Don Quixote

About the book

Alonso Quixano, a country gentleman of nearly fifty, reads books of chivalry day and night until his brain dries up. He scours a suit of armor that belonged to his great-grandfather, names his bony old horse Rocinante, chooses a farm girl from the next village, whom he has hardly seen, as the lady of his thoughts, Dulcinea del Toboso, and rides out across the plains of La Mancha as the knight-errant Don Quixote, to right the wrongs of the world. Behind him on a donkey comes his neighbor Sancho Panza, a farmer who cannot read, talks without stopping, and has been promised an isle of his own to govern.

Windmills turn into giants, inns into castles, and a barber’s brass basin into the golden helmet of Mambrino. Part One, published in 1605, set all of Spain laughing. In Part Two, published in 1615, knight and squire ride out into a world that has read about them: a duke and duchess who know the book by heart take them into their castle and, for a joke, hand Sancho a real isle to rule, and when a fake sequel by another writer appears, Don Quixote changes his road to prove that he is the real one.

This complete translation of both parts is made directly from Cervantes’s Spanish, down to the price certificates and royal privileges of the first editions. Every “the history says” of the book’s nest of narrators is kept, from the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli to the Morisco who translates him. Don Quixote talks like his romances when an adventure is at hand and like a clear-headed, learned gentleman when it is not; Sancho talks like a countryman, not a dialect, and his proverbs keep their Spanish pictures and their same words each time they come back. A single sonnet missing from the Spanish text is supplied by way of an English version of 1885, and a note says so. There are only six short translator’s notes in all.