Quixote
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1878 Minsk-born writer and pedagogue Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, also known by the name Mendele Mokher Sforim, the grandfather of Yiddish literature, writes the novel Kitser masoes Binyomen hashlishi. It is structured as a tribute to Cervantes’s book. American journalist, romantic poet, and editor of the New York Evening Post William Cullen Bryant writes a poem about Cervantes to commemorate his death.
1884 American writer and humorist Mark Twain publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Along with its prequel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it meditates on the themes of El Quijote.
1885 British translator John Ormsby publishes his rendition of El Quijote, the most scholarly up until then. It is the first translation to become available on the Internet. American poet James Russell Lowell delivers a lecture on El Quijote in London’s Working Men’s College.
1892 British scholar James Fitzmaurice-Kelly publishes the biography The Life of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
1895 American writer William Dean Howells, in his book My Literary Passions, discusses his discovery of El Quijote. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, about a journey of self-realization that is inspired by El Quijote.
1897 Later-Romantic German composer Richard Strauss writes Phantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters (Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character), Opus 35, on a theme of knightly character. Spanish writer and diplomat Ángel Ganivet publishes Idearium español and El porvenir de España. They discuss his country’s infatuation with Quijotismo.
1900 Uruguayan literary critic and cultural commentator José Enrique Rodó publishes his book-long essay Ariel, structured as a letter to the youth of Hispanic America. It is an overt variation on Quixote themes.
1902 The French silent movie Don Quichotte, by directors Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet, is the first ever to be based on El Quijote. Spanish zarzuela composer Ruperto Chapí premieres the light comedy La venta de Don Quijote.
1905 To commemorate the 300th anniversary of the publication of El Quijote, Nicaraguan poet and leader of the Modernista movement Rubén Darío publishes the poem “Letanía de nuestro señor Don Quijote.” Spanish philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno releases his volume Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly publishes Cervantes in England. José Martínez Ruíz, better known as Azorín, commissioned by the newspaper El Imparcial, follows the route of Don Quixote in Spain, writing a travel book that is also a psychological exploration of the novel’s impact in the nation’s popular imagination.
1907 Mexican lampooner José Guadalupe Posada engraves the Calavera Quijotesca.
1909 French composer Jules Massenet begins composing his five-act opera, Don Quichotte, with a libretto by French librettist Henri Caïn. Massenet calls it a “comédie-héroïque.”
1912 Russian Jewish poet of the Hebrew literary renaissance Chaim Nachman Bialik translates El Quijote into Hebrew. His source is a Russian version.
1914 Spanish thinker and cultural commentator José Ortega y Gasset writes Meditaciones del Quijote.
1915 American actor, singer, and comedian William DeWolf Hopper produces the short film Don Quixote.
1916 Fitzmaurice-Kelly publishes Cervantes and Shakespeare.
1922 Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro, a puppet-opera in one act, with a prologue and an epilogue, has its premiere.
1926 Spanish theorist, literary critic, and journalist Ramiro de Maeztu publishes Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina, in which he meditated on Spain’s archetypal literary character.
1927 British detective writer, biographer, and polemicist G. K. Chesterton writes The Return of Don Quixote.
1928 Daniel Venegas serializes his Chicano novel, The Adventures of Don Chipote: or, A Sucker’s Tale, in the Mexican newspaper El Heraldo. It tells the quixotic story of an impoverished and illiterate peasant who emigrates to the United States.
1931 Hasidic parable “Die Wahrheit über Sancho Panza,” by German-language Czech novelist and insurance worker Franz Kafka, appears in the collection Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer.
1932 French composer Maurice Ravel writes the first of three songs for voice and piano, collectively known as Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, set to poems on El Quijote by French poet, playwright, and diplomat Paul Morand.
1933 Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst releases the film Adventures of Don Quixote. There are three versions of it, all done the same year: one in French, another in English, and the third in German. Russian actor Feodor Chaliapin stars in all of them.
1935 Spanish-born Oxford scholar, historian, and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga releases the literary study Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology.
1939 Argentine hombre de letras Jorge Luis Borges publishes in the magazine Sur his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” It is reprinted in his 1944 collection, Ficciones.
