Don Quixote: “For the love of God, señor mío, don’t force me to see Your Grace naked!”

1/ The line above comes from P.1, ch.25 of Tom Lathrop’s translation.

I’ve been very much enjoying Don Quixote, laughing in public like a lunatic.

Cervantes is ingenious—he constantly plays around and subverts your expectations—for example, Sancho Panza tells a story and Don Quixote interrupts it, violating the rule Sancho has mentioned, and the story is cut off; Don Quixote later does the same thing with Cardenio, cutting off the story and you think it’s over, but later on, the story is picked up again. 

2/ Is Don Quixote mad? Or does he pretend to be insane? 

I will not attempt to have an interpretation at this point of the novel, but I’d like to draw your attention to a moment of madness—though this be madness, yet there’s method in it: 

““… So, it’s enough for me to think and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and chaste; her lineage matters little, since no one is going to investigate her background to give her an honorary degree—the only thing that matters is that I believe she’s the greatest princess in the world. […] To sum up, I make myself believe that everything I say about her is the absolute truth, neither more nor less, and I portray her in my imagination as I like her, so that in beauty and rank, Helen cannot match her, nor can Lucretia come near, nor any other of the famous women of ages past: Greek, barbarian, or Roman. Let anyone say what he wants—even if uninformed people criticize me, I’ll not be condemned by those who are discerning.”” (ibid.) 

Yes, his professions of love are mad. Yes, he plays the role of a knight errant doing everything for his beloved. But isn’t this what people do in love, just more extreme? Much of Proust is about the narrator fantasising, reinventing the women he loves. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra mythologises Antony, past the size of dreaming. 

““… It’s true that not all poets who praise ladies under fictitious names actually have these women as lovers. Do you think that the Amaryllises, the Phyllises, the Sylvias, the Dianas, the Galateas, the Alidas, and others who fill books, ballads, barbershops, and theaters, were really women of flesh and blood and really belonged to those who praise and praised them? No, certainly not, because most of them are fictional, and serve only to give a subject for their poems, and so that they themselves might be taken for lovers, and worthy to be so.” (ibid.) 

Do Shakespeare’s Fair Youth and Dark Lady exist? Not necessarily. 

I like the contrast between Don Quixote pining for the imagined Dulcinea and Cardenio driven mad by his love for Luscinda. 

3/ You notice that I’ve referenced Shakespeare a few times in my blog post so far. 

Imagine how upset I felt, reading the Cardenio story in Don Quixote and thinking about the Shakespeare play we lost! It’s not hard to see why the story of Cardenio, Luscinda, Don Fernando, and Dorotea appeals to Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights: the plot is full of twists and turns, and it has some of Shakespeare’s favourite themes and plot devices (disguise/ cross-dressing, lust, deceit, “star-crossed lovers”, and so on). I know that at this point it would have been a collaboration—the play’s probably more Fletcher than Shakespeare—but even the boy’s weakest plays like Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, or Pericles, have good and interesting stuff in them.

I should read more about the perception of Cervantes among Shakespeare’s contemporaries—so far, I have come across a Don Quixote reference in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and what looked like one in John Webster’s The White Devil. 

On a side note, I have just discovered that there are lunatics out there who think that Shakespeare and Cervantes were the same person and that person was Francis Bacon. Marvelous! I love the idea that Bacon, apart from being a philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, and jurist, and writing I don’t know how many books of philosophy and other subjects, also wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays and Don Quixote. More energy than Joyce Carol Oates. 

4/ I note that if many of Shakespeare’s characters are actors (almost every play has some form of disguise, acting, and pretence) and some are playwrights/ directors, manipulating others and driving the plot (like Iago in Othello or the Duke in Measure for Measure), many of Cervantes’s characters are storytellers: Don Quixote is one, turning his life into a chivalry romance; his niece and housekeeper make up a story after burning his books; Sancho Panza lies to him or plays along with his fantasies; the priest and Dorotea make up an elaborate story, improvising along the way, to lure Don Quixote out of the mountains and get him back home, and so on.

5/ Generally speaking, I enjoy Tom Lathrop’s translation—the book is very, very funny, and there are lots of helpful notes at the back. 

But once in a while, some modern phrasing gets on my nerves and takes me out of the book. I don’t mean that an English translation of Don Quixote should be in Shakespearean English, but words and phrases such as “boyfriend”, “girlfriend”, “a certain delicious je ne sais quoi”… stick out like a sore thumb in a 17th century novel, like “my ex” in Ignat Avsey’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov. Even the word “crazy”, which Lathrop employs rather often throughout the book, feels out of place, even though I have checked the etymology and it traces back to the early 17th century—perhaps I’m being irrational, but the word “crazy” is now so ubiquitous that it feels anachronistic and less appropriate in Don Quixote than “deranged”, “demented”, “lunatic”, “insane”, even “mad”. 

Lathrop’s language generally isn’t modern though. Most of the time, it feels fine—he doesn’t go for a “contemporary English” approach as Anthony Briggs does in his translation of War and Peace.