Toby in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne, is based on Don Quixote.

  1761 German baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann writes the opera Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Camacho.

  1767 Telemann writes the orchestral suite Don Quichotte.

  1769 N. Osipov translates El Quijote into Russian for the first time. His rendition is based on the French version by Filleau de Saint-Martin.

  1780 The first map of Don Quixote’s itinerary in La Mancha is drawn by Spanish royal geographer Tomás López. It is endorsed by the Real Academia Española (RAE).

  1792 American writer and Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Hugh Henry Brackenridge publishes the first two parts of his novel Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His servant, set on the western Pennsylvania frontier. The third part appeared in 1793 and the fourth and last in 1797. A revised edition was in 1833.

  1801 New Hampshire–based American writer Tabitha Gilman Tenney writes the novel Female Quixotism, Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon.

  1833 Mariano Arévalo’s five-volume edition appears in Mexico City, the first time El Quijote is printed in the New World. At the same time in Spain, scholar and diplomat Diego Clemencín puts out the first annotated edition of El Quijote. His exhaustive effort concludes in 1939.

  1838 Konstantin Massal’skii translates Don Quixote into Russian. It is the first translation into that language done from the Spanish.

  1850 French artist Honoré Daumier exhibits at the Paris Salon, the official art
exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a series of drawings based on El Quijote.

  1851 American writer Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. It displays a strong quixotic quality, the result of Melville’s lifelong admiration of Cervantes’s book.

  1856 French novelist Gustave Flaubert releases Madame Bovary. The book comes after years of rereading El Quijote.

  1860 Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev lectures on Hamlet and El Quijote in different parts of Russia.

  1863 French engraver, illustrator, and sculptor Gustave Doré completes the engravings that illustrate the French translation by Louis Viardot in two volumes, published under the aegis of Hachette and Co., in Paris, and Cassell and Co., in London.

  1868 Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky serializes The Idiot in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Its protagonist, Prince Myshkin, is an idealized version of Don Quixote. The serialization concludes in 1869.

  1869 The ballet Don Quixote, with music by Austrian composer Ludwig Minkus and choreography by French ballet dancer Marius Petipa, is presented at the Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow. Petipa and Minkus will expand it into five acts in 1871, when it will be staged at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre, in St. Petersburg.

  1871 For the next decade, Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud corresponds with his Romanian friend Eduard Silberstein. They sign their letters as Cipión (Freud) and Berganza (Silberstein), after the characters of Cervantes’s novella The Colloquy of the Dogs.

  1874 Don Quichotte, a play by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, with music by the Prussian-born French composer Jacques Offenbach, premieres in Paris.

  1876 Mexican American writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, author of the classic novel The Squatter and the Don, about land claims in California after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, brings out her theatrical adaptation Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts: Taken From Cervantes’ Novel of That Name.