book data
6045 ratings, 4.05 average rating, 754 reviews
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book data
all editions
6045 ratings, 4.05 average rating, 754 reviews
this edition
37 ratings,
4.41 average rating, 7 reviews
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38%
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31%
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21%
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published
September 6th 2005
(first published 1605)
by Vintage
binding
Paperback, 960 pages
characters
isbn
0099469693
(isbn13: 9780099469698)
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Nyambung postingnya Nanto soal buku bekas, nah ini strike gold gw, terjemahan Don Quixote oleh Abdul Moeis (1933), cetakan ketiga (1955). [Mia dan Roos sudah liat buku ini di rumah:]
Ini terjemahan luar biasa, kocak bukan main seperti versi aslinya. Karena sendirinya seorang sastrawan, Abdul Moeis bisa menangkap greget buku ini dengan baik, meski ini bukan versi utuh Don Quixote, Bagian II nya dipotong agak banyak dan meskipun sepertinya ini diterjemahkan dari versi Belan...more
Nyambung postingnya Nanto soal buku bekas, nah ini strike gold gw, terjemahan Don Quixote oleh Abdul Moeis (1933), cetakan ketiga (1955). [Mia dan Roos sudah liat buku ini di rumah:]
Ini terjemahan luar biasa, kocak bukan main seperti versi aslinya. Karena sendirinya seorang sastrawan, Abdul Moeis bisa menangkap greget buku ini dengan baik, meski ini bukan versi utuh Don Quixote, Bagian II nya dipotong agak banyak dan meskipun sepertinya ini diterjemahkan dari versi Belanda. Gaya bahasanya yg jadul juga bikin kita mikir dulu saat baca.
Ada bbrp fakta menarik:
1) Tahukah Abdul Moeis bhw Quixote semestinya dibaca 'ki-ho-te' dan bukan 'ki-sot'?
2) Mengapa pula Abdul Moeis pake 'u' di nama depannya dan 'oe' di nama belakangnya?
3) Kenapa Perpustakaan Keguruan Kementrian PP dan K bisa nerbitin ini, padahal pencetaknya Balai Pustaka (kenapa bukan BP aja yg nerbitin?)
4) Di akhir buku ini ada iklan sehalaman ttg karya2 dunia lainnya yg ternyata sudah diterjemahkan ke Indonesia:
- Alexander Dumas, Tiga Panglima Perang (pastinya Three Musketeers) Rp20,- dan 20 Tahun Kemudian Rp 25,-
- Tagore, Didalam dan diluar lingkungan rumah tangga Rp16,- (kalo ga salah ini terjemahannya Muhammad Yamin)
- Shakespeare, Impian ditengah musim Rp 7,-
Pada era fajar nasionalisme Indonesia itu, kita begitu cepat dan giat menerjemahkan karya2 besar dunia demi kepentingan nasional kita, dg bahasa yg digarap ciamik dg maksud pendidikan dan bukan semata komersial. Ketika Tagore dapet Nobel, 2 bulan kemudian terjemahannya terbit dalam koran berbahasa Jawa (!) Kalo dipikir2, makin maju atau mundurkah kita sekarang?...less
bookshelves:
fiction-finished,
literature
Read in April, 2004
recommends it for:
The Literati And Pseudoliterati
I'll be the first to admit it: I'm a fan of popular fiction. I desire enjoyment from certain factors of pacing and style that the literary elite consider "common" and I, in turn, generally find "literature" to be incredibly pretentious. This has led me to hold what some might consider "uncultured" opinions about various great works.
Which brings us to Don Quixote, which many in the literary elite consider to be the greatest novel ever written.
Did I love Don...more
I'll be the first to admit it: I'm a fan of popular fiction. I desire enjoyment from certain factors of pacing and style that the literary elite consider "common" and I, in turn, generally find "literature" to be incredibly pretentious. This has led me to hold what some might consider "uncultured" opinions about various great works.
Which brings us to Don Quixote, which many in the literary elite consider to be the greatest novel ever written.
Did I love Don Quixote? I wouldn't go that far. Does it deserve to be called the greatest novel ever written? I'm willing to put it on the short list.
Here's the thing: Cervantes published Don Quixote in the early 17th century, while Shakespeare was still working through his "tragic" phase (Hamlet & whatnot). By rights, it should be like so much other "classic literature:" dense, slow, utterly irrelevant to modern life, and soporific. Instead, it's dense, slow, engaging, and surprisingly relevant. Cervantes manages, almost continuously, to be clever in ways that transcend the 400-year gap and resonate with us now. There's no question that adapting to the writing style of that era is a challenge, and Don Quixote will be slow going to readers accustomed to modern pop fiction. But most intelligent readers will consider this a price worth paying.
