Prologue

Idle reader: you may believe me without my swearing to it that I would like this book, as the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most gallant, and the most discerning that could be imagined. But I have not been able to go against the order of nature, for in nature each thing begets its like. And so what could my barren and ill-tilled wit beget but the story of a child who is dry, shriveled, whimsical, and full of all sorts of thoughts never imagined by anyone else, as you would expect of one begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal noise makes its home? Calm, a peaceful spot, the pleasantness of the fields, the serenity of the skies, the murmur of springs, the quiet of the spirit go a long way toward making the most barren muses show themselves fruitful and offer the world offspring that fill it with wonder and delight. It happens that a father has an ugly child without a single grace, and the love he bears it puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he cannot see its faults; on the contrary, he takes them for cleverness and charm and tells them to his friends as witticisms and graces. But I, who, though I seem the father, am the stepfather of Don Quixote, do not want to drift with the current of custom, or beg you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to pardon or overlook the faults you see in this child of mine; for you are neither his relative nor his friend, and you have your soul in your body and your free will like the best of them, and you are in your own house, where you are lord of it, as the king is of his taxes, and you know what is commonly said: under my own cloak I can kill the king. All of which exempts you and frees you from every respect and obligation; and so you may say whatever you please about this story, with no fear of being slandered for the bad or rewarded for the good you say of it.

I would only like to give it to you plain and bare, without the ornament of a prologue, or the countless roll and catalog of the customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies that are usually set at the beginning of books. For I can tell you that although it cost me some labor to compose the story, none seemed greater to me than writing this preface you are now reading. Many times I took up my pen to write it, and many times I put it down, not knowing what I would write; and once, as I sat there at a loss, the paper in front of me, my pen tucked behind my ear, my elbow propped on the writing table, my cheek resting in my hand, wondering what to say, a friend of mine came in unexpectedly, a witty and very sensible man, who, seeing me so lost in thought, asked me the reason; and I, not hiding it from him, told him that I was thinking about the prologue I had to write for the story of Don Quixote, and that it had me in such a state that I wanted neither to write it nor, still less, to bring to light the deeds of so noble a knight.

“For how can you expect me not to be troubled by how that ancient lawgiver called the public is going to talk when it finds that, after all the years I have slept in the silence of oblivion, I come out now, with all my years on my back, with a tale as dry as esparto grass, barren of invention, meager in style, poor in conceits, and lacking all learning and doctrine, without notes in the margins or annotations at the end of the book, the way I see other books are, even fabulous and profane ones, so full of maxims from Aristotle, from Plato, and from the whole herd of philosophers that they astonish their readers and make them take their authors for well-read, learned, and eloquent men? And then, when they cite Holy Scripture! You would think they were so many Saint Thomases and other doctors of the Church, keeping in this so ingenious a decorum that in one line they have portrayed a dissolute lover and in the next they deliver a little Christian sermon that is a joy and a treat to hear or read. My book will have to go without all of this, because I have nothing to note in the margin or annotate at the end, and I know even less which authors I am following in it, so as to list them at the beginning, as everyone does, by the letters of the A B C, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, and Zoilus or Zeuxis, though the one was a slanderer and the other a painter. My book will also have to do without sonnets at the front, or at any rate without sonnets written by dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or poets of the greatest renown; although if I asked two or three friends in the trade for them, I know they would give them to me, and such sonnets that those by the men with the greatest names in our Spain could not equal them. In short, my good sir and friend,” I went on, “I have decided that Señor Don Quixote shall stay buried in his archives in La Mancha until heaven provides someone to adorn him with all the things he lacks; because I find myself unable to remedy them, owing to my inadequacy and scant learning, and because by nature I am too idle and lazy to go hunting for authors to say what I know how to say without them. This is the cause of the suspense and abstraction you found me in, my friend; and what you have heard from me is cause enough for it.”

Hearing this, my friend slapped his forehead, burst into a great peal of laughter, and said to me:

“By God, brother, now I am finally undeceived of a deception I have been under all the long time I have known you, during which I have always held you to be sensible and prudent in all your actions. But now I see that you are as far from it as heaven is from earth. How is it possible that things of so little moment and so easy to remedy can have the power to baffle and absorb a mind as mature as yours, and one so used to breaking through and trampling over other, greater difficulties? Upon my faith, this does not come from want of skill but from a surplus of laziness and a poverty of reasoning. Do you want to see whether what I say is true? Then listen closely, and you will see how, in the blink of an eye, I confound all your difficulties and remedy all the shortcomings that you say are baffling you and frightening you off from bringing to the light of the world the story of your famous Don Quixote, light and mirror of all knight-errantry.”

“Tell me,” I replied, on hearing what he said, “how do you intend to fill the void of my fear and bring the chaos of my confusion to clarity?”

To which he said:

“The first thing that troubles you, the sonnets, epigrams, or eulogies you lack for the beginning, which ought to be by grave and titled personages, can be remedied by your taking some pains to write them yourself; afterward you can baptize them and give them whatever name you like, putting them down to Prester John of the Indies or to the Emperor of Trebizond, of whom, to my certain knowledge, it is reported that they were famous poets; and even if they were not, and some pedants and bachelors bite you from behind and grumble about this truth, do not give two maravedís for it; for even if they catch you in the lie, they are not going to cut off the hand you wrote it with.

