Don Quixote of La Mancha
3.8928 votes
✒ Author | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
📖 Pages | 1568 |
⏰ Reading time | 67 hours 45 minutes |
💡 Originally published | 1615 |
🌏 Original language | Spanish |
📌 Type | Novels |
📌 Genres | Love, Adventure, Psychological, Satire, irony, Social, Philosophical, Humor |
📌 Sections | Love story , Adventure novel , Psychological novel , Social novel , Philosophical novel , Humor novel |
Table of contents
Expand
Work in other languages
Read the book
First Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha
Prologue
Idle reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else, which is just what one would expect of a person begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and every mournful sound makes its home? Tranquility, a peaceful place, the pleasant countryside, serene skies, murmuring fountains, a calm spirit, are a great motivation for the most barren muses to prove themselves fertile and produce offspring that fill the world with wonder and joy. A father may have a child who is ugly and lacking in all the graces, and the love he feels for him puts a blindfold over his eyes so that he does not see his defects but considers them signs of charm and intelligence and recounts them to his friends as if they were clever and witty. But though I seem to be the father, I am the stepfather of Don Quixote, and I do not wish to go along with the common custom and implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to forgive or ignore the faults you may find in this my child, for you are neither his kin nor his friend, and you have a soul in your body and a will as free as anyone’s, and you are in your own house, where you are lord, as the sovereign is master of his revenues, and you know the old saying: under cover of my cloak I can kill the king. Which exempts and excuses you from all respect and obligation, and you can say anything you desire about this history without fear that you will be reviled for the bad things or rewarded for the good that you might say about it.
I wanted only to offer it to you plain and bare, unadorned by a prologue or the endless catalogue of sonnets, epigrams, and laudatory poems that are usually placed at the beginning of books. For I can tell you that although it cost me some effort to compose, none seemed greater than creating the preface you are now reading. I picked up my pen many times to write it, and many times I put it down again because I did not know what to write; and once, when I was baffled, with the paper in front of me, my pen behind my ear, my elbow propped on the writing table, and my cheek resting in my hand, pondering what I would say, a friend of mine, a man who is witty and wise, unexpectedly came in and seeing me so perplexed asked the reason, and I hid nothing from him and said I was thinking about the prologue I had to write for the history of Don Quixote, and the problem was that I did not want to write it yet did not want to bring to light the deeds of so noble a knight without one.
“For how could I not be confused at what that old legislator, the public, will say when it sees that after all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity, I emerge now, carrying all my years on my back, with a tale as dry as esparto grass, devoid of invention, deficient in style, poor in ideas, and lacking all erudition and doctrine, without notes in the margins or annotations at the end of the book, when I see that other books, even if they are profane fictions, are so full of citations from Aristotle, Plato, and the entire horde of philosophers that readers are moved to admiration and consider the authors to be well-read, erudite, and eloquent men? Even more so when they cite Holy Scripture! People are bound to say they are new St. Thomases and other doctors of the Church; and for this they maintain so ingenious a decorum that in one line they depict a heartbroken lover and in the next they write a little Christian sermon that is a joy and a pleasure to hear or read. My book will lack all of this, for I have nothing to note in the margin or to annotate at the end, and I certainly don’t know which authors I have followed so that I can mention them at the beginning, as everyone else does, in alphabetical order, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, and with Zoilus and Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. My book will also lack sonnets at the beginning, especially sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or celebrated poets, though if I asked two or three officials who are friends of mine, I know they would give me a few that would be more than the equal of ones by writers who are more famous in our Spain. In short, my friend,” I continued, “I have decided that Don Quixote should remain buried in the archives of La Mancha until heaven provides someone who can adorn him with all the things he lacks; for I find myself incapable of correcting the situation because of my incompetence and my lack of learning, and because I am by nature too lazy and slothful to go looking for authors to say what I know how to say without them. This is the origin of the perplexity and abstraction in which you found me: the reasons you have heard from me are enough reason for my being in this state.”
Page 1 of 1568
You can use the left and right keys on the keyboard to navigate between book pages.
Suggest a quote
Download the book for free in PDF, FB2, EPUb, DOC and TXT
Download the free e-book by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, «Don Quixote of La Mancha» , in English. You can also print the text of the book. For this, the PDF and DOC formats are suitable.
You may be interested in
Be the first to comment
AddAdd comment