¶ The second part of Don Quixote is indeed a great deal more amusing than the first, largely because it redeems the one-damned-thing-after-another quality of what goes before. Quixote and Don Sansón, a student at Salamanca who has read the account of the knight errant’s adventures in the First Part — the publication of which, when “the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the  blade of his sword,” our hero has no difficulty attributing to enchanters — talk about the book’s reception among the reading public.

“Now I say,” said Don Quixote, “that the author of my history was no wise man but an ignorant gossip-monger who, without rhyme or reason, began to write, not caring how it turned out, just like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, when asked what he was painting, replied ‘Whatever comes out.’

(This was indeed my judgment of the narrative of the First Part.)

Pderhaps he painted a rooster in such a fashion and so unrealistically that he had to write beside it, in capital letters, ‘This is a rooster.’ And that must be how my history is: a commentary will be necessary in order to understand it.”

“Not at all,” responded Sansón, “because it is so clear that there is nothing in it to cause difficulty: children look at it, youths read it, men understand it, the old celebrate it, and, in short, it is so popular and widely read and so well known by every kind of person that as soon as people see a skinny old nag they say: ‘There goes Rocinante.’ And those who have been fondest of reading it are the pages. There is no lord’s antechamber where one does not find a copy of Don Quixote: as soon as it is put down it is picked up again; some rush at it, and others ask for it. In short, this history is the most enjoyable and least harmful entertainment ever seen, because nowhere in it can one find even the semblance of an untruthful word or a less than Catholic thought.”

But what one could find it was a massive critique of aristocratical foolishness. Might this explain why the first translation into any language was Thomas Sheltons, of 1612, into English?

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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