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he left behind much of what was best in it, which is what happens to all those who try to translate poetry: however much care they take and skill they display, they can never recreate it in the full perfection of its original birth.
‘These don’t deserve to be burned with the others, because they aren’t and never will be as damaging as those books of chivalry have been – these are books for the intellect, and do nobody any harm.’
what would be even worse than that, turn into a poet, which they say is a catching and incurable disease.’
historians should and must be precise, truthful and unprejudiced, without allowing self-interest or fear, hostility or affection, to turn them away from the path of truth, whose mother is history: the imitator of time, the storehouse of actions and the witness to the past, an example and a lesson to the present and a warning to the future.
By the natural understanding which God has granted me I know that whatever is beautiful is lovable; but I can’t conceive why, for this reason alone, a woman who’s loved for her beauty should be obliged to love whoever loves her.
Honour and virtue are ornaments of the soul, and without them the body, even if it is beautiful, shouldn’t seem beautiful.
Well then, if chastity is one of the virtues that most embellish the soul and the body, why should the woman who’s loved for her beauty lose her chastity by responding to the advances of the man who, merely for his own pleasure, employs all his strength and cunning to make her lose it?
he who calls me an ingrate can stop courting me; he who calls me distant can keep his distance; he who calls me cruel can stop following me: because this fierce basilisk, this ingrate, this cruel and distant woman is most certainly not going to seek, court, approach or follow any of them.
‘If you’ve learned your lesson for the future,’ retorted Sancho, ‘I’m a Turk.
When the Knight of the Forest heard the Knight of the Sorry Face speak in this way, he only stared at him, and stared at him again, and stared at him once more from head to foot; and once he’d had a good stare, he said:
since love in young men is usually not love at all, but lust, which, since gratification is its sole aim, ceases to exist as soon as it is satisfied, and what had looked like love turns back because it cannot go any further than the limits fixed for it by nature,
‘That is the whole point,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘and therein lies the beauty of my enterprise. A knight errant going mad for a good reason – there is neither pleasure nor merit in that. The thing is to become insane without a cause and have my lady think: if I do all this when dry, what would I not do when wet?
and you just wait till I reach El Toboso, and come before my lady Dulcinea, and then I’ll tell her such stories about the acts of madness and stupidity, which comes to the same thing, that you’ve done and are doing as will make her as sweet as a nut, even if she’s as hard as a cork-oak when I start work on her.
And pulling down his breeches as fast as ever he could, he stood there in his shirt and then did two leaps in the air followed by two somersaults, revealing things that made Sancho turn Rocinante so as not to have to see them again; and he felt fully satisfied that he could swear his master was mad.
which would be better and more suitable, imitating Orlando and his outrageous madness, or Amadis and his melancholy madness?
‘If we leave aside the absurdities that the good hidalgo comes out with concerning his mania, in conversations on other subjects he talks with great good sense, and shows himself to have a clear and balanced judgement.
I’m old enough by now, you know, to give advice, and this advice I’m giving you here is just what the doctor ordered, and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, because when the pig’s offered you must poke open the hold.’
‘That’s the kind of love,’ said Sancho, ‘that I’ve heard in sermons we’re supposed to feel for our Lord – for his own sake, without being moved by hopes of glory or fears of punishment. Though I must say I’d prefer to love him and serve him for what he can do for me.’
And so the conclusion we must reach is that to attempt things that are more likely to do us harm than good is an action of rash, unstable minds, even more so if we aren’t forced into them and it’s perfectly clear that it’s madness to attempt them.
if you believe that you’ll destroy your blood if you mix it with mine, bear in mind that there are few, if any, noble families in the world who haven’t travelled down this road, and that the women’s blood is not what counts in illustrious pedigrees; what’s more, true nobility consists in virtue, and if you forfeit that by denying me my just rights, I shall be left with better claims to nobility than you.
‘What are you saying, you madman?’ exclaimed Don Quixote. ‘Can you be in your right mind?’
And since beauty enjoys the privilege and prerogative of reconciling hearts and attracting affections, they all surrendered forthwith to the desire to serve and cherish the beautiful Moor.
truth is, my dear sir, that I myself consider these so-called books of chivalry to be prejudicial to the public good.
