Don Quixote

Cervantes’s masterpiece, joyously restored to its riotous, laugh-out-loud glory.

This bold new translation of one of the world’s greatest novels gives us Don Quixote as it was for Cervantes’s first readers: a rollicking, uproarious comedy. With stylish, inventive verve and while avoiding the embalming literalism that has flattened many modern translations, Kimi Traube captures the comic zing of Cervantes’s puns, slapstick, and satire with wit that lands for a twenty-first-century audience.

Yet the comedy never comes at the expense of faithfulness to Cervantes’s vision or the book’s cultural significance. Cervantes’s farce was always a vehicle for bigger questions: How do we know what is true? Who has the authority to tell a story? How does power warp our perception of reality? By bringing the humor back to life, Traube lets those questions sting anew, reminding us why Don Quixote is not just funny, but also one of the first modern—and most enduringly subversive—novels in world literature. This is the Don Quixote for a new generation.