Don Quixote: Part II, Chapter LXII

by Robert Croll

title page of 2nd volume — Title page of Part II, from first printing in 1615 From University of Glasgow Special Collections

Since Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s original publication of the two parts of Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605 and 1615, the novel has seen close to twenty English translations, from Thomas Shelton’s versions produced within a decade of the original—the book’s first translation into any language—to James H. Montgomery’s critical translation in 2006. It has also appeared in close to fifty other languages, making it one of the most widely translated literary works in history; with each generation, new translations have appeared and presented a new perspective. But the original novel itself is also a kind of pseudotranslation; Cervantes’s narrator pretends to have discovered the text—a true historical account—as recorded by another author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, claiming that he has only compiled the tale that we encounter.

Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote remains innovative today and continues to permeate through literature and culture, both inside and outside of the Spanish-speaking world. While some authors—such as Jorge Luis Borges with his story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote“—have engaged directly with the work, dozens of writers have been influenced by Cervantes’s use of structure and development of characters, including Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, MIguel de Unamuno, Milan Kundera, Michel Foucault, Tennessee Williams, and Paul Aster.

Portrait of Cervantes — Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes, 1600
Attributed to Juan de Jáuregui

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, just outside of Madrid, and died in 1616, making him a close contemporary of William Shakespeare. At the time that Cervantes was writing, Spain was facing the beginning of the end of its Golden Age; the famous sinking of the Spanish Armada had occurred just a few decades before.

During most of his lifetime, Cervantes was not considered a member of Spain’s top tier of writers, easily surpassed by playwrights such as Lope de Vega, but Don Quixote catapulted him to literary fame. While it is the delusional idealism of his protagonist that seems to be the most enduring element of his impact on popular culture, uncovering details of Cervantes’s life has also become a subject of fascination, and claims of having discovered his grave continue in Spain. Today, the Cervantes Prize—the most respected award in Spanish literature—is given annually on the anniversary of Cervantes’s death.

Sancho Panza listening to the enchanted head — *Sancho Displeased by the Answers Given Him by the Enchanted Head, 1755, d*esigned and drawn by Francis Hayman and engraved by Charles Grignon for the Tobias Smollett translation

Part II, Chapter LXII encapsulates many of the greatest narrative qualities of Don Quixote. The chapter of course contains the famous episode of the Enchanted Head, a comical scene in which Don Antonio Moreno tricks Don Quixote into believing that he possesses a statue with the magical power to answer whatever is asked of it; the head is in fact voiced by Don Antonio’s nephew, hiding in the room below, and its “magical” answers are largely tautological restatements of whatever is asked of it. Don Quixote’s confidence in the statue’s answers represents a classic example of his delusional state and the humor of his interactions with his squire Sancho Panza.

But the scene at the end of the chapter, in which Don Quixote visits a printing press, is equally fascinating as it demonstrates Cervantes’s metafictional approach to writing. In the passage, Don Quixote meets an Italian translator in a printing-house and engages him in a discussion of his work, inadvertently betraying a lack of knowledge about translation by asking him to translate a simple series of words. He makes a famous comparison between reading a translation and looking at a Flemish tapestry from the back, getting a general idea of the picture but losing the intended clarity of the design.

But Don Quixote also sees a copy of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s unauthorized sequel to Part I of Don Quixote, published in 1614, and Cervantes uses the chapter to denounce his literary impostor. As time has shown, Cervantes’s subtle responses to Avellaneda have outlived the false version.

Robert Croll is a member of the Amherst College class of 2016, currently completing a double major in Spanish and Architectural Studies. His first translation was of a passage from Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real into Spanish; he has since focused on translations of Latin American and Spanish short fiction into English, including, most recently, a new translation of Julio Cortázar’s Las armas secretas. He is also a guitarist and spends much of his free time performing and composing modern jazz. Sometimes he enjoys conventions like writing autobiographical blurbs in the third person.