Don Quixote E-Book

Miguel de Cervantes

• Herausgeber: Passerino Editore
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"Don Quixote" is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. The story follows the adventures of an hidalgo named Mr. Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (29 September 1547 (assumed) – 22 April 1616), was a Spanish writer who is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists. Translated by  John Ormsby

Leseprobe

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ISBN: 9788893450911

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Table of contents

ABOUT CERVANTES AND DON QUIXOTE

PART I.

​THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE

DEDICATION OF PART I.

​CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

​CHAPTER III.

​CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

​CHAPTER VII.

​CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

​CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

​CHAPTER XIII.

​CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

​CHAPTER XVI.

​CHAPTER XVII.

​CHAPTER XVIII.

​CHAPTER XIX.

​CHAPTER XX.

​CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

​CHAPTER XXIV.

​CHAPTER XXV.

CHAPTER XXVI.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

​CHAPTER XXIX.

​CHAPTER XXX.

​CHAPTER XXXI.

​CHAPTER XXXII.

​CHAPTER XXXIII.

​CHAPTER XXXIV.

CHAPTER XXXV.

​CHAPTER XXXVI.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

​CHAPTER XXXVIII.

​CHAPTER XXXIX.

​CHAPTER XL.

​CHAPTER XLI.

CHAPTER XLII.

​CHAPTER XLIII.

​CHAPTER XLIV.

CHAPTER XLV.

CHAPTER XLVI.

​CHAPTER XLVII.

​CHAPTER XLVIII.

CHAPTER XLIX.

​CHAPTER L.

CHAPTER LI.

CHAPTER LII.

PART II.

​DEDICATION OF PART II.

​THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE

​CHAPTER I.

​CHAPTER II.

​CHAPTER III.

​CHAPTER IV.

​CHAPTER V.

​CHAPTER VI.

​CHAPTER VII.

​CHAPTER VIII.

​CHAPTER IX.

​CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

​CHAPTER XII.

​CHAPTER XIII.

​CHAPTER XIV.

​CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

​CHAPTER XVII.

​CHAPTER XVIII.

​CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

​CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CHAPTER XXIV.

​CHAPTER XXV.

CHAPTER XXVI.

CHAPTER XXVII.

​CHAPTER XXVIII.

CHAPTER XXIX.

CHAPTER XXX.

CHAPTER XXXI.

CHAPTER XXXII.

​CHAPTER XXXIII.

​CHAPTER XXXIV.

CHAPTER XXXV.

​CHAPTER XXXVI.

​CHAPTER XXXVII.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

CHAPTER XL.

​CHAPTER XLI.

​CHAPTER XLII.

CHAPTER XLIII.

CHAPTER XLIV.

​CHAPTER XLV.

​CHAPTER XLVI.

​CHAPTER XLVII.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

​CHAPTER XLIX.

​CHAPTER L.

CHAPTER LI.

CHAPTER LII.

​CHAPTER LIII.

CHAPTER LIV.

CHAPTER LV.

​CHAPTER LVI.

CHAPTER LVII.

CHAPTER LVIII.

CHAPTER LIX.

CHAPTER LX.

​CHAPTER LXI.

CHAPTER LXII.

CHAPTER LXIII.

CHAPTER LXIV.

​CHAPTER LXV.

​CHAPTER LXVI.

CHAPTER LXVII.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

​CHAPTER LXIX.

CHAPTER LXX.

​CHAPTER LXXI.

​CHAPTER LXXII.

CHAPTER LXXIII.

​CHAPTER LXXIV.

DON QUIXOTE

Complete

by

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

*

Translated by John Ormsby

ABOUT CERVANTES AND DON QUIXOTE

Four generations had laughed over "Don Quixote" before it occurred to anyone to ask, who and what manner of man was this Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra whose name is on the title-page; and it was too late for a satisfactory answer to the question when it was proposed to add a life of the author to the London edition published at Lord Carteret's instance in 1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by that time disappeared. Any floating traditions that may once have existed, transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died out, and of other record there was none; for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against which the nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced no Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y Siscar, to whom the task was entrusted, or any of those who followed him, Rios, Pellicer, or Navarrete, could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes makes to himself in his various prefaces with such pieces of documentary evidence bearing upon his life as they could find.

This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer to such good purpose that he has superseded all predecessors. Thoroughness is the chief characteristic of Navarrete's work. Besides sifting, testing, and methodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previously brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found. Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no fault of his if he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says of Shakespeare may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes: "It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn … by a contemporary has been produced."

It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forced to make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture, and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take the place of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separate what is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it to the reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference or not.

The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of Spanish literature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, Garcilaso de la Vega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient families, and, curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced their origin to the same mountain district in the North of Spain. The family of Cervantes is commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and unquestionably it was in possession of lands in Galicia at a very early date; but I think the balance of the evidence tends to show that the "solar," the original site of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west corner of Old Castile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the Asturias. As it happens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes family from the tenth century down to the seventeenth extant under the title of "Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of the Famous Nuno Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the industrious genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of a manuscript genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and historiographer of John II.

The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuno Alfonso was almost as distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of Alfonso VII as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI, and was rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighbourhood of Toledo. On one of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he built himself a castle which he called Cervatos, because "he was lord of the solar of Cervatos in the Montana," as the mountain region extending from the Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his death in battle in 1143, the castle passed by his will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, as territorial or local surnames were then coming into vogue in place of the simple patronymic, took the additional name of Cervatos. His eldest son Pedro succeeded him in the possession of the castle, and followed his example in adopting the name, an assumption at which the younger son, Gonzalo, seems to have taken umbrage.

Everyone who has paid even a flying visit to Toledo will remember the ruined castle that crowns the hill above the spot where the bridge of Alcantara spans the gorge of the Tagus, and with its broken outline and crumbling walls makes such an admirable pendant to the square solid Alcazar towering over the city roofs on the opposite side. It was built, or as some say restored, by Alfonso VI shortly after his occupation of Toledo in 1085, and called by him San Servando after a Spanish martyr, a name subsequently modified into San Servan (in which form it appears in the "Poem of the Cid"), San Servantes, and San Cervantes: with regard to which last the "Handbook for Spain" warns its readers against the supposition that it has anything to do with the author of "Don Quixote." Ford, as all know who have taken him for a companion and counsellor on the roads of Spain, is seldom wrong in matters of literature or history. In this instance, however, he is in error. It has everything to do with the author of "Don Quixote," for it is in fact these old walls that have given to Spain the name she is proudest of to-day. Gonzalo, above mentioned, it may be readily conceived, did not relish the appropriation by his brother of a name to which he himself had an equal right, for though nominally taken from the castle, it was in reality derived from the ancient territorial possession of the family, and as a set-off, and to distinguish himself (diferenciarse) from his brother, he took as a surname the name of the castle on the bank of the Tagus, in the building of which, according to a family tradition, his great-grandfather had a share.

Both brothers founded families. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity; it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia, and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers, magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two cardinal-archbishops.