Why Don Quixote still works stems largely from its having taken the formulas of "heroic knighthood" (which we are still vaguely familiar with as legend today) and showing it to be cartoonish and absurd. Despite the cultural gap, modern readers will still get the gist of the parody, even if they haven't read the chivalric literature that it is an explicit parody of.
The other reason the story works is because, strangely, we find ourselves continuously at odds with the author over the character of Don Quixote himself. We are told, at every turn, that Quixote is a fool, a madman, and a sinner. Cervantes breaks from the traditional role of a passive narrator to make constant judgment on Quixote's failures and flaws. And because we see Quixote so maligned by both his own author and everyone in the book, we as the reader fall in love with him. By writing a book about a dreamer with unassailable ideals but using the narrative voice of a vitriolic cynic, Cervantes forces us to stand up for the nobility and purity that Quixote achieves. Cervantes has, in effect, martyred his own protagonist in such a dramatic way that it falls to the reader to elevate Quixote to the status of saint.
And any book that can pull that off is worth the difficult prose....less
bookshelves:
novel
Read in March, 2006
Whew. I did it. I'm ready to run the New York Marathon, climb Mount Everest, swim the Mekong River, and hunt the nefarious arctic narwhale, now that I've read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I am truly a better person for it.
Until now, I've only read Don Quixote in small doses, reading his battle with the windmills or his mistaking a barber's washbin for the Helmet of Mambrino out of context, either for class or in anthologies. After reading the first book in sequence, I'm ashamed of mysel...more
Whew. I did it. I'm ready to run the New York Marathon, climb Mount Everest, swim the Mekong River, and hunt the nefarious arctic narwhale, now that I've read Don Quixote in its entirety. And I am truly a better person for it.
Until now, I've only read Don Quixote in small doses, reading his battle with the windmills or his mistaking a barber's washbin for the Helmet of Mambrino out of context, either for class or in anthologies. After reading the first book in sequence, I'm ashamed of myself. Grossman's translation certainly adds some accessibility for the the American sensibility, but what struck me most was Cervantes' ironic self-awareness and societal critique, and his playfulness with the novel form that wasn't even technically a form yet. Quixote, whose heroes exist only in his mind at the novel's beginning, eventually meets and argues hilariously with some of them as well as plenty of third parties that stand in disbelief at his lunacy.
It would be impossible to write a comprehensive book review of this book without writing a book myself, so I think I'll just comment randomly:
I laughed and thought hardest when Cervantes brought in the ladies, both real and imagined, to continually check Quixote's romanticization of the female persuasion. His lady Dulcinea of Toboso seems to be a man-like wheat-shocker, but you'd never know it from his visions of her angelic graces. But Quixote seems to be just a worst-case scenario of all the male impulses the other characters display; pretty much all the men objectify women to superhuman levels, and many of the women are either affronted or jilted by the men's fickle imaginations.
I've heard the second book is quite a bit darker and even more self-referential as Quixote waited 10 years between books, and I have agree. Especially in the second book, I wasn’t sure what to think of the "royalty" DQ and Poncho ran into along their merry way. Either the irony was too subtle for my radar, or Cervantes seemed to be in on the arrogant, mean-spirited, sadistic jokes the landed gentry played on the deluded duo. Some of the jokes (the flying horse, for example) were laugh-out-loud funny, but some were just, well, wrong (Altisodora's feigned love for Quixote, practically starving Sancho after giving him his insula governorship). And then some, like the 3000 lashes Sancho had to give his own sweaty buttocks to make Dulcinea pretty again, were both, but mainly because of Sancho's ingenious ways of avoiding delivering the lashes.
The ending really sucked. The episodic nature of the novel I guess prevents any climactic closure, but without giving anything away, Cervantes ends the novel so apologetically that he seems to go ideologically against every previous chapter. I would have stopped reading with ten pages to go if it hadn't been such a long trip to the end.
To my pleasure, the novel was much more violent overall than I expected. If you took out and strung together all the lumps, cuts, bruises, tramplings, beatings, and lashes Quixote and Sancho took it would rival The Passion of the Christ. And be a hundred times more enjoyable.
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Read in May, 2007
As a kid did you ever dream about being a knight like the ones in the books you read? Well in Don Quixote, a delusional 50 year old man starts trying to fulfill this dream. Journeying through Spain with his squire Sancho Panza, Don Quixote finds many "adventures" that to most people wouldn't seem like adventures at all, but to Don Quixote who is thinks windmills are giants, and a flock of sheep is an army, anything is an adventure.