“As for citing in the margins the books and authors from which you take the maxims and sayings you put in your story, all you have to do is work in, so that they fall pat, some maxims or Latin tags that you know by heart, or at least that cost you little trouble to look up; for instance, when dealing with liberty and captivity, putting:

Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro. (Freedom is ill sold for all the gold there is.)

And then, in the margin, cite Horace, or whoever said it. If you are dealing with the power of death, come straight in with:

Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas, (Pale Death knocks with an even foot at the huts of the poor
Regumque turres. (and the towers of kings.)

If with the friendship and love that God commands us to bear our enemy, go straight to Holy Scripture, which you can do with a tiny bit of care, and quote the words of no less than God himself: Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros (But I say to you: love your enemies). If you are dealing with evil thoughts, bring in the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae (Out of the heart come evil thoughts). If with the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his couplet:

Donec eris felix, multos numerabis amicos, (While fortune smiles, you will count many friends;
tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris. (if the skies turn cloudy, you will be alone.)

And with these little Latin tags and others like them, people will at least take you for a grammarian, which is no small honor and profit these days.

“As for putting annotations at the end of the book, you can do it safely this way: if you name some giant in your book, make him the giant Golías, and that alone, at next to no cost, gives you a grand annotation, for you can put: The giant Golías, or Goliath, was a Philistine whom the shepherd David killed with a great blow from a stone in the valley of Terebinth, as is told in the Book of Kings, in whatever chapter you find it written. After this, to show yourself a man learned in humane letters and a cosmographer, arrange for the river Tagus to be named in your story, and you will find yourself at once with another famous annotation, putting: The river Tagus was so called after a king of the Spains; it rises in such-and-such a place and dies in the ocean sea, where it kisses the walls of the famous city of Lisbon; and it is thought to have golden sands, etc. If you deal with thieves, I will tell you the story of Cacus, which I know by heart; if with harlots, there is the bishop of Mondoñedo, who will lend you Lamia, Laida, and Flora, an annotation that will win you great credit; if with cruel people, Ovid will hand you Medea; if with enchanters and witches, you have Calypso from Homer and Circe from Virgil; if with valiant captains, Julius Caesar will lend you none other than himself in his Commentaries, and Plutarch will give you a thousand Alexanders. If you deal with love, with two ounces of Tuscan you will come upon León Hebreo, who will fill your measure to the brim. And if you would rather not go wandering in foreign lands, at home you have Fonseca, Of the Love of God, in which is summed up everything that you or the most ingenious mind could hope for on that subject. In short, all you need to do is mention these names, or touch on these stories I have named, in your own, and leave it to me to put in the annotations and marginal notes; for I swear I will cram your margins full and spend four whole sheets at the back of the book.

“Now let us come to the citing of authors that other books have and yours lacks. The remedy for this is very easy, because you have nothing else to do but find a book that cites them all, from A to Z, as you say. Then you put that very same alphabet in your book; for though the lie will be plain to see, since you had so little need to make use of them, it does not matter at all; and perhaps someone will be simple enough to believe that you have made use of all of them in your simple and plain story; and if it serves no other purpose, at least that long catalog of authors will serve to lend the book authority on the spot. Besides, no one will set about checking whether you followed them or not, since he has nothing to gain by it. All the more so since, if I rightly understand it, this book of yours has no need of any of the things you say it lacks, because the whole of it is an invective against the books of chivalry, which Aristotle never thought of, Saint Basil never said a word about, and Cicero never came across; nor do the fine points of truth or the observations of astrology come within the reckoning of their fabulous nonsense; nor do geometrical measurements matter to it, nor the refutation of the arguments that rhetoric uses; nor has it any reason to preach to anyone, mixing the human with the divine, which is a kind of motley no Christian understanding should be dressed in. It has only to make use of imitation in what it writes; for the more perfect the imitation, the better the writing will be. And since this writing of yours aims at nothing more than undoing the authority and favor that books of chivalry enjoy in the world and among the common people, there is no reason for you to go begging maxims from philosophers, counsels from Holy Scripture, fables from poets, orations from rhetoricians, or miracles from saints; rather, see to it that your sentences and periods come out plain, in meaningful, decent, well-placed words, sonorous and festive, portraying your intention in everything you can reach and is possible, and making your ideas understood without tangling and darkening them. See to it also that, as they read your story, the melancholy man is moved to laughter, the cheerful man laughs the more, the simple man is not bored, the discerning man admires the invention, the grave man does not scorn it, and the prudent man does not fail to praise it. In effect, keep your aim fixed on bringing down the ill-founded machine of these chivalric books, loathed by so many and praised by many more; for if you achieve that, you will have achieved no small thing.”

In deep silence I sat listening to what my friend was telling me, and his arguments so stamped themselves on my mind that, without disputing them, I approved them as good and resolved to make this prologue out of them; in which you will see, gentle reader, my friend’s discernment, my good luck in finding such a counselor at such a time of need, and your own relief in finding the story of the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha so sincere and so free of twists, of whom all the inhabitants of the district of the plain of Montiel hold the opinion that he was the most chaste lover and the most valiant knight seen in those parts for many years. I do not want to make much of the service I do you in introducing you to so noble and so honorable a knight, but I do want you to thank me for the acquaintance you will make with the famous Sancho Panza, his squire, in whom, to my mind, I give you, summed up in one, all the squirely graces that lie scattered through the rabble of empty books of chivalry.

And with this, may God give you health, and not forget me. Farewell.