Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (156 page)

2 This was a prayer to cure toothache.

3 A secondary meaning for
bachiller
(the holder of a bachelor’s degree) is “a person who babbles or chatters.” Cervantes plays with the two meanings of the word.

4 With this sentence, Don Quixote again uses a more distant form of address with Sancho in order to indicate his displeasure; he does not return to less formal address until he speaks to Sancho again, following Sansón Carrasco’s arrival on the scene.

5 The Latin phrase translates roughly as “Then well and good” or “That’s fine with me.”

1 Garcilaso de la Vega, in his third eclogue.

2 The temple, also called the Pantheon, was in fact visited by Charles, who would walk through Rome in disguise; the anecdote told here does not appear in any other text, however, and may be an invention of Cervantes.

3 In this example of Sancho’s linguistic and historical confusions, the wordplay is based on the fact that in Spanish
julio
is the month of July, while
Julio
is the equivalent of Julius;
agosto
is the month of August, while
Agosto
is the equivalent of Augustus.

1 The line is from an old ballad, “El conde Claros” (“Count Claros”).

2 This statement is one of the best known in the novel, for it has been interpreted as meaning that Don Quixote and Sancho have “run into” the church in the sense of coming into dangerous conflict with the institution. The sentence is sometimes cited using another verb to underscore that meaning:
topar
(the verb used by Sancho just a few lines down) rather than
dar.
According to Martín de Riquer, this is overinterpretation, and the sentence means only what it says: the building is a church, not Dulcinea’s palace.

3 Sancho quotes a different version of the ballad of Roncesvalles.

1. Highborn ladies would receive visitors in a special room of the house that had lounging pillows.

2 Sancho misquotes the proverb.

3 The lines are from a ballad about Bernardo del Carpio.

5 In the weaving and embroidering of the raised design on brocade, fabric with three levels of handiwork was considered very valuable. Carried away by his fantasy, Sancho exaggerates.

6 Municipalities had community grazing lands for the use of residents.

1 This is a way to say, “Let’s behave sensibly and realistically.”

2 This may be a reference to a religious play of the same title (
Las cortes de la muerte
) by Lope de Vega; there was, in fact, a theatrical impresario named Angulo el Malo.

1 As Martín de Riquer points out, this kind of comparison was common in Spain, and a frequent subject for sermons, so it is not surprising that Sancho repeats it. Whenever Sancho shows signs of erudition—citing Latin words and phrases, for example—his knowledge, by dint of repetition, has its origin in the Church and consequently does not affect the believability of the character.

2 Two friendships celebrated in classical mythology, the first Roman, the second Greek.

3 The first citation is from a ballad; the second is a proverb that probably appeared in a song or ballad, as the verb “sung” suggests.

4 Pliny claimed that the ibis could administer an enema to itself by filling its neck with water and using its long beak as a nozzle.

5 A dog returning to its own vomit was cited as a symbol of a backsliding Christian who abandons a vice and then returns to it.

7 This was an early form of the guitar.

1 The reference is to the weathervane at the top of the tower called La Giralda.

2 Ancient Iberian stone sculptures of bulls discovered outside Guisando, in the province of Ávila.

3 There is a deep chasm close to Cabra, in the province of Córdoba.

4 These are paraphrased lines from Alonso de Ercilla’s epic poem
La Araucana.

5 In religious brotherhoods, fines were paid in specific quantities of long wax candles.

1 The phrase means “in order to earn one’s bread.”

2 The phrase, “God is in us,” is by Ovid.

3 The reference is to the
Satires
of Horace.

5 The allusion is to the laurel.

1 As indicated in note 7, chapter XLIX of part I, Don Manuel de León (
León
is a province of Spain as well as the word that means “lion”) retrieved a glove from a lion’s cage at the request of a lady and then slapped her for needlessly endangering the life of a knight.

2 Certain fine swords had the image of a dog engraved on the blade.

1 These are verses from one of Garcilaso’s sonnets.

2 A creature who, like an amphibian, spent as much time in the water as on land. As early as the twelfth century, he was alluded to in troubadour poetry and identified with St. Nicolas of Bari.

3 Probably Pedro Liñán de Riaza (1558?–1607), a poet praised by Cervantes.

4 The meter of Spanish poetry is essentially determined by the number of syllables in a line; the short line (
arte menor
) has eight syllables or less; the long line (
arte mayor
) has nine or more syllables. Here the long line is the hendecasyllable—the eleven-syllable line, perfected by Petrarch, which influenced all of European poetry in the Renaissance and is generally associated with the sonnet. Garcilaso de la Vega naturalized this meter in Spanish early in the sixteenth century.

1 University students and clerics wore the same kind of clothing.

2 People from Sayago (in the modern province of Zamora) spoke with a rustic accent that was often used in the theater for comic effect; natives of Toledo were thought to speak an extremely correct and pure Spanish.

4 The dispute between the bachelor and the licentiate is based on the latter’s adherence to the elaborately theoretical handbooks on the art and science of fencing that were extremely popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

1 A figure who appears in traditional ballads.

2 As indicated earlier, an
arroba
is a dry weight of twenty-five pounds and a variable liquid measure of 2.6 to 3.6 gallons.