One very enjoyable part is that the main charac...more
As a kid did you ever dream about being a knight like the ones in the books you read? Well in Don Quixote, a delusional 50 year old man starts trying to fulfill this dream. Journeying through Spain with his squire Sancho Panza, Don Quixote finds many "adventures" that to most people wouldn't seem like adventures at all, but to Don Quixote who is thinks windmills are giants, and a flock of sheep is an army, anything is an adventure.
One very enjoyable part is that the main characters both exhibit completely contradictory traits. Don Quixote is completely sane and very intelligent until the subject of chivalry is brought up at which point his madness prevails. Sancho is a complete fool (he follows around a madman that he knows his mad), but occassionally proves himself to be incredibly wise. The interactions between the sane madman and the wise fool provide some very interesting dynamics. Another interesting aspect of this book is that the characters in the book actually read a book based on Don Quixote's adventures and those who encounter him after reading always make up some plot to take advantage of his quirks for their entertainment.
I would have given this book five stars, but I was not a very big fan of the ending. Based on the premise with which the book was written (to denounce chivalry books) the way it ends makes sense, but I think Cervantes could have established the point by keeping true to the absurdity of his characters instead of completely changing the character in the last few pages to get his point across....less
Read in July, 2006
Reading Cervantes' massive 400-year-old novel may seem to be a challenge analogous to the titular errant knight's ill-advised confrontation with the windmill, however, as with Quixote's famed inanimate opponent, appearances are deceiving. Despite its age, Quixote holds up remarkably well: the characters still charm, the wit still bites and the prose feels crisp and modern – no doubt a testament to Grossman's vivacious translation. However, as purposefully written by Cervantes in the style of t...more
Reading Cervantes' massive 400-year-old novel may seem to be a challenge analogous to the titular errant knight's ill-advised confrontation with the windmill, however, as with Quixote's famed inanimate opponent, appearances are deceiving. Despite its age, Quixote holds up remarkably well: the characters still charm, the wit still bites and the prose feels crisp and modern – no doubt a testament to Grossman's vivacious translation. However, as purposefully written by Cervantes in the style of the chivalrous tales with which our Man of La Mancha is so amusingly obsessed, the plot tends to feel a bit cyclical. But don't let that deter you – there's a reason why certain works of literature remain in the public consciousness for four centuries.
...less
bookshelves:
classics,
favourites,
humour
Shakespearean feel - more in the plotting and tales within tales (eg The Man Who was Recklessly Curious, stolen by Mozart for Cosi fan Tutte) than the language. In fact, the story of Cardenio is thought to be the basis for Shakespeare's lost play of the same name. Very funny - slapstick, toilet and more subtle humour, with lots of factual historical and chivalric detail as well, but it doesn't feel especially Spanish to me. Certainly long, but I don't understand why, supposedly, so few people ma...more
Shakespearean feel - more in the plotting and tales within tales (eg The Man Who was Recklessly Curious, stolen by Mozart for Cosi fan Tutte) than the language. In fact, the story of Cardenio is thought to be the basis for Shakespeare's lost play of the same name. Very funny - slapstick, toilet and more subtle humour, with lots of factual historical and chivalric detail as well, but it doesn't feel especially Spanish to me. Certainly long, but I don't understand why, supposedly, so few people manage to finish it. Some of DQ's delusions hurt only himself (tilting at windmills), but others lead to suffering for his "squire" Sancho Panza (tossed in a blanket) or reluctant beneficiaries of his salvation (the beaten servant, beaten even more once DQ departs) and bemuse people (mistaking inns for castles, sheep for enemy armies and ordinary women as princesses) and are used to justify theft (the golden "helmet"/bowl) and non-payment to inn-keepers. His resolute optimism in the face of severe pain and disaster is extraordinary. Meanwhile, Sancho wavers between credulity (wishfully thinking the promise of an island for him to rule will come true) and pragmatism. Reading it whilst Tristan and Anders repeatedly watched and quoted Monthy Python's Holy Grail was amusing!
Part II starts with Cervantes' response to the unknown writer of an unofficial sequel to part 1, though DQ, Sancho and others also critique it in early chapters. The following story presumes that part 1 is true, and shows how DQ's resulting fame affects his subsequent adventures. A very modern mix of "fact" and fiction. Some characters doubt his exploits, others pander to them, especially the duke and duchess who go to great lengths to treat him in knightly/chivalric manner, and provide new adventures (for their amusement, at the painful expense of DQ and Sancho). Sancho gets rather more scope for lengthy meanderings of jumbled and largely irrelevant proverbs. Less slapstick and more pontificating than part I - both DQ's advice to Sancho on how to govern his promised insula and when Sancho has intriguing disputes to resolve.
...less
Read in January, 2008
A classic in every sense of the word.
Called “the Spanish Bible”, the story of the Man from La Mancha (1605) and the Return of the Man from La Mancha (1615) is one of the most famous literary works in the world and rightfully so. Here, the two works are placed in a single volume and, as translated by Edith Grossman, the characters come crazily alive.
