Don Quixote
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3.8 • 103 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Widely regarded as the world’s first modern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through 16th century Spain.
“Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality. . . . He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.”-Vladimir Nabokov
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There would seem to be little reason for yet another translation of Don Quixote. Translated into English some 20 times since the novel appeared in two parts in 1605 and 1615, and at least five times in the last half-century, it is currently available in multiple editions (the most recent is the 1999 Norton Critical Edition translated by Burton Raffel). Yet Grossman bravely attempts a fresh rendition of the adventures of the intrepid knight Don Quixote and his humble squire Sancho Panza. As the respected translator of many of Latin America's finest writers (among them Gabriel Garc a M rquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa), she is well suited to the task, and her translation is admirably readable and consistent while managing to retain the vigor, sly humor and colloquial playfulness of the Spanish. Erring on the side of the literal, she isn't afraid to turn out clunky sentences; what she loses in smoothness and elegance she gains in vitality. The text is free of archaisms the contemporary reader will rarely stumble over a word and the footnotes (though rather erratically supplied) are generally helpful. Her version easily bests Raffel's ambitious but eccentric and uneven effort, and though it may not immediately supplant standard translations by J.M. Cohen, Samuel Putnam and Walter Starkie, it should give them a run for their money. Against the odds, Grossman has given us an honest, robust and freshly revelatory Quixote for our times.
Customer Reviews
COPY ERROR found one so far
There is a repeat of passages. At least one location.
Book reads well and translation is great. For the price I would expect more from the copying.
Don't be scared of reading Don Quixote
For years, I had assumed that Don Quixote was one of those classics that nobody actually read anymore, because the language would be so dense and the writing style so, well, old that it would be a chore to get through. Then I came across this translation by Edith Grossman, read a couple of pages and realized how wrong I was.
Cervantes wrote Don Quixote with tremendous wit, verve and imagination and Grossman's translation retains as much of the humor and clever wordplay as is possible in a translation.
My fears that Don Quixote would be a boring slog were entirely unfounded. The inventiveness and imagination of Cervantes shines through every page and the language sparkles beautifully. Before I read it, I thought it was a novel I would never read. But by the time I was done, it had become -- hands down -- my favorite book.
So don't be scared: you too can read Don Quixote. And trust me, you're missing out if you don't.
Great translation, but faulty iBook
It is literally impossible to access the footnotes from the iPhone Books app. The numbers are visible, but tapping them does nothing. This is very aggravating, as the footnotes are often quite important to understanding the story. If I want to read them, I have to look them up later on my computer, which is ridiculous. Further, in portrait mode, inset poems (which are frequent) are cut off on the left edge. I can read them in landscape mode, but I shouldn’t have to change my preferred reading method to deal with faulty ebook typesetting. (This is nowhere near as problematic as the broken footnotes, however.) Finally, it would be very helpful (and I imagine rather easy) to include the page numbers from the print edition. I am reading the book as part of a club and it is difficult for us to get on the same page. I’m paying the full price of a paper book for this file – I expect it to work at least as well as a paper book would!