"Context cannot hold Cervantes and Shakespeare" 💜

Miguel de Cervantes

The Spanish Shakespeare | Creator of the first European novel

#onhisbirthdaytoday

#disqualifiedknowledges #M-Effect

29th September

[Infamous for his involvement in piracy in the Mediterranean, espionage and the Spanish Armada | Imprisoned in Spain for issues related to his work as a tax collector, including being accused of selling seized wheat]

In continuance of our Prison Writing Series, today, albeit by fortuitous coincidence, we shall discuss yet another renowned prison writer who has his birthday today.

Miguel de Cervantes!

Well, Cervantes’s writing was significantly influenced by his time in prison. In fact, the timeless classic, Don Quixote, which also happens to be his most famous novel, is believed to have been conceived while he was in prison. In the prologue to the first part of the book, he suggests the story was “engendered in a prison where every annoyance has its home.”

Trying to catch hold of some authentic references, I was able to gather some very interesting material on Cervantes, from the point of view of three literarians! 

Firstly, one of his recent biographies, titled, No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes by Donald McCrory.

Donald here has a very insightful note on the importance of 29th September to Cervantes –

The generally accepted date of Miguel’s birth is St Michael’s day, 29 September 1547, the year in which both Henry VIII and Francis I of France died. It was also the year in which Ivan the Terrible of Muscovy assumed the title of Tsar, an event that went unnoticed by most Spaniards at the time. On the wider canvas, it was the year that saw Charles V defeat the Lutherans at Mühlberg (Luther had died the previous year) and, on a more local note, it was the year when Philip II spent Christmas in Alcalá de Henares,

says Donald.

Secondly, Edith Grossman, one of the recent translators of Don Quixote, has some very profound material to share with her readers –

Cervantes’s fictional difficulty was certainly my factual one as I contemplated the prospect of writing even a few lines about the wonderfully utopian task of translating the first - and probably the greatest - modern novel.

Substitute keyboard and monitor for pen and paper, and my dilemma and posture were the same; the dear friend who helped me solve the problem was really Cervantes himself, an embodied spirit who emerged out of the shadows and off the pages when I realized I could begin this note by quoting a few sentences from his prologue.

I believe that my primary obligation as a literary translator is to recreate for the reader in English the experience of the reader in Spanish.

When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, it was not yet a seminal masterpiece of European literature, the book that crystallized forever the making of literature out of life and literature, that explored in typically ironic fashion, and for the first time, the blurred and shifting frontiers between fact and fiction, imagination and history, perception and physical reality, or that set the stage for all Hispanic studies and all serious discussions of the history and nature of the novel.

When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, his language was not archaic or quaint. He wrote in a crackling, up-to-date Spanish that was an intrinsic part of his time (this is instantly apparent when he has Don Quixote, in transports of knightly madness, speak in the old-fashioned idiom of the novels of chivalry), a modern language that both reflected and helped to shape the way people experienced the world.

This meant that I did not need to find a special, anachronistic, somehow-seventeenth-century voice but could translate his astonishingly fine writing into contemporary English.

And his writing is a marvel: it gives off sparks and flows like honey.

Cervantes’s style is so artful it seems absolutely natural and inevitable; his irony is sweet-natured, his sensibility sophisticated, compassionate, and humorous.

If my translation works at all, the reader should keep turning the pages, smiling a good deal, periodically bursting into laughter, and impatiently waiting for the next synonym (Cervantes delighted in accumulating synonyms, especially descriptive ones, within the same phrase), the next mind-bending coincidence, the next variation on the structure of Don Quixote’s adventures, the next incomparable conversation between the knight and his squire.

To quote again from Cervantes’s prologue: “I do not want to charge you too much for the service I have performed in introducing you to so noble and honorable a knight; but I do want you to thank me for allowing you to make the acquaintance of the famous Sancho Panza, his squire….”

Finally, for the take by Harold Bloom on Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote –

Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died almost simultaneously, are the central Western authors, at least since Dante, and no writer since has matched them, not Tolstoy or Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce.

Context cannot hold Cervantes and Shakespeare: the Spanish Golden Age and the Elizabethan-Jacobean era are secondary when we attempt a full appreciation of what we are given.

W. H. Auden found in Don Quixote a portrait of the Christian saint, as opposed to Hamlet, who “lacks faith in God and in himself.” Though Auden sounds perversely ironic, he was quite serious and, I think, wrong-headed.

Against Auden I set Miguel de Unamuno, my favorite critic of Don Quixote. For Unamuno, Alonso Quixano is the Christian saint, while Don Quixote is the originator of the actual Spanish religion, Quixotism.

Herman Melville blended Don Quixote and Hamlet in Captain Ahab (with a touch of Milton’s Satan added for seasoning). Ahab desires to avenge himself upon the white whale, while Satan would destroy God, if only he could. Hamlet is death’s ambassador to us, according to G. Wilson Knight. Don Quixote says that his quest is to destroy injustice. The final injustice is death, the ultimate bondage. To set captives free is the knight’s pragmatic way of battling against death.

Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose.

The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman’s translation that I believe has not been achieved before.

The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to the heightened quality of her diction. Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes’s darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.

Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers who have come after him. Dickens and Flaubert, Joyce and Proust reflect the narrative procedures of Cervantes, and their glories of characterization mingle strains of Shakespeare and Cervantes. You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

Cervantes inhabits his great book so pervasively that we need to see that it has three unique personalities: the Knight, Sancho, and Cervantes himself.

Yet… how sly and subtle is the presence of Cervantes!

says Bloom, Harold Bloom!