In the first book, we are introduced to Alonso Quixano, an intelligent man who spends too much time reading chivalric novels and romantic ta...more
A classic in every sense of the word.
Called “the Spanish Bible”, the story of the Man from La Mancha (1605) and the Return of the Man from La Mancha (1615) is one of the most famous literary works in the world and rightfully so. Here, the two works are placed in a single volume and, as translated by Edith Grossman, the characters come crazily alive.
In the first book, we are introduced to Alonso Quixano, an intelligent man who spends too much time reading chivalric novels and romantic tales. One day, he snaps, believes himself to be Don Quixote, knight errand, and, after talking a neighboring farmer called Sancho Panza into being his squire in return for an island (insula) to govern, leaves his village to seek adventure and to rid the world of evil in the name of his beloved Dulcinea of Toboso, who happens to be some local farm girl that he has built up as this object of impossible beauty.
What follows next are a series of beat downs, misunderstandings, and adventures of a sort. The famous assault on the windmills happens early and from there we are lost in the imagination of Don Quixote and the reality that keeps butting in. As time moves on, and as a commentary on the first book, which was a mad hit, the sequel was made ten years later only to quash the “unauthorized” sequels. The adventures become more adventurous and end in the only real way they can.
What surprised me was how modern it is. The writing style is not out of place today and his use of meta narratives was not only unexpected but also good. And it did make me laugh. The first book is funnier than the second but what is lost in situational comedy is gained in character development.
That is where these books stand the test of time. The stories themselves aren’t out of the ordinary, at least until the second book, but the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is. The book lives in the conversations between them; a true believer and a lost soul that wants to believe but has to be the buffer with reality.
Don Quixote has had such an influence that the name Quixote has become an English word (quixotic) meant to define an impossible quest based on romantic notions. And that’s why Don Quixote is loved. He is the guy tilting at windmills because, even though he sees a dragon, he’s trying to live up to an impossible ideal of what life could be. His motivation isn’t bad. We all act out of love when it really comes down to it and his actions are no exception. Only in his mind do his goals manifest, but unlike most of us, Quixote goes after them irrespective of the world might think because the only world that matter is the one he is living.
And Sancho sees what we see. Critics have argued that these novels are really about Sancho and his attempts to reconcile the real world with that of his master and that it is Sancho’s journey that most reflects the human condition. Don Quixote is simply the vehicle.
Either way, this is a must read. It is long, but surprising. Invest your time in the Man from La Mancha. You won’t regret it,
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bookshelves:
happyendings-,
wish-i-owned
Read in January, 2004
recommends it for:
knights errant; the sorrowful-faced
I really regret leaving my edition of this book on the curb when I moved out of that Brooklyn apartment. I was like, "Oh, super translation and lovely red cover, but it's really heavy and it's not like I'm gonna need to reread *Don Quixote* any time soon..... I need to quit being such a materialistic packrat!" Actually, I tossed tons of great stuff during that move, but this is the book I've regretted the most.
I DREAMT about this book on Saturday night. I had this really stressful ...more
I really regret leaving my edition of this book on the curb when I moved out of that Brooklyn apartment. I was like, "Oh, super translation and lovely red cover, but it's really heavy and it's not like I'm gonna need to reread *Don Quixote* any time soon..... I need to quit being such a materialistic packrat!" Actually, I tossed tons of great stuff during that move, but this is the book I've regretted the most.
I DREAMT about this book on Saturday night. I had this really stressful dream where I was stuck on a college campus in Ohio of all places (because of Columbus Day weekend, I guess) and I had all this crap I needed to get back to New York. I missed my flight and wouldn't get another one, nor could I figure out a way to get all these possessions back with me, and everything was rushed and terrible and, as I said, really stressful. Anyway, this book was one of the main things in the room full of stuff I was trying to get back to New York, and the reason I missed my flight. It was sitting on this shelf in its red glory, and I just needed to figure out a way to get it back home with me, which was hard, and the figuring out was keeping me stuck in Ohio, where I really didn't want to be.
So what do you guys think *that* means?...less
Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in March, 2008
recommended to John by:
Ted Hoagland
recommends it for:
Classics readers, knights-fiction readers
In short: it's a frickin' classic of world literature. Read it.
In slightly longer, but still short: an amusing an infamous first fifty pages with lots of hit-or-miss after that. The second half gets dreadfully stale, but has an interesting ending from a literary analytical standpoint.
In long: I'm using this review space as a journal of reading the incredible mountain of pages.
Day 1: Here goes nothing. Here come 1,000 pages of translated text.
The opening was insufferably cheeky, a...more
In short: it's a frickin' classic of world literature. Read it.
