Edith Grossman's new translation of Don Quixote is a pleasure to read, not a chore. Easy, vernacular, high-conversational in tone, written in the long sentences of an expansive spirit, this English version let me truly enter the greatest of all dialogues, literary or otherwise.

What kind of proprietary relationship exists between the writer and his character? Hamlet, Falstaff, Lear, and company are always Shakespeare's. They are giants of the stage, along with their mysterious creator. Deeply as they speak to the human heart, they don't leave the boards, walk out through the audience, and exit to the street. What writer could name a character "Hamlet" and think even for a moment that it would not conjure Shakespeare's?

Doctor Johnson, a historical personage, may live by dint of James Boswell's journalizing, but the author of The Dictionary had a larger-than-life existence of his own. Thanks to the heap of minute particulars amassed by Boswell, there is little chance of anyone "being" or invoking "another" Samuel Johnson. The obverse of a character imagined so vividly that he seems real, like the mural painted by Appelles that birds tried to light on, Boswell's subject is an actuality meticulously documented by an imagination in love with another man's life.

Don Quixote presents itself as a personal history, framed in the conventions of a courtly romance. Miguel de Cervantes, the author of record, was perhaps descended from Spanish Jews on his mother's side. As a young man, he fought with the Spanish navy alongside the vessels of Venice and the Papal States in the Battle of Lepanto and was wounded in that victory over the Ottoman fleet. Sailing home four years later, Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates, and endured five years of slavery in Algiers before his family finally ransomed him. Back in Spain and dirt-poor, he worked for a time as a collector of taxes beginning around the defeat of the Spanish Armada, only to be imprisoned for peculation, or incompetence, or some other haplessness. One tradition holds that Cervantes began writing his Ingenious Gentleman: Don Quixote of La Mancha while still in prison, in 1598. Part 1 of the novel was published in 1605. It was an instant success, for its publisher if not for the author.

Part 2 of Don Quixote appeared in 1615, about one year before Cervantes' death on April 23, 1616. As the Second Part of The Ingenious Gentleman … by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Author of the First Part makes abundantly clear, Cervantes was galvanized by the popularity of a false sequel, The Second Part of the Exploits of Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Fernandez de Avellaneda, which made a mockery of his character. So again Cervantes picked up his pen, to defend the honor and dignity of the Knight of the Sad Countenance (or the Sorrowful Face, in this translation), and the integrity of his imagination.

The true adventures of the real Don Quixote are only found in Cervantes' novel. But his knight has ridden off the page and into the minds of all, whether they've read his adventures or no. The novel has fostered such multifarious inventions as an English song cycle by William Purcell, a 19th-century Russian ballet, an 18th-century French ditto, and a German romantic ballet set by Felix Mendelssohn. Also numbered among its progeny are a 17th-century French stage comedy and operas by Jules Massenet and Georg Philip Telemann. Tobias Smollett did a complete English translation, Mikhail Bulgakov made the Don into Russian. There are a Hebrew Don Quixote, the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha and, most recently a film, Lost in La Mancha.

Translations aside, none of these hommages and spinoffs of Don Quixote has a life independent of the novel. Perhaps truest to the quixotic spirit is Lost in La Mancha, which documents celluloid medievalist and former Monty Python trouper Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film his favorite novel. Watching, it's hard to tell where inspiration edges into madness, where history leaves off and embroidery takes over, what action is scripted and when real misfortune begins. The documentary stars Gilliam as himself, the scriptwriter and director; the actor who is unable to play Don Quixote for medical reasons is Jean Rochefort; Johnny Depp plays Johnny Depp signed to play Sancho Panza. One Fred Millstein plays himself in the role of "production guarantor." Jeff Bridges narrates. Orson Welles appears courtesy of the archives. The rains, the banks, and conflicting schedules conspire to curse Gilliam's production as absolutely as any evil enchanter could. Not even the windmill scene is completed. The documentary ends with a plea for a new backer to finance Don Quixote.

What is the original of the true history of Don Quixote?Part 1, comprising the first eight chapters, sets the Don upon the path of chivalry and returns him dubbed and drubbed to his home village. This opening sally parodies those popular romances in Don Quixote's library, which the priest and the barber consider each by each before consigning them to the flames. After the auto-da-fe, the tale cuts free of received folly. Don Quixote's second venture into the Spanish countryside, this time accompanied by his squire and conversational complement Sancho Panza, is one as yet untold.

