“Alonso Quixano the Good is truly dying, and he has truly recovered his reason; we ought to go in so that he can make his will.”
This news put terrible pressure on the already full eyes of his housekeeper, his niece, and his good squire, Sancho Panza, forcing tears from their eyes and a thousand deep sighs from their bosoms, because the truth is, as has already been said, that whether Don Quixote was simply Alonso Quixano the Good, or whether he was Don Quixote of La Mancha, he always had a gentle disposition and was kind in his treatment of others, and for this reason he was dearly loved not only by those in his household, but by everyone who knew him.
The scribe came in with the others, and after Don Quixote had completed the preface to the will and tended to his soul with all the Christian particulars that are required, he came to the bequests and said:
“Item: it is my will that with regard to certain monies held by Sancho Panza, whom, in my madness, I made my squire, because between him and me there were certain accounts and debts and payments, and I do not want him held responsible for them, nor should any accounting be demanded of him, but if anything is left over after he has taken what I owe him, the remainder, which will not amount to much, should be his, and may it do him good; and if, when I was mad, I was party to giving him the governorship of the ínsula, now, when I am sane, if I could give him the governorship of a kingdom, I would, because the simplicity of his nature and the fidelity of his actions deserve it.”
And turning to Sancho, he said:
“Forgive me, my friend, for the opportunity I gave you to seem as mad as I, making you fall into the error into which I fell, thinking that there were and are knights errant in the world.”
“Oh!” responded Sancho, weeping. “Don’t die, Señor; your grace should take my advice and live for many years, because the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him or any other hands ending his life except those of melancholy. Look, don’t be lazy, but get up from that bed and let’s go to the countryside dressed as shepherds, just like we arranged: maybe behind some bush we’ll find Señora Doña Dulcinea disenchanted, as pretty as you please. If you’re dying of sorrow over being defeated, blame me for that and say you were toppled because I didn’t tighten Rocinante’s cinches; besides, your grace must have seen in your books of chivalry that it’s a very common thing for one knight to topple another, and for the one who’s vanquished today to be the victor tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” said Sansón, “and our good Sancho Panza knows the truth of these cases.”
“Señores,” said Don Quixote, “let us go slowly, for there are no birds today in yesterday’s nests. I was mad, and now I am sane; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, and now I am, as I have said, Alonso Quixano the Good. May my repentance and sincerity return me to the esteem your graces once had for me, and let the scribe continue.
Item: I bequeath my entire estate to Antonia Quixana, my niece, who is present, having first taken out, in the most convenient way, what is necessary to fulfill the other bequests I have made; and the first that I want to make is to pay the salary owed to my housekeeper for the time she has served me, plus another twenty ducados for a dress. As executors I appoint the priest and Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, who are both present.
Item: it is my will that if Antonia Quixana, my niece, wishes to marry, she marry a man regarding whom it has first been determined that he does not know anything about books of chivalry; and in the event it is discovered that he does know about them, and despite this my niece still wishes to marry him, she must lose all that I have left her, which can then be distributed by my executors in pious works, as they see fit.
Item: I implore the aforementioned executors that if they are fortunate enough to meet the author who, they say, composed a history entitled The Second Part of the Exploits of Don Quixote of La Mancha, that they ask him for me, as courteously as possible, to forgive the occasion I unwittingly gave him for writing so many and such great absurdities as he wrote therein, because I depart this life with qualms that I have been the reason he wrote them.”
With this he brought his will to a close, and falling into a swoon, he collapsed on his bed. Everyone was alarmed and hurried to assist him, and in the three days he lived after making his will, he fainted very often. The house was in an uproar, but even so the niece ate, the housekeeper drank, and Sancho Panza was content, for the fact of inheriting something wipes away or tempers in the heir the memory of the grief that is reasonably felt for the deceased.
In brief, Don Quixote’s end came after he had received all the sacraments and had execrated books of chivalry with many effective words. The scribe happened to be present, and he said he had never read in any book of chivalry of a knight errant dying in his bed in so tranquil and Christian a manner as Don Quixote, who, surrounded by the sympathy and tears of those present, gave up the ghost, I mean to say, he died.
When he saw this, the priest asked the scribe to draw up a document to the effect that Alonso Quixano the Good, commonly called Don Quixote of La Mancha, had passed from this life and had died a natural death; he said he was requesting this document in order to remove the possibility that any author other than Cide Hamete Benengeli would falsely resurrect him and write endless histories of his deeds.
This was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete did not wish to name precisely, so that all the towns and villages of La Mancha might contend among themselves to claim him as their own, as the seven cities in Greece contended to claim Homer.
The tears of Sancho and of Don Quixote’s niece and housekeeper, new epitaphs for his grave, are not recorded here, although Sansón Carrasco did write this one for him:
Here lies the mighty Gentleman
who rose to such heights of valor
that death itself did not triumph
over his life with his death.
He did not esteem the world;
he was the frightening threat
to the world, in this respect,
for it was his great good fortune
to live a madman, and die sane.
And a most prudent Cide Hamete said to his pen:
“Here you will remain, hanging from this rack on a copper wire, and I do not know if you, my quill pen, are well or badly cut, but there you will live, down through the ages, unless presumptuous and unscrupulous historians take you down to profane you. But before they reach you, you can warn them and tell them as well as you are able:
Careful, careful, worthless idlers!
Let no one lay a hand on me;
for this enterprise, O king,
is reserved only for me.