In slightly longer, but still short: an amusing an infamous first fifty pages with lots of hit-or-miss after that. The second half gets dreadfully stale, but has an interesting ending from a literary analytical standpoint.
In long: I'm using this review space as a journal of reading the incredible mountain of pages.
Day 1: Here goes nothing. Here come 1,000 pages of translated text.
The opening was insufferably cheeky, and the origins of Quixote are slower to unravel than a heroic anime. Still, I see promise here, and my, if the reputation doesn't earn it a couple of hundred pages before I pass a strong judgment.
Day 2: Just finished chapter two. Couldn't help but notice the dope wearing ill-fitting armor, his sidekick riding an ass, and the party attacking wind mills all occurred within the first two chapters. That about sums up the culturally famous parts of the novel, making me wonder how many people in human history made it to page 50.
Day 3: Passing through Book 3, Quixote is really growing on me despite Cervantes's narrative. Cervantes comes across as very bitterly and far less clever in his very, very frequent literary and cultural criticisms, making Quixote's naive and insane positivity downright refreshing. I'll be interested to see if Cervantes does anything with this, but he's got me sympathizing with, and heck, downright rooting for the irresponsible, senile knight.
Day 6: I'm told Cervantes took up the hyper-critical narrator to make a second point - beyond satirizing chivalry and parodying chivalric literature, he wants me to sympathize with Quixote. That is a deep and admirable goal, though I'm too thick-headed to have realized it on my own. It would have been particularly hard to realize without help because the caustic nature of the narrative goes dormant so often, and has been almost completely absent for fifty pages.
Though it's at least part because of my modern bias, the bigoted references to Africans and Islam are bothering me.
This book is quickly feeling like a classical prose anime. Many of the chapters are completely unrelated and feel like filler episodes, the main chapters are highly episodic, most everything centers around a cast dealing with an interesting titular character, and the cast is even growing the way anime introduce characters. If it wasn't for Cervantes's sense of humor being so similar to (if more polite than) Geoffrey Chaucer's, and the stuffyness of the writing, I'd sooner put this one the anime DVD shelf than the classic book shelf.
Day 7: Climbed through all of "The Impertinent Curiosity" today, a three-chapter digression that told another "novel" all on its own. Perhaps it's in part due to the translation, but this is insufferably overwritten, with so much needless language and euphemism that I couldn't tell if Cervantes intended homosexual innuendo in the first chapter, or when characters were supposed to have erotic or romantic attraction half the time in the rest. Despite that, it is a great argument against picking apart the things you love ('lest you aren't able to put them back together).
Day 11: I'm deep into Book 2. The dialogue is sharper (though still very dated), a lot of the cleverness is executed more subtly, and Sancho (that's the sidekick) and Quixote seem to actually expand as characters. No, they don't grow or change, or dimensions are finally coming out of them - nice to read, over 600 pages in. Quixote is finally exiting that insufferable phase of senility where everything he does is stupid and the characters or narrator remind us of it, and is now actually getting things right now and then, suggesting he must be more complex than the fool Cervantes often drew him to be. He recognizes good poetry (even though the narrator disagrees with his judgment), is able to discuss philosophy with sound judgment, and actually stands up to defend a case of real but forbidden love, rather than a delusion of two cucumbers that he thinks are lovers. This makes him much more interpretable and interesting, just as the stories in the picaresque are becoming more interesting, as deception is used for more amiable ends than selfishness, pride or greed. Deception is quickly replacing mistakes as the main theme of this tome.
Oh, and the introduction to Book 2 is interesting as it stands as a 400-year-old example of metafiction, with the characters discussing events of publication, the real-life forged "sequel" to the original book, and Cervantes' work. It also stands out as a 400-year-old example of metafiction being insufferably cheeky. How much the ancients predicted...
Day 15: The apocryphal chapter was tremendous. Don Quixote visiting a holy site, descending into it beyond anyone's line of sight, and falling asleep. Not getting knocked out, not passing unconscious, but Cervantes specifically says he is asleep. Then he returns with a story of rich visions no one could improvise, leaving us to wonder if he is lying, if his delusion deepened in the cave, or if Quixote, who has been developing to show more real intelligence lately, really saw some of this. Cervantes is so preoccupied with slamming Quixote that it's easy to dismiss the possibility that Quixote really experienced some of this, but I think that's the easy way out. Hell, even if Cervantes did mean to make this the thousandth skeptical joke at Quixote's expense, I think I'd interpret it the other way just to give the text some depth.