1940 Catalan composer Roberto Gerhard writes the ballet Don Quixote. In 1947 Gerhard rewrote the ballet. It is staged at London’s Covent Garden with choreography by Irish-born British dancer and choreographer Ninette de Valois and décor by English printmaker Edward Burra.
1945 Catalan surrealist artist Salvador Dalí creates a series of watercolors to illustrate the First Part of El Quijote, published by Random House.
1947 The first full-length feature film based on El Quijote is released. It is called Don Quijote de La Mancha, directed by Spanish screenwriter and director Rafael Gil. Pedro Salinas, a Spanish poet who belonged to the Generation of ’27 aesthetic movement, publishes in The Nation an essay called “Don Quixote and the Novel.”
1948 Spanish journalist, translator, and essayist Luis Astrana Marín publishes the first of his seven-volume biography Vida ejemplar y heróica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The last volume appears in 1958. The first partial translation into Japanese based on the Spanish, by Hirosada Nagata, is released in Tokyo.
1949 American translator and scholar of Romance languages Samuel Putnam releases his translation of El Quijote into contemporary English. He also rendered into English a couple of novellas from Cervantes’s Exemplary Novellas.
1950 British translator of European literature J. M. (John Michael) Cohen, also known for his translations of Rousseau, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Teresa de Ávila, renders El Quijote into English for Penguin Books.
1951 During the fall semester, Russian-born trilingual novelist Vladimir Nabokov teaches a course at Harvard on El Quijote, accusing it of cruelty. The first translation of the novel into Yiddish is released by Argentine Jewish intellectual and newspaper editor Pinie Katz. Done directly from the Spanish, it is published in Buenos Aires.
1953 Avant-garde Irish novelist Samuel Beckett premieres the play Waiting for Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone, in Paris. Berlin-born Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach publishes the study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. One of its chapters deals with Dulcinea.
1954 Irish Hispanist Walker Starkie, known for his worldwide travels, publishes his abridged translation of El Quijote into English. The unabridged version will appear in 1964.
1955 Spanish scholar Juan Givanel Mas y Gaziel published the illustrated volume Historia gráfica de Cervantes y del Quijote. The cover of the French weekly magazine Les Lettres Françaises features a silhouette by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso of the knight-errant and his squire. It quickly becomes a staple of the novel’s durability. American writer Kenneth Grahame published the novel Adventures in Yankeeland, which transposes Don Quixote to the United States.
1956 American film director and actor Orson Welles, in The Frank Sinatra Show, comes up with the idea of making a film based on El Quijote. This lifelong project will be left unfinished. In 1992, Spanish B-movie director Jesús Franco and producer Patxi Irigoyen made a 116-minute remix, greeted negatively by audiences. The Russian film Don Kikhot, directed by Ukrainian-born Russian Jewish director Grigori Kozintsev, wins an award at the Cannes Film Festival.
1965 The American musical Man of La Mancha, with a book by playwright Dale Wasserman, lyrics by songwriter Joe Darion, and music by composer Mitch Leigh, premieres on Broadway. (American-based British poet W. H. Auden was originally asked to write the libretto, producing an early draft.) The movie adaptation, with Peter O’Toole, Sophia Loren, and Ian Richardson, and directed by Canadian filmmaker Arthur Hiller, is released in 1972. Russian choreographer George Balanchine premieres his ballet Don Quixote, with music by Russian-born composer Nicholas Nabokov, and performed by American ballerina Suzanne Farrell. French filmmaker Éric Rohmer makes a twenty-three-minute movie called Don Quichotte de Cervantes.
1966 French semiotician Michel Foucault publishes The Order of Things, in which El Quijote, a central topic, is seen from a semiotic perspective.
1973 Mexican standup comedian Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” is Sancho Panza in the movie Don Quijote cabalga de nuevo.
1977 British comedian John Cleese, a guest of The Muppet Show, apologizes for not singing the lyrics of “The Impossible Dream,” the theme song of Man of La Mancha, calling it trash.