Fictional stories should suit their readers’ understanding and be written in such a way that, by making impossibilities seem easy and marvels seem straightforward and by enthralling the mind, they amaze and astonish, gladden and entertain, so that wonder and pleasure go hand in hand; and none of this can be achieved by the writer who forsakes verisimilitude and imitation, because the perfection of all writing consists in these two qualities.
their style is harsh, their adventures are incredible, their loves are licentious, their civilities are uncouth, their battles are endless, their speeches are absurd, their journeys are preposterous, and, in short, there’s no ingenious artifice about them, so they deserve to be thrown out of a Christian society as useless wastrels.’
this makes those who’ve written such books all the more blameworthy, disregarding all sound reasoning and all the rules of art,
I’m not willing to subject myself to the indiscriminate judgement of the fickle mob, the principal readers of such books.
‘And what about plays on religious subjects? How many false miracles they invent, how many apocryphal and misunderstood events,
the audience that has gone to see an ingenious and well-crafted play comes out at the end cheered by its jests, instructed by its truths, amazed at its action, wiser thanks to its speeches, warned by its roguery, shrewder for its examples, incensed against vice and enamoured of virtue; for a good play will provoke all these reactions in anyone who watches it,
plays have been turned into goods for sale,
The knight errant and his errant squire
as I said before, read these books, and you will soon see how they banish any melancholy you might be feeling, and improve your disposition,
am merely striving to make the world understand the delusion under which it labours in not renewing within itself those most happy days when the order of knight-errantry carried all before it.
‘May God give me a bad life, Sancho,’ replied the young graduate, ‘if you aren’t the second most important character in the history, and there are those who’d rather hear you talk than the finest of the others, even though there are also people who say you were too gullible
anyone publishing a book exposes himself to enormous risk, because it’s absolutely impossible to write one in such a way that it satisfies and pleases all those who read it.’
because some people are saying, “Second parts are never any good,” and others are saying, “What’s already been written about Don Quixote is quite enough,”
I’ve always been in favour of equality, and I can’t stand people getting above themselves for no good reason. Teresa I was christened, pure and simple, without any frills or flounces or titles stuck on the front, and Cascajo was my father’s name, and just because I’m your wife I’m called Teresa Panza even though by rights I ought to be called Teresa Cascajo.
I’ll say it yet again – you do as you please, because that’s the burden we women were born with, obeying our husbands even if they are damn fools.’
the great man who is sin-ridden can only be a great sinner, and the wealthy man who is not generous will be nothing but a miserly beggar: the owner of wealth is not made happy by owning it but by spending it, and not by spending it capriciously, but by knowing how to spend it well. The
by cheerfully giving a pauper a couple of maravedís he will show himself to be as generous as the man who distributes alms to a fanfare of trumpets,
‘If I remember rightly,’ Sancho replied, ‘I’ve already asked you once or twice not to correct my words, if you understand what I mean by them – and if you don’t understand, you can always say, “Sancho, you devil, I don’t understand you,”
‘I bet,’ said Sancho, ‘you knew exactly what I meant from the start, but you wanted to ruffle me so as to make me put my foot in it another few hundred times.’
In slaying giants, we must slay pride; in our generosity and magnanimity, we must slay envy; in our tranquil demeanour and serene disposition, we must slay anger; in eating as little as we do and keeping vigil as much as we do, we must slay gluttony and somnolence; in our faithfulness to those whom we have made the mistresses of our thoughts, we must slay lewdness and lust; in wandering all over the world in search of opportunities to become famous knights as well as good Christians, we must slay sloth.
‘What I’m trying to say,’ said Sancho, ‘is let’s go in for being saints, and then we’ll get the good reputation we’re after much sooner –
without adding or subtracting one atom of truth or concerning himself with any accusations that might be made that he was lying; and he was right to do so, because the truth might be stretched thin but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.
‘And do try and stop that poor little heart of yours from shrinking so, it must be about the size of a hazel nut by now, and remember what they say, a good heart conquers ill fortune, and where there isn’t any bacon there aren’t any hooks to hang it from
‘I do hope that God gives me even better fortune in my aspirations than you have in choosing proverbs appropriate to our discussions.’
it won’t be all that difficult to make him believe that some peasant girl, the very first one I come across, is lady Dulcinea – and if he doesn’t believe it I’ll swear she is, and if he swears she isn’t I’ll swear she is again, and if he insists I’ll insist even more,
‘Sceptres and crowns of playhouse emperors,’ Sancho retorted, ‘are never made of pure gold, but of tin or tinsel.’
‘Well, the same happens,’ said Don Quixote, ‘in the play of this life, in which some act as emperors, others as popes and, in short, all the characters that there can be in a play; but when it is over, in other words when life ends, death strips them all of the costumes that had distinguished between them, and they are all equals in the grave.’