The prophetic ape was also amusing, but after that the novel has spiraled down into the worst streak of thinly-veiled criticism. Sancho's bitching is insufferable. The meeting with another knight's party was similarly cloying. All the cleverness is gone. At this stage in the game, did we really need Sancho to give us yet another monologue on how dumb his master is? This better be a trick setting up some further development of Quixote as semi-reliable or some other twist.
Day 22: I went out of town for a week and decided to leave this at home. I took some shorter books with me instead. Couldn't put up with the awful redundancy and unhumorous comedy during what was supposed to be a vacation. After a week-long breather I find Cervantes's Book 2 almost unbearable. It seems that every new situation is quirky or curious in some way that feels not novel in the least after several hundred pages of other quirky and curious conflicts, and the stories consist mostly of characters talking about how weird or difficult some part of them are. In all the years I've had professors and writers praise this book to me I've never heard them mention any of this material, leaving me to guess that even they never really finished this thing. Sancho as a governor has a nice inverted-Solomon quality about it when he's actually acting, but even most of his deliberations are considerably subpar satire for Cervantes. The highlight of today's reading was Quixote's letter of advice, and that only for the rare extremely quotable and thought-provoking lines, such as "Be thou a father to the virtuous, and a stepfather to the wicked," rather than their (self-defeating) context.
Day 24: Rounding the final stretch of the book, Sancho and Quixote are somehow back out on the road together again, running into people who are alternately impressed or cynical towards Quixote's wackiness. They complain about the fake second book again. Quixote defends some woman's honor through zany romanticism again. Was Cervantes paid by the page? The highlight (by far) is Quixote's criticism of various saints, going from bold to absurd. The lowlight is the talking bust that, *shockingly,* is a fake.
Day 26: Finally done. Cervantes really bore a grudge against the guy who wrote the fake Quixote sequel, but his last riffs against him (won't spoil them) was by far the funniest. I imagine the last twenty pages are cause for more college essays than the preceeding 980, but especially having read so much history and taking so much pains to learn how to earn an ending in fiction, this came off entirely as a half-hearted cop-out that Cervantes didn't mean to be the final word (figuratively, though obviously it is literally). He's suddenly sane, renounces everything he did and becomes bitter? There's a good reason his company "had no doubt whatever that some new craze had taken possession of him."...less
bookshelves:
fiction
Read in August, 2007
Entertaining, funny, bawdy, inventive, comic, ironic...this is one fantastic piece of literature. It stoops occasionally towards slapstick and toilet humor, but other than that it is sheer genius. Cervantes was inventing the modern novel as he went along. All the forms the modern reader is used to are here. Cervantes never forgets that his job is to entertain, and he skips around, narrating as the author, the editor, anyone and any point of view he needs. It's post-modern! He openly refers...more
Entertaining, funny, bawdy, inventive, comic, ironic...this is one fantastic piece of literature. It stoops occasionally towards slapstick and toilet humor, but other than that it is sheer genius. Cervantes was inventing the modern novel as he went along. All the forms the modern reader is used to are here. Cervantes never forgets that his job is to entertain, and he skips around, narrating as the author, the editor, anyone and any point of view he needs. It's post-modern! He openly refers to his contemporaries, his rivals, his readers, society at large. He will stop the story dead in order to have one of the characters launch into a side-story. The language is poetic, and it is amazing and enlightening to learn that people 400 years ago were calling each other "blockhead," for example. Go read this masterpiece!
...less
Read in January, 2006
recommends it for:
old guys who read a lot
My goal was to read the book at an age younger than was Cervantes when he wrote it (70). Barely made it. If you are interested in the wind mills, it happens in the first few pages; and Broadway is right--you can reduce the point of the book to that one scene. However, now that you are old and have read everything, it's worth coming back to read the first novel ever written. Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare (who read Cervantes, if not the converso). In prose, he writes an endless comed...more
My goal was to read the book at an age younger than was Cervantes when he wrote it (70). Barely made it. If you are interested in the wind mills, it happens in the first few pages; and Broadway is right--you can reduce the point of the book to that one scene. However, now that you are old and have read everything, it's worth coming back to read the first novel ever written. Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare (who read Cervantes, if not the converso). In prose, he writes an endless comedy of errors as well as the consummate romance. The only truly heartbreaking scene in the book is Quixote's death at the instant he gets real. So, stop playing the fool, and start being one. You'll live longer. ...less
bookshelves:
good-for-you
Read in January, 2007
So, I kind of feel like a Philistine for giving *Don Quixote* only four stars. Please don't hate me.
Parts of this novel are absolutely, earth-shatteringly brilliant. There are insights into the most enduring parts of humanity ... and then there is farting. Lots and lots of farting. Think the Wife of Bath at a bean banquet. With midgets.
Entire movies could be made of the tales inserted into the main story. "The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious" is one of my favorites.
I give it...more
So, I kind of feel like a Philistine for giving *Don Quixote* only four stars. Please don't hate me.
