I have been negligent in updating the blog, mostly due to the fact that I haven’t had a lot of time to read due to work pressures, and partly due to the fact that I’m *very* stuck in “Don Quixote”.
The first half of the book I took down in a week – for me, even that is slow reading (450 pgs in one week, compared to my normal monthly average of about 6200 pgs per month), but I was already starting to get swamped at work and I was coming down with a nasty cold, to boot.
But the first half was funny, compelling, and the interleaved stories that were not directly related to the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza added to the interest, rather than distracting me. In the second half (originally published somewhere around 12 years later), Cervantes whines about how readers of the first half complained about the interjected stories, and so in this half, he is only going to treat on the actual adventures of DQ & SP.
Sadly, although there is some good material in there, a lot of it is made up of long, didactic, even pedantic, monologues by DQ, setting forth his view of just about everything. A lot of the purported humor is lost, perhaps because of the gap of centuries between writing and reading; perhaps because even people reading at the time wouldn’t have gotten the humor; possibly because it was tailored more for the aristocratic audience of the day rather than the more plebian crowd; or maybe in spite of Cervantes’ intent, it just is not funny. He keeps telling the reader about how funny everything is – if it really were that funny, why does he have to keep reminding us? I don’t feel I can blame it on Edith Grossman, who did such a brilliant job translating on the first half – capturing the spirit and flow of a translation can’t be easy, and the first half was nearly seamless in terms of style and cohesion. I suspect that she did as beautiful a job on the second half, but unless you choose to alter the sense of what you’re translating to achieve a certain effect, you’re stuck with the original material and its flaws.
I’ve got about 100 pages to go, and it’s finally starting to pick up again. For the first half of the book, I was engaged and actively reading – the narrative gave me ideas to write on, made me think more about the context of the book’s time, location, and cultural setting, and the sub-text, as well as entertaining me; but very little in the first 350 pages of the second half has been more than just filler. Again, this may partially be due to my own circumstances, where my focus has been more on work than on what I’m reading; but I’ve been in similar circumstances before, and not had this much trouble with medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Victorian texts.
At this point, I feel committed to finishing the book, because I have high hopes for it to redeem itself, and bring back the enjoyment I had for the first half. However, in addition to the two books I read and wrote about already while I was working my way through DQ, I have read another two, quick reads that I will write about in later posts.
