Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (158 page)

3 This indicates that what has just been said is either impossible or untrue.

4 An allusion to the story of a man who sucked on an egg, and when the chick peeped in his throat, he said: “You peeped too late.”

5 Shoes worn by the nobility were often decorated with holes and cutouts.

1 The equivalent phrases in Spanish,
mentir por mitad de la barba
and
mentir por toda la barba
(“to lie through half of one’s beard” and “to lie through one’s whole beard”), mean essentially the same thing; unfortunately, the contrast between “half” and “whole” makes little sense in English.

2 Martín de Riquer indicates that hoodlums and thieves frequently dressed as pilgrims.

3 “Money” in German.

5 Between 1609 and 1613, public proclamations ordered the immediate expulsion from Spain of the Moriscos, who were accused of continuing to practice Islam in secret and of having a pernicious influence on Spanish society.

6 In contemporary Spanish, the word is spelled
caviar.

7 This phrase is taken from a ballad that begins: “Nero, on Tarpeian Rock, / watched as Rome went up in flames; / crying ancients, screaming infants, / and not one thing caused him sorrow.”

8 The word in Spanish is
sagitario,
which in underworld slang also meant a person who was whipped through the streets by the authorities. Martín de Riquer speculates that since this meaning seems out of place here, Sancho may simply be repeating a word he has heard Don Quixote use or is referring indirectly to the rigor of his governance by alluding to the archers of the Holy Brotherhood who executed criminals at Peralvillo.

1 A legendary Moorish princess whose father, Gadalfe, built gorgeous palaces for her in Toledo, on the banks of the Tajo. She later converted and became the first wife of Charlemagne. The story gave rise to an idiom: if people are not happy with their accommodations, they are often asked if they would prefer the palaces of Galiana. It was also the subject of
Maynet,
a French epic chanson about the youthful adventures of Charlemagne.

2 A reference to a ballad that begins, “Doña Urraca, that princess,” in which one of the lines reads: “Take up thick ropes and stout cords.”

3 Martín de Riquer believes this may be a game called “four corners;” each of four positions is occupied by one player, a fifth is in the middle, the four change places, and “it” tries to take over a corner, forcing the original occupant into the center.

1 An allusion to Law 19 of the Council of Trent prohibiting challenges and tourneys.

2 A breed of horses that are very strong, with broad hooves.

3 As indicated earlier, this meant to divide the field in such a way that the sun would not be in one combatant’s eyes more than in the other’s.

2 Three card games in which kings, aces, and sevens, respectively, are the most valuable cards.

1 Martín de Riquer points out that there is no ironic or comic intent involved in using the honorific
don
with St. George, the patron saint of the crown of Aragón: in medieval Catalonian texts, he was referred to as
Monsenyer Sant Jordi.

1 Matthew 11:12.

3 A mythical animal with the body and hind legs of a lion and the head, wings, and forelegs of an eagle.

4 It was traditional to attribute superstitious beliefs to people named Mendoza.

5 The phrase in Spanish is
¡Santiago, y cierra España!
The verb
cerrar
usually means “to close,” but Martín de Riquer points out that it could also mean “attack,” so that the battle cry, with the addition of a comma, should be “St. James, and attack, Spain!” He also remarks on the fact that Don Quixote does not answer Sancho’s very reasonable question.

6. Hagar, Abraham’s concubine and the mother of Ishmael, is considered the mother of all Arab peoples and, by extension, of Muslims.

7 Vulcan, married to Venus, threw a net over her and Mars while they were making love.

8 Originally a rural district in the Peloponnesus, Arcadia subsequently became the preferred setting in Renaissance pastoral literature.

9 Luiz Vaz de Camoes, the great Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century (1524?–1580).

1 In the
Don Quixote
by Avellaneda, which is the book the two travelers are discussing, Don Quixote renounces his love for Dulcinea and is then called the Disenamored Knight.

2 According to Martín de Riquer, these are the insults directed at Cervantes that are mentioned in the prologue to the authentic part II.

3 Many critics have attempted to prove that Avellaneda was Aragonese on the basis of this statement, but Martín de Riquer states that it cannot be proved. He points out that the omission of articles has never been a characteristic of the Aragonese dialect or of writers from Aragón; further, in Avellaneda’s book there are only four cases of missing articles, something that could just as easily be found in texts by Cervantes. If Cervantes uses “articles” to mean “particles” (as some contemporary grammarians did), there are more instances of this kind of omission in the “False
Quixote,
” but it is still not a characteristic of Aragonese writing.

4 As Martín de Riquer points out, the error is less Avellaneda’s than Cervantes’s; in part I, Sancho’s wife had four different names, one of which was Mari Gutiérrez.

5 According to Martín de Riquer, Avellaneda’s Sancho, unlike the original, is stupid, slovenly, and coarse.

6 The idiom (
hecho equis
) means “staggering drunk” and is based on the image of the shape an inebriated person’s legs assume when he stumbles and struggles to keep his balance.

7 A chivalric activity in which men on horseback would gallop past a ring hanging from a cord and attempt to catch it on the tip of their lance.

8 The verses and epigrams, normally alluding to their ladies, on the shields carried by knights in jousts.

9 Martín de Riquer indicates that this objection is not justified, since Avellaneda’s descriptions of the liveries worn at the Zaragozan jousts are adequate.

2 These are lines from one of the ballads about the Infantes of Lara.

3 In Cervantes’s time, banditry was an especially severe problem in Cataluña.

4 A short, high-necked jacket of mail that was usually sleeveless.

5 A kind of short harquebus favored by the bandits of Cataluña; they were usually worn on a leather bandolier called a
charpa.

6 Martín de Riquer points out that this is a mistake: the reference should be to Busiris, an Egyptian king who killed foreigners as sacrifices to the gods.