Parts of this novel are absolutely, earth-shatteringly brilliant. There are insights into the most enduring parts of humanity ... and then there is farting. Lots and lots of farting. Think the Wife of Bath at a bean banquet. With midgets.
Entire movies could be made of the tales inserted into the main story. "The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious" is one of my favorites.
I give it four stars only because my 21st century ADD mind was pushed to the brink by Cervantes's meandering style. ...less
bookshelves:
favorites
Read in November, 2006
What can I say that hasn't been said? If literary fiction is a long and winding river, Don Quixote is the melting snow feeding the headwaters; if the novel were a state, Don Quixote would be the glorious revolutionary.
What most impresses me, is the story of Miguel Cervantes himself, his defeats and life as a hostage, prisoner of war, and debtor until age 60, which makes his magnificent late-life success and this wellspring of literary talent all the more inspiring. This book is a testament ...more
What can I say that hasn't been said? If literary fiction is a long and winding river, Don Quixote is the melting snow feeding the headwaters; if the novel were a state, Don Quixote would be the glorious revolutionary.
What most impresses me, is the story of Miguel Cervantes himself, his defeats and life as a hostage, prisoner of war, and debtor until age 60, which makes his magnificent late-life success and this wellspring of literary talent all the more inspiring. This book is a testament to the human mind, and I'm glad to have read it, even it is really fucking long.
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Read in January, 2007
recommends it for:
Sarah
One of my favorite literary moments: The chapter in which the servants and the good doctor weed through Don Quixote's book collection that they believe has warped his mind. Of course these are all garbage, says the doctor, but this one here is a one of a kind and this one here in mint condition and this one here, harmless, surely.
Granted, I never got much farther along that that, having just finished The Once and Future King and feeling too full of knight stories myself. But if I am ever on...more
One of my favorite literary moments: The chapter in which the servants and the good doctor weed through Don Quixote's book collection that they believe has warped his mind. Of course these are all garbage, says the doctor, but this one here is a one of a kind and this one here in mint condition and this one here, harmless, surely.
Granted, I never got much farther along that that, having just finished The Once and Future King and feeling too full of knight stories myself. But if I am ever on holiday again and happen to have Don Quixote with me I'd love to finish it. ...less
Read in September, 2008
okay, you don't have to read all 846 pages, but this book is pretty amazing - especially formally, as it anticipates most of the literary strategies of meta-narrativity. and it's not as simple as madness - a real inquiry into perception, and the relationship of materiality and the ideal. pretty cool.
bookshelves:
readinghere-and-there
Dear Don Quixote,
I think you are very funny. But, I find myself growing weary of your exploits. So, now that I have reached the end of your first book, I've made the difficult decision to put you down. But only for the moment. I'll come back. I promise.
Love,
Tempest
Was this book seriously written in the 16th century? Could we write a novel this influential or sophisticated today? I doubt it.
Read in January, 1998
recommends it for:
Anyone who likes classic books that make them think
Messes with your mind in a good way.
bookshelves:
to-never-read
A new category is needed to classify Rutherford's mis-take on Cervantes' masterpiece: a "never to read" shelve. A shame that so many trees will transpire for such dross. Arboricide, truly.
Rutherford, in his note on the translation, remarks, "By undertaking this translation I'd chose to rub shoulders with the great man, so that was what I had to do, not grovel at his feet," and, "What I tried to do was different: to let the Spanish words construct in my minds eye the ...more
A new category is needed to classify Rutherford's mis-take on Cervantes' masterpiece: a "never to read" shelve. A shame that so many trees will transpire for such dross. Arboricide, truly.
Rutherford, in his note on the translation, remarks, "By undertaking this translation I'd chose to rub shoulders with the great man, so that was what I had to do, not grovel at his feet," and, "What I tried to do was different: to let the Spanish words construct in my minds eye the world of the novel, and to live in that world; and only then to search for the English words with which to describe what I found in my imagination."
So much further away, then, from Cervantes' mind are all reader of Rutherford's rendering. He seems to not think much of the imaginative capacities of his readers who, presumably, would be unable reconstruct and inhabit a similar world based on the nearest English word equivalents to the Spanish. Instead, Rutherford tells us that the hidalgo constructs a visor out of "cardboard" which "shatters" during his test. Cardboard? Cardboard that shatters?
Ultimately we see that Rutherford is no more fit to scrub the corns from Cervantes' feet let alone "rub shoulders." In order to make the characters more appealing to contemporary readers, and to truly capture their animus, we have Sancho Panza saying, "What's up," while Don Q. "racks his brains." Cervantes' reduced to platitudes and cliches. Shoulder rubbing has turned into a cheap-shot elbow in the literary gut. One is reminded of "No Fear Shakespeare" wherein the Bard is made accessible to readers of Stephen King and Robert Ludlum at the cost of nearly everything Shakespearean.