3 Money bags were made of cat skin; Roman cats had a black-and-gray-striped fur.

4 A phrase used to indicate which contender the speaker favored in a cockfight or in any other kind of contest.

1 When they married, peasant women usually wore a medallion with religious images on it.

2 Sancho exaggerates to indicate the luxuriousness of the cloth: the warp of velvet normally was two-and-a-half pile.

3 Martín de Riquer explains the reference as follows: Sancho’s wordplay alludes to at least three different meanings for the phrase. The first refers to shifting sand banks, making the phrase equivalent to “passing safely between Scylla and Charybdis.” The second alludes to the great Flemish banking houses. The third suggests the banks, or benches, made of a wood called Flanders pine, which the poor used as beds in central and southern Spain. Sancho, then, is saying that Quiteria is beautiful enough to pass through any danger, that she is going to marry a very wealthy man, and that she will soon come to her nuptial bed.

1 A proverb that extols the joys of liberty.

3 The cave is near one of the Lakes of Ruidera, the source of the Guadiana River.

4 The weathervane on the tower of the Church of the Magdalena in Salamanca was in the shape of an angel.

5 A pipe that carried Córdoba’s sewage into the Guadalquivir River.

6 The first two were in the Prado de San Jerónimo and the third in the Plaza de Oriente, in Madrid.

7 The book of the Italian humanist Polidoro Vergilio (1470–1550),
De inventoribus rerum,
which deals with the origin of inventions, was widely read; it was translated into Spanish in 1550.

8 A Spanish term for syphilis.

9 Don Quixote paraphrases the words of a ballad.

10 The phrase means that matters are being handled by someone competent.

11 A Dominican monastery between Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca.

1 A unit of measurement, roughly seven feet, used to determine height or depth.

2 This was worn by the holders of doctoral degrees.

3 Round caps that were stiffened by metal bands.

4 Montesinos, an important character in the Spanish ballads that recount the legend of Charlemagne, does not appear in French literature; Don Quixote’s adventure is based on the tradition that has Montesinos marrying Rosaflorida, mistress of the castle of Rocafrida that was identified in the popular imagination with certain ruins near the Cave of Montesinos.

5 Durandarte, a name originally given to the sword of Roland, became a hero of the Spanish (though not the French) Carolingian ballad tradition. He was the cousin and close friend of Montesinos, whom he asked, before he was killed at Roncesvalles, to carry his heart to his lady.

6 The poem is composed of lines from several ballads that deal with the subject.

7 The name of one of the lakes is
del Rey
(“of the King”). All the lakes were the property of the crown except for two, which probably belonged to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.

8 A line from the ballad about Lancelot that was cited in chapter XIII of the first part.

9 This is the Spanish version of the name Fugger, the well-known German family of bankers and merchants who were closely associated with Spain.

11 An allusion to the many travels of Pedro of Portugal. There is a traditional tendency to say that he traveled to the seven parts (
partidas
) of the world, rather than the more usual “four corners,” perhaps through confusion with the
Siete Partidas,
the treatise on laws compiled by Alfonso the Learned (1221–1284), king of Castilla and León.

12 A
vara
is a Spanish linear measurement (.84 meter).

1 The count of Lemos, to whom the second part of the novel is dedicated.

2 A variable Spanish poetic stanza of four to seven lines, its verses alternating between five and seven syllables.

3 The word means “miserliness” or “stinginess.”

1 This phrase (literally “what fish are we catching?” or “what are we up to, what are we doing?”) and others like it, as well as the Italian words spoken by the innkeeper, were introduced into Spain by soldiers returning from Italy.

2 A character in the novel
Amadís of Gaul.

3 The phrase is based on John 10:38: “…though ye believe not me, believe the works.”

1 The line is taken from the Spanish translation of the
Aeneid
by Gregorio Hernández de Velasco, 1555.

3 These verses are from a poem on the subject by Miguel Sánchez.

4 The line is from one of the ballads about Gaiferos.

5 The lines are taken from a ballad by Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), one of the most brilliant literary figures of the Spanish Golden Age.

6 A character in the
lliad
who was extremely old.

7 These lines are from one of the many ballads that deal with Don Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king of Spain, who lost the country to the Moors.

8
Mono
is “monkey,” and
mona
is “female monkey.” Colloquially, it can also mean “drinking binge” or “hangover.” The Spanish reads,
“…no para tomar el mono, sino la mona.”

1. A breed of small donkeys native to Sardinia.

2 The story is based on the cycle of ballads that deals with the struggle for power among the children of Fernando I, and the siege of Zamora, in the eleventh century.

3 The lines in the ballad read: “I challenge you, Zamorans / as false and lying traitors; / I challenge young and old, / I challenge the quick and the dead; / I challenge the plants in the field, / I challenge the river fishes, / I challenge your bread and meat, / and also your water and wine.”

5 Nicknames given to the residents of Vallodolid, Toledo, Madrid, and Sevilla, respectively.

1 As he has done before, an enraged Don Quixote addresses Sancho in more formal terms and does so throughout this paragraph.

2 Latin for “by the sign of the cross.”

3 In his anger with Sancho, Don Quixote returns to the more distant form of address, which he uses for the next few paragraphs, until he begins to laugh.

4 Latin for “the great sea” or “ocean.”

5 “There is no honey without gall” (
No hay miel sin hiel
), or “Nothing is perfect.”

1 This was a common belief in Cervantes’s time.

2 This phrase is based on the wordplay growing out of
bestia,
which can literally mean “animal” or “beast” as well as “dolt” or “dunce.”

1 Hunting with falcons or other birds of prey was a pastime of the upper classes exclusively.

3 This sentence seems to be a misprint in the first edition; Martín de Riquer indicates in a footnote that two other editors, Cortejón and Schevill, suggest, in his opinion correctly, that it read as follows:
“…there’s no more Sorrowful Face or Figure [there is an untranslatable wordplay involving
figura
(“face”) and
figuro
(a nonexistent masculine form)].”
“Let it be of the Lions,” the duke continued. “I say that…”