Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (electric book reader TXT) 📕
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Don Quixote is a novel that doesn’t need much introduction. Not only is it widely considered the greatest Spanish literary work of all time, one of the greatest literary works in history, and a cornerstone of the Western literary canon, it’s also considered one of the first—if not the first—modern novels.
This Standard Ebooks edition is believed to be the first ebook edition of Don Quixote to feature a full transcription of translator John Ormsby’s nearly 1,000 footnotes. Ormsby as an annotator deftly explains obscure passages, gives background on the life and times of 1600s Spain, references decisions from other contemporary translators, and doesn’t hold back from sharing his views on the genius—and flaws—of Cervantes’ greatest work.
The story is of the eponymous Don Quixote, a country noble who, in his old age, reads too many chivalric romances and goes mad. After convincing his grubby servant, Sancho Panza, to join him as his squire, he embarks on an absurd and comic quest to do good and right wrongs.
Today Don Quixote’s two volumes are published as a single work, but their publication came ten years apart. Cervantes saw great success with the publication of his first volume, and appeared to have little desire to write a second volume until a different author wrote a spurious, inferior sequel. This kicked Cervantes into gear and he wrote volume two, a more serious and philosophical volume than the largely comic first volume.
Despite being written in 1605 and translated in 1885, Don Quixote contains a surprising amount of slapstick laughs—even for the modern reader—and narrative devices still seen in today’s fiction, including meta-narratives, frame narratives, and metafiction. Many scenes (like Quixote’s attack on the windmills) and characters (like Sancho Panza and Lothario) are so famous that they’re ingrained in our collective culture.
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- Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
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Proverb 110. ↩
Proverb 163. ↩
Proverb 56. ↩
Proverb 13. ↩
The Spanish form of Fugger, the name of the great Augsburg capitalists of the sixteenth century. ↩
Referring to the ballad quoted in Part I Chapter V and elsewhere. ↩
The Travels of the Infante Don Pedro of Portugal Through the Four Quarters of the World, written by Juan Gomez de Sanestevan Saragossa, 1570, was a popular book and passed through several editions. ↩
A passing compliment to his patron, the Conde de Lemos. ↩
Literally, “some of the dear.” ↩
A fashion introduced by the Duke of Lerma, whose feet were disfigured by bunions. ↩
Verses of shorter lines than the ballad, and generally of a humorous or satirical cast. ↩
The war to which the youth was bound was probably that which had arisen in Italy in 1613, out of the conflicting claims of the Dukes of Savoy and Mantua to the Duchy of Montferrat. ↩
It is not easy to say what passage Cervantes could have been thinking of. ↩
A proverbial phrase, expressive of extreme impatience. ↩
Officers who have charge of the expenditure of the municipality. ↩
A polite way of saying “after you,” when pressed to drink. ↩
Proverb 1. ↩
The eastern part of La Mancha, adjoining the Cuenca Mountains, and now part of the province of Cuenca. It had nothing to do with the kingdom of Aragón, as Cervantes seems to have supposed; the name, so Fermín Caballero (Pericia Geográfica de Cervantes) says, being derived from a hill called Monte Aragón. ↩
Vota a Rus, an obscure oath, but probably a Manchegan form of Voto d Dios. Rus is the name of a stream and castle near San Clemente. ↩
A giantess in Amadís of Gaul. ↩
In the original, Sancho’s mistake is patio for pacto. ↩
I.e., belonging to judicial astrology. ↩
There is, however, no trace of the story of Gaiferos and Melisenda (which is the correct form of the name) in any French chronicle or romance. Master Pedro’s puppet-show follows closely the ballad—
“Asentado está Gaiferos
En el palacio real,”
which is in the three oldest Cancioneros de Romances, and in Duran’s Romancero General, No. 377. ↩
These lines are not a quotation from the old ballad, but from a more modern piece of verse in octaves, in the National Library at Madrid. “Tables” was a game something like tric-trac or backgammon; not chess, as Dunlop supposes. It was played with dice. ↩
In the Chanson de Roland, “Durendal.” ↩
Marsilio is, of course, the Marsiles of the Chanson de Roland, and, in spite of the company in which he appears, a historical personage, the name being a corruption of Omari filius, i.e., Abd el Malek Ibn Omar, Wali of Saragossa at the time of Charlemagne’s invasion. In the ballad, however, he is called Almanzor. ↩
Góngora has a droll ballad on this subject—
“Desde Sansueña á Paris”—
in which he expresses his sympathy with Melisendra’s sufferings during her ride. ↩
Proverb 3. ↩
From the ballad on the rout of King Boderick’s army at the battle of the Guadalete—
“Las huestes del Rey Bodrigo
Desmayaban y huian.”
↩
Proverb 104. ↩
The joke here is untranslatable. Don Quixote says, “not to catch the ape, but the she-ape;” pillar la mona being a slang phrase for “to get drunk.” ↩
Here we have an additional proof that Cervantes did not supply the correction in the second edition, Part I Chapter XXIII, and was not even aware that it had been made. ↩
From this it would seem that Cervantes was under the impression that La Mancha de Aragón belonged to the kingdom of Aragón. ↩
I.e., a Sardinian pony, just as we say “a Shetland.” ↩
V. the ballad—
“Ya cabalga Diego Ordoñez.
Desmayaban y huian.”
↩
The Cazoleros (or, more properly, Cazalleros) were the people of Valladolid, so called because of their townsman, Cazalla, burned as a Lutheran in 1559; the Berengeneros were the Toledana, berengenas, or eggplants, being grown in large quantities in the neighbourhood; the inhabitants of Madrid were nicknamed the Ballenatos, i.e. the whalemen, from a story that they took a mule’s packsaddle, floating down the Manzanares in a flood, for a whale. Who the people of the clock town, or the Jaboneros—the soap-men—were, is uncertain. ↩
Proverb 219. ↩
Proverb 132. ↩
Don Quixote forgets that Sancho was not with him the first time he left home. ↩
Proverb 138. ↩
Proverb 83. ↩
Cervantes allows them but five days in all for this journey. The nearest and most accessible point of the Ebro would
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