![]() ![]() Victorio, who first experiences the book when he read it to his bedridden, illiterate grandfather as a child, believes that "one needs be in a certain mental state.to have suffered at life's hands" before taking on Quixote. "Everyone has it on their bookshelves but not even a minority get through it," he says. While Edward Friedman, Spanish professor and Cervantes expert at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, defends the book, saying "It is by no means impossible to read," Juan Victorio, medieval literature professor at Spain's National Open University, concedes that few people bother to pick it up in the first place. Sensitive translations and modern language adaptations make the task easier, but even so, most people - Spaniards included - shy away from it. Written in gorgeously crafted but inescapably archaic Spanish, it demands considerable patience and concentration. In the original, Don Quixote spans 126 chapters and nearly 1,000 pages. Calvo acknowledges the problem, saying that despite the lavish anniversary celebrations "the most important tribute you can pay the book is to read it." For the casual reader, however, this can feel like a formidable undertaking. "This celebration will reach every public library in every corner of the country," promised Carmen Calvo, Spain's minister for culture.īut in spite of the national and international fanfare with which the anniversary of what many critics believe to be the first modern novel, it is a frequently acknowledged truth that while almost everyone has heard of Don Quixote, a relatively tiny proportion of us have actually sat down and read it. Companies are being given tax breaks to help promote the opus while schools have free new children's editions for their pupils. Institutes, universities and local authorities, meanwhile, promise an exhausting list of seminars, conferences, readings, adaptations, theatre works, films and concerts, not only in Spain, but across the globe. The 400th anniversary sees bookshops overflowing with new editions, some with CD-ROMs, and complementary texts. Asked to explain the novel's grip on its readers' imaginations, Mancing replies, "I've read thousands of novels but I've never read anything that I've wanted to come back to as I do this one." ![]() It bagged 50% more votes than any other book. In 2002, a panel of 100 leading authors from 54 different countries - including Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Seamus Heaney, and Norman Mailer - named Don Quixote as the "most meaningful book of all time". His precise birthday and birthplace are unknown, as are the whereabouts of his remains.įrom the moment of its publication, Don Quixote was a bestseller four centuries on, it is the most published and translated book in the world, after the Bible, and writers and readers the world over praise the book with astonishing unanimity. A man of no formal schooling, his nomadic lifestyle took him from the battle fields of Lepanto, where he crippled his left arm, to five years as a hostage in Algeria he later roamed Spain as a tax collector and civil servant for the Spanish Armada, all the time trying to write plays, poems and novels. Much of the rest of Cervantes' life remains a mystery. Cervantes finally completed the novel in 1615 - a year before his death. It came off the presses on December 20, 1604, and went on sale on January 16, 1605. ![]() Middle-aged and unsuccessful, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra began on Don Quixote in the late 1500s - during, according to some biographers, one of several spells he spent in prison. "It's hard not to see yourself in Don Quixote and Sancho." "It's a book that means all things to all people," says Howard Mancing, literature professor of Purdue University in Indiana. Despite recognising his master's derangement, Sancho nevertheless sticks by him, and both characters change and develop as they wind their way across Spain, until Quixote finally grasps the folly of his enterprise and returns home, sadly, to die. But the stories have addled his wits: he mistakes inns for enchanted castles, and peasant girls for beautiful princesses he confuses windmills with giants and dreams up a beautiful damsel - Dulcinea - to whom he has pledged love and fidelity. Taking on the name of Don Quixote de La Mancha, he mounts his nag, Rocinante, and sallies forth from a nameless village in the heart of Spain to right wrongs and protect the oppressed. Alonso Quijano is an ordinary gentleman who, after absorbing too many stories of knights errant - all the rage in the 16th century - decides to become one himself. A fusion of reality and fantasy, the plot covers the journeys and adventures of Don Quixote and his mule-straddling squire, Sancho Panza. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |