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 118. ↩
Proverbs 172, 105, 72, 98, 166, 20, 63, 192, 189. ↩
Proverbs 75 and 161. ↩
From a modernised version, apparently, of the ballad, Despues que el Rey don Rodrigo—Cancionero de Romances Antwerp, S.A. Duran, Romancero, No. 606. ↩
The passage is apparently corrupt. Don Juan Calderón defends the text in his Cervantes Vindicado; but it cannot be said that his vindication is satisfactory. ↩
Proverb 115. ↩
Proverb 183. ↩
Proverb 252. ↩
Proverb 156. ↩
Catonian sentences, i.e. in the style of Dionysius Cato. Michael Verino was the author of a book entitled De Puerorum Moribus Disticha, somewhat in the style of Cato’s Disticha, and, like it, a well-known schoolbook at the time. The Latin quoted by the duchess is from the epitaph on him by Politian. ↩
Proverb 36. ↩
A popular way of describing drinking without getting drunk. ↩
Proverb 39. ↩
Don Quixote told them nothing about the cave of Montesinos: all they knew of it was through Sancho. Hartzenbusch inserts the correction. ↩
Favila was the son and successor of Pelayo. Don Quixote is hardly correct in describing him as a Gothic king, for the Gothic kings, properly so called, ended with Roderick. ↩
Vereis como os vale un pan por ciento; literally, “you’ll see it will be worth a loaf per cent to you.” There has been a good deal of discussion about this phrase. Critics, assuming that, as it stands, it must be wrong, have suggested various new readings, such as tan por ciento, pamporcino, and the like; forgetting, apparently, that Cervantes uses it again in precisely the same form and way in Chapter LXXI. There can be no doubt it is some old popular, perhaps local, phrase, now obsolete, but in use in his day in the sense I have given. ↩
Proverb 148. Sancho adapts the proverb to his argument. ↩
Triunfo envidado; “brag” would be a closer translation, but the game seems to have been more like “all fours.” ↩
Proverb 76. ↩
Proverbs 164, 84, and 232. ↩
I.e. Hernán (or Fernán) Núñez, of the noble family of the Guzmáns, professor of Greek at Alcalá and afterwards at Salamanca, and one of the greatest scholars of the sixteenth century. He made a collection of proverbs which was published in 1555, after his death. He was Commander of the Order of Santiago, and hence commonly called the Greek Commander, El Comendador Griego, a title absurdly translated “Greek commentator” by Jervas, Viardot, Damas Hinard, and others. ↩
The cry of La Alla ila Alla—“there is no God but God.” ↩
In the carts described wheels and axle are all in one piece. They are in use to this day in the Asturias, and their creaking may be heard on a still evening miles away. The country folk there maintain it has the effect Cervantes mentions. ↩
Proverb 152. ↩
Disciplinante de luz: one in the costume of the disciplinants who used to walk in procession in Holy Week. ↩
For abrenuncio. ↩
That which holds back the string of the crossbow. ↩
Proverbs 17, 68, 85, and 227. ↩
Proverb 108; i.e. a perfectly natural accompaniment. ↩
Proverb 225. ↩
Proverb 58. ↩
Proverb 52. ↩
Properly the thick knotted ends of the cords forming the lashes of the scourge used by penitents. ↩
Proverb 127. ↩
The last clause of this paragraph was expunged by order of the Inquisition in 1619, and have not been since restored in any edition I am acquainted with. ↩
Proverb 29. A proverb that evidently had its origin in the words of some philosophical culprit after having been whipped through the streets mounted on an ass, according to custom. Sancho quotes it again in Chapter LXXII. ↩
Proverb 57. ↩
A reference to Proverbs 200 and 53. ↩
A popular phrase expressive of extreme eagerness. ↩
This date is obviously the date at which Cervantes was writing. ↩
Orégano, properly wild marjoram. See Proverb 160. ↩
Proverb 50. ↩
Trifaldi = Tres faldas, or three skirts. ↩
Proverb 204. ↩
Proverb 231. ↩
Proverb 137. ↩
Proverbs 39 and 95. ↩
Martos, a town of Andalusia to the southwest of Jaén, apparently famous for its garbanzo crops. ↩
From zorra, a fox. ↩
Perhaps an allusion to the story in Gaspar Lucas Hidalgo’s Diálogos of the pious young man who said if he had moustaches to his soul he did not care for any others. ↩
A translation from the Italian of Serafino Aquilano (1500). The original is interesting as an Italian imitation of Spanish
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