Don Quixote
Page 125
10. The archbishop of Reims, whose Fables (1527) are a fictional Carolingian chronicle. He is constantly cited for his veracity in The Mirror of Chivalry.
3 In Cervantes’s time, banditry was an especially severe problem in Cataluña.
4 A short, high-necked jacket of mail that was usually sleeveless.
5 A kind of short harquebus favored by the bandits of Cataluña; they were usually worn on a leather bandolier called a charpa.
6 Martín de Riquer points out that this is a mistake: the reference should be to Busiris, an Egyptian king who killed foreigners as sacrifices to the gods.
7 Perot Roca Guinarda was a historical figure whom Cervantes had already praised in his dramatic interlude La cueva de Salamanca (The Cave of Salamanca). Born in 1582, he fought constantly in factional wars, and although his adversaries favored the nobility, he received support from members of the aristocracy and the Church hierarchy, including Don Antonio Moreno, who plays a part in Don Quixote’s adventures in Barcelona. Roca Guinarda was known for his chivalric nature, and like other Catalan bandits, or bandoleros, he eventually abandoned his former life of crime and fought for the Spanish crown in Italy and Flanders. In 1611, he was granted a pardon and left for Naples as a captain in the Spanish army. The date of his death is unknown. As Martín de Riquer indicates, the topic of the Catalan bandit became a romantic theme in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as exemplified by these passages in Don Quixote.
8. The factions, or bandos, gave rise to the word bandolero (cf. “band” and “bandit” in English).
9 Martín de Riquer states that many of the Catalan bandoleros were in fact from Gascony and may have been Huguenot fugitives from France.
10 According to Martín de Riquer, Roque kept what could not be divided and gave his men their share of its equivalent value in money.
11 This is the Catalan word for “thieves,” used here as an insult.
12 Martín de Riquer points out that, given the similarities between the languages of Gascony and Cataluña, the bandoleros probably spoke a mixture of the two; frade, however, is Portuguese (the word for “friar” is frare in Catalan, frayre in Gascon). Riquer assumes that either Cervantes mistakenly attributed a Portuguese word to the bandits or the typesetter made an error.
13 It is Martín de Riquer’s opinion that the reference is to the commemoration of John the Baptist’s beheading (August 29), not to the celebration of his birth (June 24).
14 The Niarros (Nyerros in Catalan) and the Cadells were the factions in whose wars the historic Roque had been involved.
1 More accurately, the viceroy of Cataluña.
2 A prickly evergreen shrub native to European wastelands.
1 Manjar blanco: a dish made of chicken breasts, rice flour, milk, and sugar.
2 In Avellaneda’s book, Sancho is said to be extremely fond of rissoles.
3 Martín de Riquer is certain the reference is to Michael Scot (d. ca. 1232), who studied at Oxford, Bologna, Paris, and eventually Toledo, where he learned Arabic, the language from which he translated (or supervised the translation of) many of Aristotle’s writings into Latin. Escotillois the diminutive of Escoto, his name in Spanish. For a variety of reasons, including his interests in astrology, alchemy, and the occult sciences, he was widely known as a magician and soothsayer.
4 “Flee, enemies,” a formula used in exorcisms.
5 According to Martín de Riquer, Cervantes is describing the printing house of Sebastián de Cormellas, on Calle del Call, which brought out a good number of the classic works of the Spanish Golden Age.
6 Martín de Riquer points out that the book has not been identified and that in Italian the title would be Le Bagattelle, not Le Bagatele. There has been speculation that this might be an anagram for Le Galatee, by Giovanni della Casa, which was translated into Spanish in 1585 by Dr. Domingo Becerra, who was a prisoner in Algiers at the same time as Cervantes.
7 Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa’s translation of II pastor Fido, by Battista Guarini, was published in Naples in 1602; Juan de Jáuregui’s translation of Torquato Tasso’s L’Aminta was published in Rome in 1607.
8 Luz del alma… (Valladolid, 1554), by the Dominican friar Felipe de Meneses, was heavily influenced by Erasmus. For a time it was widely read and had several printings, though none in Barcelona, as far as anyone knows.
9 Avellaneda called himself “a native of the town of Tordesillas.” Apparently there was no Barcelona edition of the “false Quixote” in the seventeenth century; the second printing appeared in Madrid in 1732.
10 The phrase in Spanish is …su San Martín se le llegará, como a cada puerco. “Having your St. Martin’s Day come” is roughly equivalent to “paying the piper” in English, since St. Martin’s Day also refers to the time when animals were slaughtered.