But this product isn't very shocking given the nature of the producer who, we surmise from the intro note, is motivated to consider himself the visionary equivalent of Cervantes by his "post-" everything training. The translator, he says, who "depends upon the discredited metaphor that presents language as the clothes for the body of the thoughts and feelings" is doomed to failure for "self-obliteration is impossible." Derridean bullshit. Striving to minimize their role, Rutherford continues, the translator creates a dull text. Ergo, No Fear Shakespeare and this unfortunate block of wood from Rutherford's inadequate mind that "spices things up." His argument is nonsensical, or at least highly debatable, and his pretension revolting.
"Any translated work ought to retain marks of its origins, of its otherness in time and space, of its historicity and its foreigness." Of course, it shouldn't retain any of its marks of having originated in Cervantes himself because, afterall, Cervantes was simply a construct of the social power apparatus of a given epoch, a "sign signifying a signifier signifying a sign."
Better to run to the Samuel Putnam translation or the more recent translation by Edith Grossman.
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Read in September, 2008
recommends it for:
anyone who appreciates postmodern narratives.
There are many books out there that you're "supposed" to read. You know, the books that were assigned to you in high school, or the books that were popular in their day, or enormously influential for the history of literature. I usually have a large list of these in the back of my mind that someday I'll get to. Cervantes Don Quixote has been on that list for some time; after all, it's often claimed to be the original modern novel. It's difficult to be more influential than that! Anyway...more
There are many books out there that you're "supposed" to read. You know, the books that were assigned to you in high school, or the books that were popular in their day, or enormously influential for the history of literature. I usually have a large list of these in the back of my mind that someday I'll get to. Cervantes Don Quixote has been on that list for some time; after all, it's often claimed to be the original modern novel. It's difficult to be more influential than that! Anyway, I taught a writing class in which we read parts of the work, but I just never felt like sitting down and reading the whole thing. Well, I did that this past month.
And you know what, like other books that you're "supposed" to read, it turns out to be a really amazing book. The curious thing is that it reads like a postmodern novel, and in this respect it reminds me a lot of contemporary Italian fiction. Not bad for a work written in 1605. For instance, look at the complexity of the narrative: in the ninth chapter Cervantes presents the work as if it was the product of a translator who copied it from an Arabic original version by Cide Hamete Benengeli, who probably lied and distorted the truth. But what "truth" is being distorted if it is actually a work of fiction that is being written by Cervantes? There are even further levels of fiction in the book, since characters themselves tell stories that contain stories, and so on. The complexity of the narrative levels underscores the farcical nature of the work, and makes it seem rather postmodern in the way it deconstructs truth.
The work is also a farce in terms of its subject matter. The basic premise of the story is that Don Quixote reads so many works of fiction that he begins to believe them, and wanders out into the world as a knight errant seeking to save maidens and defeat knights. But as the story repeatedly emphasizes, there are no such things as knights errant during Don Quixote's day, and so nearly everyone in the book thinks the hero is completely mad. And even though there may be some “real” precedents for some of the things Don Quixote does (after all he does have a suit of armor in his house, and some of the stories in the work are understood to be "real"), they are in the far distant past. This gives Cervantes the opportunity to reflect on a previous genre of literature, in much the same way that postmodern authors take apart the works of modernist authors. And he carries out some of this criticism with ridiculous detail.
One thing that is certain is that Don Quixote is a long book: 982 pages in the English translation. I admit that sometimes I needed to take a break from it. But I always went back. Highlights that come to mind from the first part of the book include the opening with the famous windmill scene (1-8), Sancho's amazing deconstruction of the literary form (Chapter 20 - maybe not everyone's favorite part, but when you hear his story, think about what you’ve been reading throughout), the Tale of Inappropriate Curiosity (Chapters 33-35), the amazing cadenza to the first part when the travelers go to the inn (Chapters 32-52). In the second part of the book the story of Camacho's wedding (Chapters 19-21) The adventure of the bray (Chapters 25-27), the fact there is a jet-propelled horse (Chapter 41), and Sancho's governorship (Chapters 44-53). Anyway, a lot of these won't be as much fun without the context and development, so the work really is one that pays reading from the beginning. If you can't make it to the end of the whole work, at least make it to the end of the first part (479pp). The way all the plot lines come together at the inn is really overwhelming.
I'm sure the work is even better in the old Spanish. Perhaps someday I'll make it through that. In the meantime, the story is sophisticated and creative enough that the genius of the work is apparent even in an English translation. I wonder what it was like in the original Arabic? :-)
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Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)
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