Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] (5 page)

This curious blend of the sublime and the bathetic does not come again until Kafka, another pupil of Cervantes, would compose stories like “The Hunter Gracchus” and “A Country Doctor.” To Kafka, Don Quixote was Sancho Panza’s daemon or genius, projected by the shrewd Sancho into a book of adventure unto death:

In Kafka’s marvelous interpretation, the authentic object of the Knight’s quest is Sancho Panza himself, who as an auditor refuses to believe Don Quixote’s account of the cave. So I circle back to my question: Does the Knight believe his own story? It makes little sense to answer either “yes” or “no,” so the question must be wrong. We cannot know what Don Quixote and Hamlet believe, since they do not share in our limitations. Don Quixote knows who he is, even as the Hamlet of act V comes to know what can be known.

Cervantes stations his Knight quite close to us, while Hamlet always is remote and requires mediation. Ortega y Gasset remarks of Don Quixote: “Such a life is a perpetual suffering,” which holds also for Hamlet’s existence. Though Hamlet tends to accuse himself of cowardice, he is as courageous, metaphysically and in action, as Don Quixote: they compete as literary instances of moral valor. Hamlet does not believe the will and its object can be brought together: “Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.” That is the Player-King enacting
The Mousetrap,
Hamlet’s revision of the (nonexistent)
Murder of Gonzago
. Don Quixote refuses such despair yet nevertheless suffers it.

Thomas Mann loved
Don Quixote
for its ironies, but then Mann could have said, at any time: “Irony of ironies, all is irony.” We behold in Cervantes’s vast scripture what we already are. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who could not abide Jonathan Swift’s ironies, easily accepted those of Cer
vantes; Swift’s satire corrodes, while Cervantes’s allows us some hope. Johnson felt that we required some illusions, lest we go mad. Is that part of Cervantes’s design?

Mark Van Doren, in a very useful study,
Don Quixote’s Profession,
is haunted by the analogues between the Knight and Hamlet, which to me seem inevitable. Here are the two characters, beyond all others, who seem always to know what they are doing, though they baffle us whenever we try to share their knowledge. It is a knowledge unlike that of Sir John Falstaff and Sancho Panza, who are so delighted at being themselves that they bid knowledge to go aside and pass them by. I would rather be Falstaff or Sancho than a version of Hamlet or Don Quixote, because growing old and ill teaches me that being matters more than knowing. The Knight and Hamlet are reckless beyond belief; Falstaff and Sancho have some awareness of discretion in matters of valor.

We cannot know the object of Don Quixote’s quest unless we ourselves are Quixotic (note the capital Q). Did Cervantes, looking back upon his own arduous life, think of it as somehow Quixotic? The Sorrowful Face stares out at us in his portrait, a countenance wholly unlike Shakespeare’s subtle blandness. They match each other in genius, because more even than Chaucer before them, and the host of novelists who have blended their influences since, they gave us personalities more alive than ourselves. Cervantes, I suspect, would not have wanted us to compare him to Shakespeare or to anyone else. Don Quixote says that all comparisons are odious. Perhaps they are, but this may be the exception. We need, with Cervantes and Shakespeare, all the help we can get in regard to ultimates, yet we need no help at all to enjoy them. Each is as difficult and yet available as is the other. To confront them fully, where are we to turn except to their mutual power of illumination?

I
DLE READER:
Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else, which is just what one would expect of a person begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and every mournful sound makes its home?
¹
Tranquility, a peaceful place, the pleasant countryside, serene skies, murmuring fountains, a calm spirit, are a great motivation for the most barren muses to prove themselves fertile and produce offspring that fill the world with wonder and joy. A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty. But though I seem to be the father, I am the stepfather of Don Quixote, and I do not wish to go along with the common custom and implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to forgive or ignore the faults you may find in this my child, for you are neither his kin nor his friend, and you have a soul in your body and a will as free as anyone’s, and you are in your own house, where you are lord, as the sovereign is master of his revenues, and you know the old saying: under
cover of my cloak I can kill the king. Which exempts and excuses you from all respect and obligation, and you can say anything you desire about this history without fear that you will be reviled for the bad things or rewarded for the good that you might say about it.

