el ingenioso hidalgo don quixote de la mancha

It took me five months to read the whole thing, albeit with a break of almost a month between Books One and Two. Starkie’s Quixote has a slightly Irish flavour, which I enjoyed, and the humour of the piece came across brilliantly. I then heard about a translation by the Irish scholar Walter Starkie – a fascinating character in his own right – and picked up his translation in August 2022 (I went for the unabridged version of 1964, which required buying a second-hand copy from the United States). The Knight’s form evokes a Spanish inverted question mark. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, drawing by Pablo Picasso, 1955. My initial experience taught me that translations do matter, since the one I picked up, by a French Huguenot called Pierre Antoine Motteux (1700), proved a slog and I quickly gave up on it. I first started reading Don Quixote – whose full title is El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha ( The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) – on Christmas Day, 2021. And there are plenty of opinions on Don Quixote: from Franz Kafka to Vladimir Nabokov to Jorge Luis Borges to Harold Bloom. I do have one advantage: I am a first-time reader, and so my observations might be a little fresher – more naiive, certainly – but not weighed down by the critical mass of opinion. And is there anything left to say about this great novel? Wikimedia Commons.Ĭan there be anything more daunting than writing about Don Quixote? In the same way as Shakespeare, Cervantes is such a towering figure in world literature that any task related to writing about him seems equally monumental. Wilhelm Marstrand, Don Quixote og Sancho Panza ved en skillevej, uden datering (efter 1847).

El ingenioso hidalgo don quixote de la mancha