11 An officer in command of four galleys.
1 This meant that they were prepared to row.
2 One of the oarsmen who sat with his back to the stern.
3 The castle of Montjuich, which overlooks Barcelona.
4 Félix (feliz in contemporary Spanish) means “happy” or “fortunate.”
1 Cervantes creates a wordplay that cannot be duplicated in English. It is based on loco (“crazy” or “mad”) and the possibilities of “dis located” (deslocado).
1 He was in charge of the expulsion of the Moriscos from Castilla.
2 Felipe III (1578–1621) became king in 1598 and ruled until his death.
1 These lines by Ariosto are also cited in chapter XIII of the first part.
2 This story is taken from the Floresta general (General Anthology) by Melchor de Santa Cruz, a sixteenth-century student and collector of proverbs.
3 The untranslatable wordplay is based on the verb deber, which is the equivalent of “must” as well as of “owe.”
1 It was believed that goblins turned buried treasure into coal, which is the origin of the phrase tesoro de duende (“goblin’s treasure”) to describe wealth that is squandered.
2 Martín de Riquer points out that despite this essentially satiric depiction of the pastoral novel, Cervantes was very pleased with his pastoral Galatea and was working on its second part at approximately the same time that he wrote this passage.
3 This name is based on a pastoral version of Micolás for Nicolás.
4 At one time it was thought that Nemoroso, in Garcilaso’s first eclogue, was the poet’s friend and fellow poet Boscán (a name related to bosque, or “forest”): Nemushas the same meaning in Latin.
5 The Spanish word for “priest” that is used here is cura.
6 Ona is an augmentative ending, so that Teresona is roughly equivalent to “Big Teresa.”
7 The words mean “curry comb,” “to eat lunch,” “carpet,” “bailiff,” “lavender,” “storehouse,” “money box.” Despite the general correctness of this oddly placed lesson in etymology, Martín de Riquer points out that Cervantes is not entirely accurate in the examples he chooses, although he agrees generally with the linguists of his day.
8 The words mean “Moorish half-boot,” “hovel,” “ancient Spanish coin.”
9. The words mean “gillyflower,” “teacher of the Koran.”
1 In Spanish, primer sueño, or “first sleep,” is the equivalent of “beauty sleep”—that is, sleep before midnight, generally considered the most restful.
2 “After the darkness I hope for the light,” cited by Martín de Riquer as Job 17:12, although in the King James Bible that line reads, “They change the night into day: the light is short because of darkness.” Perhaps more important than the biblical source is the fact that the phrase was the motto of the printer Juan de la Cuesta and therefore appears on the frontispiece of the earliest editions of both parts of Don Quixote.
3 The madrigal is a translation from the Italian of a poem by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547).
4 A nomadic and fierce people from southeastern Europe; their territory, Scythia, lay between the Carpathian
s and the Don.
5 One of the Cyclopes, he was blinded by Ulysses.
1 The earliest Greek poets, including Orpheus, were allegedly from Thrace.
2 This second stanza is from Garcilaso’s third eclogue.
3 With his brother, Minos, he was a judge of the shades in Hades.
4 Martín de Riquer points out that the first edition had Literather than Dite (Spanish for “Dis”), which he thinks resulted from some confusion with Leteo (Lethe), the mythical river of oblivion. In any case, Dis is another name for Pluto, or Hades, the god of the underworld.
5 The second part of the proverb is: “…that she didn’t leave any, green or dry.”
6 A cosmetic lotion made of vinegar, alcohol, and aromatic essences.
1 The line is by Garcilaso.
2 The lines are from a ballad.
1 Latin for “given free of charge.”
2 The rest of the proverb is: “with a bare line.”
3 The sun, in Greek mythology.
4 The reference is to Paris abducting Helen, who was married to Menelaus; this incident sparked the Trojan War.
5 In Virgil’s recounting of the legend, Dido, the founder of Carthage, had a love affair with Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan War and the founder of Rome. When he abandoned Dido, she killed herself on a funeral pyre.
6 The joke is based on the repetition of the initial din both Latin and Spanish (Dé donde diere: “Give wherever you choose”) and on the duplication of rhythm in the two phrases, which actually have no other connection.
7 The phrase is equivalent to “as it was before”—that is, “up to your old tricks.”
1 Don Álvaro Tarfe is a character in Avellaneda’s Don Quixote.
2 The madhouse in Toledo, where Avellaneda’s Don Quixote is confined.
3 Martín de Riquer observes that this statement probably alludes to a comic anecdote regarding the fate of a man who had been whipped.
1 Don Quixote’s misunderstanding is based on the fact that in Spanish, the objective pronoun lais the equivalent of both “it” and “her” in English.