Cervantes refers to himself as "the second author" of his book. He claims that he suspended chapter 8 in mid-gesture because he could not discover what came next. Yet this second author refused "to believe that so curious a history would be subjected to the laws of oblivion, … and so, … he did not despair of finding the conclusion to this gentle history." One day in the market of Toledo, Cervantes happened upon a boy selling a bundle of old books and papers. Answering his curiosity, Cervantes plucked a volume from the pile. It was written in Arabic. No problem. The Spaniard easily found a Morisco who spoke both Castilian and Arabic (indeed, it would have been even easier to find a Hebrew-speaking Christian there, had one been called for). Cervantes handed the volume to the Moor and asked him to interpret. The Morisco opened the book, and began to laugh. So was discovered the History of Don Quixote of La Mancha. Written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab Historian.

To claim that a book is actually the translation of an older manuscript from another language was a common device, as our translator explains in one of her illuminating footnotes. But I take this poke from Cervantes as something more than conventional. Don Quixote is the work of an old, wounded soldier, not a literary pastiche. The writer had lived and fought among Arabs; Spain had a long and glorious Moorish history only officially expunged in 1492. And the first real chivalric romance, as distinct from the ruck of 16th-century pulp taken from the Quixote's personal library and fed to the flames, was written in Arabic.

Antar: A Bedoueen Romance, as translated by Terrick Hamilton in 1819, would fill over 4,000 pages were the entire original ever to make it into English. It celebrates the exploits of an historical figure, Antara Ibn Shaddad, from the time known as the Ignorance, before the calling of Mohammed. Warrior, lover, author of one of the "Seven Odes" written on banners in gold ink and hung in the Ka'aba in Mecca, Antar was the black son of a sheik of the tribe of Abs by an Ethiopian concubine. His Romance, attributed to Al-Asmai—a renowned Basran scholar at the court of Harun ar-Rashid—was as popular in the Arabic-speaking world as the 1001 Nights. Dating from the time of Charlemagne, the work was composed before the Poem of the Cid and the Song of Roland, not to mention all those epics celebrating the Jerusalem Crusades.

The French artists Robert and Sonia DeLaunay practiced what they called "simultaneity." Their aesthetic theory stated that no color exists alone, but only appears when in the company of at least one other color. There is no such thing as "red." There is only red next to blue, or green, or yellow, or black. And red next to blue is different—a different red—from the very same pigment beside yellow. Don Quixote, the knight errant, starts out as a reader but only lives as an actor and speaker. His actions alone, before he rides with Sancho, are slapstick, cruel, and even grotesque. Paired with the earthy Sancho, his discourses become part of an ongoing conversation. And his chivalric imaginings reshape the landscape, just as Jacob dreaming in a empty place with a rock for a pillow could awake and see that empty place was none other but the house of God, the gateway to heaven.

For Cervantes, that most serious reader, it was not enough to open discourse via Don Quixote with the world as it might be, and with Sancho as it hath ever been. Through his Arab historian, and the secret Jews in the Toledo market, he also enters into a conversation with what once really was, and how it still is behind the screen of orthodoxy. By constantly poking at the edges of his own conventions, Cervantes manages to have it both ways, to make a fiction that insists upon the existence of a higher fact.

The narrative deadpan self-consciousness liberates Don Quixote from the constraints of literature, of unreality, of the Inquisition. The Knight of the Sorrowful Face might even have escaped from the confines of his own life story, except that the author(s) return(s) Quixote to his senses—a return to what may be sanity, or maybe a transfiguration, ending with an novelistic death so unwelcome to this reader that it makes a real grief.

The hero began his story as a 50-year-old gentleman named Quixada, or Quexada, or Quexana. Bedeviled by his reading and perhaps by an intimation that the life he'd lived was not one he believed, or perhaps because he was no longer of an age to love a woman, all that remained for him was to declare his love for the world. Whatever the impulse, he entered the lists as Don Quixote of La Mancha.

Defeated at last in combat by another knight, the disguised bachelor Sanson Carrasco, the melancholy knight undergoes one final transformation. To the assembled friends called to his bedside to hear his last will and testament, he'll tell no more tales. Instead, he declares that "Those [tales] that until now … have been real, to my detriment, will, with the help of heaven, be turned to my benefit by my death." And more: "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." Then Don Quixote collapses on his bed; three days later, he dies.

The scribe (no name given) draws up one more document, attesting to the natural death of Don Quixote, so that no author other than Cide Hamete Benengeli himself can resurrect him.

Cide Hamete, who may or may not be Miguel de Cervantes but is surely not the contemptible Avellaneda, then offers a valediction to his pen that equals Prospero's adjuration of his books. Cautioning "presumptuous and unscrupulous historians" against profaning his enterprise, the Arab declares: "For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; he knew how to act, and I to write. … " At which point someone very like the second author takes one last swing at that false history which, had the inspired Cervantes not taken arms against it, would surely be lost in oblivion.

Laurance Wieder is the author most recently of Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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