First Impressions: Don Quixote!

This is a whale of a book. I think that I spent a few hours combing through various versions until I found this one, which was the first one that didn't seem to be significantly abridged.

The whole thing is over twelve hundred pages.

The translation I'm looking at is by John Ormsby, from 1885, and others have said this version is both "thorough and accurate."

In fact, it starts with about a hundred pages of prefatory material by Ormsby, including a very humorous section in which he complains with bitter wit about all the other translations' failings. He follows that with a short biography of Cervantes, and another section about the writing of Quixote itself.

The book is full of footnotes to help explain the references, too. Cervantes wrote Quixote as a parody and satire of chivalrous romances that were popular in Spain at the time, and most of the references would be over my head without the footnotes.

For example, chivalrous romances were often preceded by a bunch of poetry. Quixote does this, but self-referentially and self-effacingly.

The basic idea of the book is that reading too many of these chivalrous romances makes Quixote go a bit mad, and it follows his adventures as he tries to re-enact them.

Quixote is portrayed by the narrator as a madman, and the characters around him also seem to be aware of his madness. He arbitrarily decides that some farm woman he was once infatuated with when he was a young man is his Lady Dulcinea del Toboso--only he does this without her knowledge. He tries to turn an old helmet into a knight's helmet with pasteboard. He picks fights and often loses. When he wins, he demands the losers go visit his Lady and tell her of his great deeds. Remember, she not only doesn't know he's doing this, he also gives them the wrong name.

Chapter 6 is basically Cervantes giving his thumbs-up or thumbs-down on various chivalrous romance books... by having characters decide whether said books should be burned or not.

At the point of making the embedded video, I had gotten through nine chapters, and I'm going to crunch through this bit by bit.

If you'd like to read it, you can get a nice scan of Ormsby's version on Archive.

Vol. 1
https://archive.org/details/ingeniousgentlem01cerv/page/n5/mode/2up

Vol. 2
https://archive.org/details/ingeniousgentlem02cerv/page/n5/mode/2up

It's available on Gutenberg but unfortunately the Gutenberg version makes it hard or impossible to see Ormsby's footnotes, without which you won't get most of the jokes.