1980 The first branch of the Japanese discount store Don Quixote, known as Donki, opens up in the Suginami neighborhood of Tokyo. Japanese anime series Don Quixote: Tales of La Mancha is released. British writer Robin Chapman publishes the novel The Duchess’ Diary. It is part of a trilogy, along with Sancho’s Golden Age (2004) and Pasamonte’s Life (2005), featuring characters from El Quijote. Chapman is also the author of Shakespeare’s Don Quixote (2011), a novel-cum-dialogue between Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Cervantes.
1982 British novelist and Catholic polemicist Graham Greene publishes the novel Monsignor Quixote.
1983 Swiss astronomer Paul Wild discovers Asteroid 3552. It functions as an asteroid but behaves like a comet. He names it Don Quixote.
1985 American experimental writer Kathy Acker writes the novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. And Susan Sontag writes an essay on Don Quixote for Spain’s Tourist Agency. It is called “España: Todo bajo el sol.”
1986 Czech novelist Milan Kundera published The Art of the Novel, which includes the essay “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes.”
1987 Dinamic Software releases in Spain the video game Don Quijote, based on an animated series produced by Televisión Española.
1991 TVE, Spanish television, produces the movie El caballero Don Quijote, based on the First Part, by Spanish screenwriter and director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón.
1995 Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie publishes the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. American academic Burton Raffel publishes his translation into English of El Quijote.
1998 Chilean-born Spanish-based novelist Roberto Bolaño publishes the novel The Savage Detectives. Terry Gilliam, the American-born British comedian and director, fails to make a movie called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp. After being postponed, it went into production in 2000, with a budget of $32.1 million. The effort collapsed after a number of mishaps, including insurance issues, the destruction of equipment during a flood, and an actor’s illness. Apparently, the project acquired new life and—with a different script—was slated to be completed for a 2015 release.
2000 American film director Peter Yates makes the TV movie Don Quixote. The script is by British novelist John Mortimer. It stars John Lithgow, Bob Hoskins, and Isabella Rossellini.
2002 Mexican-born American literary critic and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans publishes a Spanglish translation of El Quijote, First Part, chapter I, in a literary supplement in Barcelona. It is included in his book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. TVE produces El caballero Don Quijote, a movie based only on the Second Part and directed by Gutiérrez Aragón. The documentary Lost in La Mancha, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, is released. It is about Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to freely adapt, or pay tribute to, El Quijote in the movie called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
2003 American translator Edith Grossman is the first woman ever to translate El Quijote into English.
2005 The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid releases a commemorative edition of El Quijote to celebrate the 400th anniversary of its release.
2006 Peruvian scholar Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui translates parts of El Quijote into Quechua.
2007 The Conseil de l’Europe, an organization endowed with promoting Europe’s cultural heritage, gives its official stamp to the tourist route the knight-errant and his squire supposedly follow in their three adventures. A Spanish CGI-animated movie Donkey Xote, with Sancho’s donkey as lead character, is released.
2009 Retired American university librarian James H. Montgomery published Don Quixote. It is the twentieth full rendition of the novel into English.
2015 To relocate them in a more decorous grave, the purported remains of Cervantes, along with those of his wife of thirty years, Catalina de Salazar, identified through DNA, are exhumed in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid. The publication of the Second Part of El Quijote turns four hundred years old, acknowledged with symposia, translations, books, and film cycles.
2016 The 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the two most important writers of the Renaissance, is commemorated globally.
