Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (electric book reader TXT) ๐
Description
Don Quixote is a novel that doesnโt 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, itโs also considered one of the firstโif not the firstโmodern novels.
This Standard Ebooks edition is believed to be the first ebook edition of Don Quixote to feature a full transcription of translator John Ormsbyโs 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 doesnโt hold back from sharing his views on the geniusโand flawsโof Cervantesโ 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 Quixoteโs 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 laughsโeven for the modern readerโand narrative devices still seen in todayโs fiction, including meta-narratives, frame narratives, and metafiction. Many scenes (like Quixoteโs attack on the windmills) and characters (like Sancho Panza and Lothario) are so famous that theyโre ingrained in our collective culture.
Read free book ยซDon Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (electric book reader TXT) ๐ยป - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Read book online ยซDon Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (electric book reader TXT) ๐ยป. Author - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
He was born at Alcalรก de Henares and baptised in the church of Santa Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we know nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his Comedies of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model of his interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a significant one, for it shows the early development of that love of the drama which exercised such an influence on his life and seems to have grown stronger as he grew older, and of which this very preface, written only a few months before his death, is such a striking proof. He gives us to understand, too, that he was a great reader in his youth; but of this no assurance was needed, for the First Part of Don Quixote alone proves a vast amount of miscellaneous reading, romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry, chronicles, for which he had no time or opportunity except in the first twenty years of his life; and his misquotations and mistakes in matters of detail are always, it may be noticed, those of a man recalling the reading of his boyhood.
Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was a boy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period for Spain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. The new Spain was the mightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire and it had not yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy of Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and the Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, who had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought the Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallen the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragรณn had been swept away, and the only function that remained to the Cortes was that of granting money at the Kingโs dictation.
The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la Vega and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had brought back from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature, which took root and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the native growths. Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had been fairly naturalised in Spain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for investing with an air of novelty the idea of a despairing shepherd and inflexible shepherdess. As a set-off against this, the old historical and traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But the most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was the flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the press ever since Garci Ordรณรฑez de Montalvo had resuscitated Amadรญs of Gaul at the beginning of the century.
For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no better spot in Spain than Alcalรก de Henares in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town, something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcalรก the traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light literature, and as a producer of books Alcalรก was already beginning to compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and Seville.
A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcalรก at that time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a bookshop where the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be, what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy, that called itself Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, Segunda Impresiรณn, could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father of the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis of Don Quixote.
For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But why Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son to a university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his own door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he did so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomรกs Gonzรกlez, that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a Miguel de Cervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen again; but even if it had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove nothing, as there were at least two other Miguels born about the middle of the century; one of them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin, no doubt, who was a source of great embarrassment to the biographers.
That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcalรก is best proved by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he did, and he has nowhere
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