I wanted only to offer it to you plain and bare, unadorned by a prologue or the endless catalogue of sonnets, epigrams, and laudatory poems that are usually placed at the beginning of books. For I can tell you that although it cost me some effort to compose, none seemed greater than creating the preface you are now reading. I picked up my pen many times to write it, and many times I put it down again because I did not know what to write; and once, when I was baffled, with the paper in front of me, my pen behind my ear, my elbow propped on the writing table, and my cheek resting in my hand, pondering what I would say, a friend of mine, a man who is witty and wise, unexpectedly came in and seeing me so perplexed asked the reason, and I hid nothing from him and said I was thinking about the prologue I had to write for the history of Don Quixote, and the problem was that I did not want to write it yet did not want to bring to light the deeds of so noble a knight without one.

“For how could I not be confused at what that old legislator, the public, will say when it sees that after all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity, I emerge now, carrying all my years on my back,
²
with a tale as dry as esparto grass, devoid of invention, deficient in style, poor in ideas, and lacking all erudition and doctrine, without notes in the margins or annotations at the end of the book, when I see that other books, even if they are profane fictions, are so full of citations from Aristotle, Plato, and the entire horde of philosophers that readers are moved to admiration and consider the authors to be well-read, erudite, and eloquent men? Even more so when they cite Holy Scripture! People are bound to say they are new St. Thomases and other doctors of the Church; and for this they maintain so ingenious a decorum that in one line they depict a heartbroken lover and in the next they write a little Christian sermon that is a joy and a pleasure to hear or read. My book will lack all of this, for I have nothing to note in the margin or to annotate at the end, and I certainly don’t know which authors I have followed so that I can mention them at the beginning, as everyone else does, in alphabetical order, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, and with Zoilus and Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. My book will also lack sonnets at the beginning, especially sonnets whose authors are
dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or celebrated poets, though if I asked two or three officials who are friends of mine, I know they would give me a few that would be more than the equal of ones by writers who are more famous in our Spain. In short, my friend,” I continued, “I have decided that Don Quixote should remain buried in the archives of La Mancha until heaven provides someone who can adorn him with all the things he lacks; for I find myself incapable of correcting the situation because of my incompetence and my lack of learning, and because I am by nature too lazy and slothful to go looking for authors to say what I know how to say without them. This is the origin of the perplexity and abstraction in which you found me: the reasons you have heard from me are enough reason for my being in this state.”

On hearing this, my friend clapped his hand to his forehead, burst into laughter, and said:

“By God, brother, now I am disabused of an illusion I have lived with for all the time I have known you, for I always considered you perceptive and prudent in everything you do. But now I see that you are as far from having those qualities as heaven is from earth. How is it possible that things so trivial and so easy to remedy can have the power to perplex and absorb an intelligence as mature as yours, and one so ready to demolish and pass over much greater difficulties? By my faith, this does not have its origins in lack of skill but in an excess of laziness and a paucity of reasoning. Do you want to see if what I say is true? Then listen carefully and you will see how in the blink of an eye I confound all your difficulties and remedy all the problems that you say bewilder you and make you fearful to bring to light the history of your famous Don Quixote, the paragon and model of all knights errant.”

“Tell me,” I replied, listening to what he was saying. “How do you intend to fill the void of my fear and bring clarity to the chaos of my confusion?”

To which he said:

“First, to solve the question of the sonnets, epigrams, or laudatory poems by distinguished and titled people, which you need at the beginning, you must make a certain effort and write them yourself, and then you can baptize them with any name you want, attributing them to Prester John of the Indies
³
or to the emperor of Trebizond,
⁴
both of whom, I have
heard, were famous poets; and if they were not, and certain pedants and university graduates backbite and gossip about the truth of the attributions, you should not give two
maravedís
⁵
for what they say, because even if they prove the lie, they won’t cut off the hand you used to write with. As for citing in the margins the books and authors that were the source of the sayings and maxims you put into your history, all you have to do is insert some appropriate maxims or phrases in Latin, ones that you know by heart or, at least, that won’t cost you too much trouble to look up, so that if you speak of freedom and captivity, you can say:

And then, in the margin, you cite Horace or whoever it was who said it. If the subject is the power of death, you can use:

If it’s the friendship and love that God commands us to have for our enemies, you turn right to Holy Scripture, which you can do with a minimum of effort, and say the words of God Himself:
Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros.
⁸
If you mention evil thoughts, go to the Gospel:
De corde exeunt cogitationes malae.
⁹
If the topic is the fickleness of friends, Cato’s there, ready with his couplet:

And with these little Latin phrases and others like them, people will think you are a grammarian; being one is no small honor and advantage these days. As for putting annotations at the end of the book, certainly
you can do it this way: if you name some giant in your book, make him the giant Goliath, and just by doing that, which is almost no trouble at all, you have a nice long annotation, because then you can write:
The giant Goliath, or Goliat, was a Philistine whom the shepherd David slew with a stone in the valley of Terebint, as recounted in the Book of Kings,
and you can easily find the chapter. After this, to show that you are a scholar in humane letters and a cosmographer, be sure to mention the Tajo River in your history, and you’ll have another worthy annotation if you write:
The Tajo River received its name from a king of all the Spains; it is born in that place and dies in the Ocean Sea, kissing the walls of the famous city of Lisbon, and it is thought that its sands are of gold, etc.
If you mention thieves, I will tell you the history of Cacus, which I know by heart; if the subject is prostitutes, there’s the Bishop of Mondoñedo, who will provide you with Lamia, Laida, and Flora, and citing him will be a credit to you;
¹¹
if you refer to cruelty, Ovid will give you Medea; enchanters and sorcerers, and you have Homer’s Calypso; valiant captains, and none other than Julius Caesar will give you himself in his
Commentaries,
and Plutarch will provide you with a thousand Alexanders. If you write about love, with the couple of ounces of Tuscan that you know you’ll run right into León Hebreo,
¹²
who will inflate your meters. And if you don’t care to travel to foreign lands, right at home you have Fonseca’s
Del amor de Dios,
¹³
which summarizes everything that you or the most ingenious writer might wish to know about the subject. In short, all you have to do is to name the names or touch on the histories that I have mentioned, and leave it to me to put in annotations and notes; I swear to you that I’ll fill up the margins and use four quartos of paper at the end. Let’s turn now to the citation of authors, found in other books and missing in yours. The solution to this is very simple, because all you have to do is find a book that cites them all from A to Z, as you put it. Then you’ll put that same alphabet in your book, and though the lie is obvious it doesn’t matter, since you’ll have little need to use them; perhaps someone will be naive enough to believe you have consulted all of them in your plain and simple history; if it serves no other purpose, at least a lengthy catalogue of authors will give the book an unexpected authority. Furthermore, no
one will try to determine if you followed them or did not follow them, having nothing to gain from that. Besides, if I understand it correctly, this book of yours has no need for any of the things you say it lacks, because all of it is an invective against books of chivalry, which Aristotle never thought of, and St. Basil never mentioned, and Cicero never saw, and whose unbelievable absurdities do not enter into the calculations of factual truth, or the observations of astrology;
¹⁴
geometrical measurements are of no importance to them, and neither is the refutation of arguments used in rhetoric; there is no reason for your book to preach to anyone, weaving the human with the divine, which is a kind of cloth no Christian intelligence should wear. It only has to make use of mimesis in the writing, and the more precise that is, the better the writing will be. And since this work of yours intends only to undermine the authority and wide acceptance that books of chivalry have in the world and among the public, there is no reason for you to go begging for maxims from philosophers, counsel from Holy Scripture, fictions from poets, orations from rhetoricians, or miracles from saints; instead you should strive, in plain speech, with words that are straightforward, honest, and well-placed, to make your sentences and phrases sonorous and entertaining, and have them portray, as much as you can and as far as it is possible, your intention, making your ideas clear without complicating and obscuring them. Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it. In short, keep your eye on the goal of demolishing the ill-founded apparatus of these chivalric books, despised by many and praised by so many more, and if you accomplish this, you will have accomplished no small thing.”

In deep silence I listened to what my friend told me, and his words made so great an impression on me that I did not dispute them but acknowledged their merit and wanted to use them to write this prologue in which you will see, gentle reader, the cleverness of my friend, my good fortune in finding the adviser I needed in time, and your own relief at finding so sincere and uncomplicated a history as that of the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, who is thought by all the residents of the district of Montiel
¹⁵
to have been the most chaste lover and most valiant knight
seen in those environs for many years. I do not want to charge you too much for the service I have performed in introducing you to so noble and honorable a knight; but I do want you to thank me for allowing you to make the acquaintance of the famous Sancho Panza, his squire, in whom, in my opinion, I have summarized for you all the squirely wit and charm scattered throughout the great mass of inane books of chivalry. And having said this, may God grant you health and not forget me.
Vale.
¹⁶