CREDITS
FRONTISPIECE AND CHAPTER OPENERS Don Quixote in his Library, engraved by Heliodore Joseph Pisan (1822–90) c.1868 (engraving), Doré, Gustave (1832–83) (after) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images
PAGE 18 Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra (1547–1615), 1600 (oil on panel), Jauregui y Aguilar, Juan de (c.1566–1641) / Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain / Index / Bridgeman Images
PAGE 19 Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) engraved by Jacob Folkema (1692–1767) (engraving) (b/w photo), Kent, William (1684–1748) (after) /Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images
PAGE 20 1868 portrait of Cervantes, artist unknown. Archive Photos/Getty Images
PAGE 22 Cervantes, Charles Bouvier, 1825, engraving. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray, G533. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College
PAGE 93 Don Quixote, 1955 (gouache on paper), Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973) © 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists CREDIT: Rights Society (ARS), New York / Private Collection / Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images
PAGE 94 Monument to Don Quixote and Sancho in Plaza de España, Madrid. John Greim/LightRocket/Getty Images
PAGE 99 The Skulls of Don Quixote, c.1910–13, printed 1943 (photo-relief etching with engraving), Posada, José Guadalupe (1851–1913) / Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA / gift of the Friends of Freda Radoff. / Bridgeman Images
PAGE 120 Don Quixote and the Windmills, by Salvador Dalí. © Salvador Dalí, Fundacioó Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2014
PAGE 122 Don Quixote and the Windmills, from Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616) engraved by Heliodore Joseph Pisan (1822–90) (engraving) (b/w photo) (see also 141799), Doré, Gustave (1832–83) (after) / Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images
PAGE 161 Quixote and Rocinante by Barry Moser. Used by permission of the artist
PAGE 165 Movie poster of Lost in La Mancha (2002), directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. Courtesy of Moviestore collection Ltd / Alamy
PAGE 167 Poster for the musical Man of La Mancha. © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org. Al Hirschfeld is also represented by the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York
PAGE 169 Don Quixote en Spanglish. With permission of David Enriquez and Ilan Stavans
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p; PAGE 175 Title page of the French translation by Francois Filleau de Saint-Martin. Image courtesy of the Cervantes Project, Textual Iconography of the Quixote Digital Archive, Texas A&M University Libraries (dqi.tamu.edu)
PAGE 211 Don Quixote marionette by Tony Sinnett, www.tonysinnett.com
THROUGHOUT Details of the Don Quixote chess set courtesy of The Chess House, www.chesshouse.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Such is my lifelong obsession with this subject that it feels as if it has taken me more than four hundred years to write Quixote—since the First Part debuted in 1605.
At Norton, my heartfelt gracias to Alane Salierno Mason, whose passion for translation of world literature is a touchstone benefiting us all, and who saw the seed for this volume in 2001, upon reading a special issue of Hopscotch: A Cultural Review. I cherish her friendship as well as her savvy, intelligent editorial touch. I wrote a first version of this book, and upon completion, I understood, in conversation with her, that it was the wrong book. So I rewrote it from scratch.
Denise Scarfi, at one time Alane Mason’s editorial assistant and now a school teacher at a Spanish-English dual-language school in the Bronx, meticulously read the second version of the manuscript, graciously offering her insights. Mary Babcock did an exemplary copy-editing job. Kay Banning was in charge of the index.
Thanks to my tireless Amherst College assistant, Mariela Figueroa, for the countless ways in which she helped bring this volume together. My former student Irina Troconis, who went on various research missions, was also an invaluable resource. And I benefited from the help of four other assistants: Derek García, Rebecca Pol, Heather Richard, and Federico Sucre.
The Cervantes industry has been a topic of mine for years. It’s impossible to thank the countless people with whom I have engaged in conversation, real and imaginary. Among them are Paula Abate, Jennifer Acker, Verónica Albin, Lalo Alcaraz, Frederick Aldama, Rene Alegría, John Alexander, Frederick de Armas, Diana de Armas Wilson, Harold Augenbraum, David Bellos, Silvia Betti, Harold Bloom, Sara Brenneis, William P. Childers, Uri Cohen, Isabel Durán, Eko, Laszlo Erdelyi, Marcela García, Matthew Glassman, Erica González, Roberto González Echevarría, Jorge E. C. Gracia, Edith Grossman, Iván Jaksi, Steven G. Kellman, Stacy Klein, Tom Lathrop, Jeffrey Lawrence, Chris Lovett, Luis Loya, Victoria Maillo, James Maraniss, Roberto Márquez, Juan Carlos Marset, Juan Fernando Merino, Rogelio Miñana, María Negroni, Glenda Nieto, Eliezer Nowodworski, Maibe Ponet, Burton Raffel, Nieves Romero-Díaz, David G. Roskies, Elda Rotor, Nina Scott, Steve Sheinkin, Earl Shorris, Ilene Smith, Gonzalo Sobejano, Neal Sokol, Patricio Tapia, Peter Temes, Carlos Uriona, Julio Vélez-Sainz, Juan Villoro, David Ward, Aline White, Kurt Wildermuth, Karen Winkler, Martín Felipe Yriart, Pablo Zinger, and Raúl Zurita.