2 Latin for “a bad sign” or “an evil omen.”
3 An embroidered cloth or tapestry, bearing a knight’s coat of arms, that was draped over pack mules.
4 As Martín de Riquer observes, Sancho seems to be citing an inappropriate proverb, since he means to say that despite his wretched appearance, he has brought home money.
5 The lines are from a Christmas carol.
6 The origin of the proverb was the tradition of forming flutes or pipes out of green barley stems; it is used when a mature and sensible person does not wish to engage in childish activities.
1 The Italian Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) was the author of La Arcadia, the first pastoral novel of the Renaissance.
2 This was recounted by Avellaneda at the end of his book; he also expresses his confidence that another author will take up the task of writing the new adventures of Don Quixote.
11. Matteo Boiardo was the author of Orlando innamorato; Ludovico Ariosto, who wrote Orlando furioso, referred only to the Christian God in his work. Cervantes disliked the Spanish translations of Ariosto, including the one by Captain Jerónimo de Urrea (1549), which he refers to in the next paragraph.
12. The references are to two poems, the first by Agustín Alonso (1585) and the second by Francisco Garrido Vicena (1555).
13. The first of the Palmerín novels, published in 1511, is of uncertain authorship. The Palmerín of England was the third novel in the series; it was written in Portuguese by Francisco Moraes Cabral and translated into Castilian by Luis Hurtado (1547).
14. Written by Jerónimo Fernández and published in 1547.
15. As indicated earlier, this was first published in 1490; composed in Catalan by Johanot Martorell and continued by Martí Johan de Galba, the anonymous Castilian translation was published in 1511.
16. In the translation of this sentence, which has been called the most obscure in the entire novel, I have followed the interpretation offered by Martín de Riquer. One of the problematic issues in Spanish is the word galeras, or “galleys,” which can mean either ships or publisher’s proofs.
17. As indicated earlier, this was the first pastoral novel in Spanish.
18. A very poor continuation by Alonso Pérez, a Salamancan physician, printed in 1564; also published in 1564 is the highly esteemed Diana enamorada (Diana in Love) by Gil Polo.
19. Published in 1573; according to Martín de Riquer, Cervantes’s praise is ironic, since he mocked the book in his Viaje del Parnaso (Voyage from Parnassus).
20. The first, by Bernardo de la Vega, was published in 1591; the second, by Bernardo González de Bobadilla, was published in 1587; the third, by Bartolomé López de Encino, was published in 1586.
21. Published in 1582 by Luis Gálvez de Montalvo.
22. Published in 1580 by Pedro de Padilla.
23. Published in 1586 by Gabriel López Maldonado and his collaborator, Miguel de Cervantes.
24. This pastoral novel was the first work published by Cervantes, in 1585; the often promised second part was never published and has been lost.
25. Epic poems of the Spanish Renaissance, they were published in 1569, 1584, and 1588, respectively.
26. Published in 1586 by Luis Barahona de Soto.
1. The first two are epic poems by Jerónimo Sempere (1560) and Pedro de la Vecilla Castellanos (1586); the third work is not known, although Luis de Ávila did write a prose commentary on Spain’s wars with the German Protestants. Martín de Riquer believes that Cervantes intended to cite the poem Carlo famoso (1566) by Luis Zapata.
2. The enchanter Frestón is the alleged author of Don Belianís of Greece, a chivalric novel.
3. A Latinate word for “island” that appeared frequently in novels of chivalry; Cervantes uses it throughout for comic effect.
4. Panzameans “belly” or “paunch.”
5. Presumably through an oversight on the part of Cervantes, Sancho’s wife has several other names, including Mari Gutiérrez, Juana Panza, Teresa Cascajo, and Teresa Panza.
1. A monstrous giant in Greek mythology who had fifty heads and a hundred arms.
2. An entrance to the mountains of the Sierra Morena, between La Mancha and Andalucía.
3. A historical figure of the thirteenth century.
4. Agrajes, a character in Amadís of Gaul, would say these words before doing battle; it became a proverbial expression used at the beginning of a fight.
5. The “second author” is Cervantes (that is, the narrator), who claims, in the following chapter, to have arranged for the translation of another (fictional) author’s book. This device was common in novels of chivalry.
6. Cervantes originally divided the 1605 novel (commonly called the “first part” of Don Quixote) into four parts. The break in the narrative action between parts was typical of novels of chivalry.
1. These lines, probably taken from a ballad, appeared in Alvar Gómez’s Spanish translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi, although nothing comparable is in the Italian original.
2. A commonplace in chivalric fiction was that the knight’s adventures (Platir’s, for example) had been recorded by a wise man and then translated, the translation being the novel.