7 Perot Roca Guinarda was a historical figure whom Cervantes had already praised in his dramatic interlude
La cueva de Salamanca (The Cave of Salamanca
). Born in 1582, he fought constantly in factional wars, and although his adversaries favored the nobility, he received support from members of the aristocracy and the Church hierarchy, including Don Antonio Moreno, who plays a part in Don Quixote’s adventures in Barcelona. Roca Guinarda was known for his chivalric nature, and like other Catalan bandits, or
bandoleros,
he eventually abandoned his former life of crime and fought for the Spanish crown in Italy and Flanders. In 1611, he was granted a pardon and left for Naples as a captain in the Spanish army. The date of his death is unknown. As Martín de Riquer indicates, the topic of the Catalan bandit became a romantic theme in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as exemplified by these passages in
Don Quixote.

8. The factions, or
bandos,
gave rise to the word
bandolero (cf.
“band” and “bandit” in English).

9 Martín de Riquer states that many of the Catalan
bandoleros
were in fact from Gascony and may have been Huguenot fugitives from France.

10 According to Martín de Riquer, Roque kept what could not be divided and gave his men their share of its equivalent value in money.

12 Martín de Riquer points out that, given the similarities between the languages of Gascony and Cataluña, the
bandoleros
probably spoke a mixture of the two;
frade,
however, is Portuguese (the word for “friar” is
frare
in Catalan,
frayre
in Gascon). Riquer assumes that either Cervantes mistakenly attributed a Portuguese word to the bandits or the typesetter made an error.

13 It is Martín de Riquer’s opinion that the reference is to the commemoration of John the Baptist’s beheading (August 29), not to the celebration of his birth (June 24).

14 The Niarros (Nyerros in Catalan) and the Cadells were the factions in whose wars the historic Roque had been involved.

1 More accurately, the viceroy of Cataluña.

2 A prickly evergreen shrub native to European wastelands.

1
Manjar blanco:
a dish made of chicken breasts, rice flour, milk, and sugar.

2 In Avellaneda’s book, Sancho is said to be extremely fond of rissoles.

3 Martín de Riquer is certain the reference is to Michael Scot (d. ca. 1232), who studied at Oxford, Bologna, Paris, and eventually Toledo, where he learned Arabic, the language from which he translated (or supervised the translation of) many of Aristotle’s writings into Latin.
Escotillo
is the diminutive of
Escoto,
his name in Spanish. For a variety of reasons, including his interests in astrology, alchemy, and the occult sciences, he was widely known as a magician and soothsayer.

4 “Flee, enemies,” a formula used in exorcisms.

5 According to Martín de Riquer, Cervantes is describing the printing house of Sebastián de Cormellas, on Calle del Call, which brought out a good number of the classic works of the Spanish Golden Age.

7 Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa’s translation of
II pastor Fido,
by Battista Guarini, was published in Naples in 1602; Juan de Jáuregui’s translation of Torquato Tasso’s
L’Aminta
was published in Rome in 1607.

8
Luz del alma…
(Valladolid, 1554), by the Dominican friar Felipe de Meneses, was heavily influenced by Erasmus. For a time it was widely read and had several printings, though none in Barcelona, as far as anyone knows.

9 Avellaneda called himself “a native of the town of Tordesillas.” Apparently there was no Barcelona edition of the “false
Quixote
” in the seventeenth century; the second printing appeared in Madrid in 1732.

10 The phrase in Spanish is
…su San Martín se le llegará, como a cada puerco.
“Having your St. Martin’s Day come” is roughly equivalent to “paying the piper” in English, since St. Martin’s Day also refers to the time when animals were slaughtered.

11 An officer in command of four galleys.

1 This meant that they were prepared to row.

2 One of the oarsmen who sat with his back to the stern.

3 The castle of Montjuich, which overlooks Barcelona.

4
Félix (feliz
in contemporary Spanish) means “happy” or “fortunate.”

1 He was in charge of the expulsion of the Moriscos from Castilla.

2 Felipe III (1578–1621) became king in 1598 and ruled until his death.

1 These lines by Ariosto are also cited in chapter XIII of the first part.

2 This story is taken from the
Floresta general (General Anthology
) by Melchor de Santa Cruz, a sixteenth-century student and collector of proverbs.

3 The untranslatable wordplay is based on the verb
deber,
which is the equivalent of “must” as well as of “owe.”

1 It was believed that goblins turned buried treasure into coal, which is the origin of the phrase
tesoro de duende
(“goblin’s treasure”) to describe wealth that is squandered.

2 Martín de Riquer points out that despite this essentially satiric depiction of the pastoral novel, Cervantes was very pleased with his pastoral
Galatea
and was working on its second part at approximately the same time that he wrote this passage.

3 This name is based on a pastoral version of Micolás for Nicolás.

4 At one time it was thought that Nemoroso, in Garcilaso’s first eclogue, was the poet’s friend and fellow poet Boscán (a name related to
bosque,
or “forest”):
Nemus
has the same meaning in Latin.

6
Ona
is an augmentative ending, so that
Teresona
is roughly equivalent to “Big Teresa.”

7 The words mean “curry comb,” “to eat lunch,” “carpet,” “bailiff,” “lavender,” “storehouse,” “money box.” Despite the general correctness of this oddly placed lesson in etymology, Martín de Riquer points out that Cervantes is not entirely accurate in the examples he chooses, although he agrees generally with the linguists of his day.

8 The words mean “Moorish half-boot,” “hovel,” “ancient Spanish coin.”

9. The words mean “gillyflower,” “teacher of the Koran.”

1 In Spanish,
primer sueño,
or “first sleep,” is the equivalent of “beauty sleep”—that is, sleep before midnight, generally considered the most restful.