For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; he knew how to act, and I to write; the two of us alone are one, despite and regardless of the false Tordesillan writer who dared, or will dare, to write with a coarse and badly designed ostrich feather about the exploits of my valorous knight, for it is not a burden for his shoulders or a subject for his cold creativity; and you will warn him, if you ever happen to meet him, to let the weary and crumbling bones of Don Quixote rest in the grave, and not attempt, contrary to all the statutes of death, to carry them off to Castilla la Vieja,2 removing him from the tomb where he really and truly lies, incapable of undertaking a third journey or a new sally; for to mock the many undertaken by so many knights errant, the two he made were enough, and they have brought delight and pleasure to everyone who knows of them, in these kingdoms as well as those abroad. And with this you will fulfill your Christian duty, by giving good counsel to those who do not wish you well, and I shall be pleased and proud to have been the first who completely enjoyed the fruits of his writing, just as he wished, for my only desire has been to have people reject and despise the false and nonsensical histories of the books of chivalry, which are already stumbling over the history of my true Don Quixote, and will undoubtedly fall to the ground. Vale.”
About the Author a
nd the Translator
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor’s prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.
EDITH GROSSMAN is the distinguished prize-winning translator of major works by leading contemporary Hispanic writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, and Mayra Montero. Her new translation of Don Quixote is Edith Grossman’s excursion into the classic literature of an earlier time, a natural kind of progression in reverse. Now she employs her many years’ experience translating modern classics to bring us an elegantly contemporary translation of Don Quixote.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
PRAISE FOR
Don Quixote
“Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era…. The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being, and yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?”
—MILAN KUNDERA
“Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality…. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.”
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
“I…commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose…. Reading [Grossman’s] amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes’ darkening vision is an entrance into further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”
—HAROLD BLOOM
“Ms. Grossman…has provided a Quixote that is agile, playful, formal and wry…. What she renders splendidly is the book’s very heart.”
—New York Times
Copyright
DON QUIXOTE. Copyright © 2003 by Edith Grossman; introduction copyright © 2003 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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1. Cervantes was imprisoned in Seville in 1597 and in 1602.
2. La Galatea appeared in 1585 and the first part of Don Quixote in 1605; Cervantes published nothing in the intervening twenty years. He was fifty-eight years old in 1605.
3. A legendary medieval Christian king and priest supposed to have ruled in a variety of places, including Ethiopia and the Far East.
4. One of the four divisions of the Greek empire in the Middle Ages, it was frequently cited in novels of chivalry.
5. An ancient Spanish coin introduced by the Moors; its precise value is difficult to determine, since it changed over time.
6. The line (“Liberty cannot be bought for gold”) comes from a collection of Aesop’s fables.
7. The line (“Pale death comes both to the hovel of the poor wretch and the palace of the mighty king”) is from Horace.
8. Matthew 1:4 (“But I say unto you, Love your enemies”).
9. Matthew 15:19 (“For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts”).
10. These lines are from Ovid, not Cato, and they translate roughly as “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.”
11. Fray Antonio de Guevara, a sixteenth-century writer, was, among other things, the bishop of Mondoñedo. The irony lies in the fact that his books were well-known for their inaccuracies.
12. Author of Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues of Love), his theories of love influenced Cervantes in the writing of his pastoral novel, La Galatea.
13. The reference is to Tratado del amor de Dios (Treatise on the Love of God), published by Cristóbal de Fonseca in 1592.
14. In contemporary terms, Cervantes is referring here to the science of astronomy.
15. A town in La Mancha, in the province of Ciudad Real.
16. “Farewell” in Latin.
16. Urganda was a sorceress in Amadís of Gaul who could change her appearance at will.
In this form of humorous poetic composition, called versos de cabo rato (“lines with unfinished endings”), the syllables following the last stressed syllable in the final word of each line are dropped.
17. These lines are a homage to the Duke of Béjar, Cervantes’s patron.
18. A reference to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (Roland Gone Mad).
4. A Moor who had been converted to Christianity.
5. An allusion to Hebrew, spoken by the Jews who were merchants in the Alcaná.
6. Cide is the equivalent of señor; Hamete is the Arabic name Hamid; Benengeli (berenjenain Spanish) means “eggplant,” a favorite food of Spanish Moors and Jews. In chapter II of the second volume (1615), the “first author” is, in fact, referred to as Cide Hamete Berenjena.
7. Two arrobas is approximately fifty pounds; two fanegasis a little more than three bushels.
8. Zancas means “shanks”; panza, as indicated earlier, means “belly” or “paunch.”
1. Cervantes apparently divided this portion of the text into chapters after he had written it, and he did so in haste: the adventure with the Basque is concluded, and the Galicians do not appear for another five chapters.
2. The Santa Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, was an armed force that policed the countryside and the roads.
3. Sancho confuses homicidios (“homicides”) and omecillos (“grudges”).
4. Lint was used in much the same way that absorbent cotton is used in modern medicine.
5. Mentioned in a twelfth-century chanson de geste that was translated into Spanish prose in 1525 and became very popular, the balm could heal the wounds of anyone who drank it.
6. An azumbre was the equivalent of a little more than two liters.
7. Loosely based on an episode in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, in which Reinaldos de Montalbán takes the enchanted helmet of the Moorish king Mambrino from Dardinel (not Sacripante) and kills him in the process.
8. A reference to an episode in Boiard
o’s Orlando innamorato, in which Agricane’s army, consisting of “twenty-two hundred thousand knights,” laid siege to Albracca.
9. This name appears in a novel of chivalry, Clamades y Clarmonda (1562); in later editions of Don Quixote it was changed to “Sobradisa,” a kingdom mentioned in Amadís of Gaul.
1. Don Quixote’s soliloquy incorporates all the elements traditionally associated with the classical idea of the Golden Age.
2. A precursor of the violin, mentioned frequently in pastoral novels.
1. The lines are from Orlando furioso. “Roland” is the English (and French) for “Orlando.” The Spanish version of the name is “Roldán.”
2. Virgil requested that the Aeneid be burned at his death.
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