Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra [reading well .txt] 📗

xml:lang="es">Santiago y cierra España! ↩

Demasia⁠—literally “excess.” Hartzenbusch would add “of the risk,” or substitute “occasion,” but I venture to think the word by itself may be taken in the sense I have given. ↩

Proverbs 236 and 22. ↩

Proverb 158. ↩

Literally, “among the mallows.” ↩

There is some difference of opinion as to who were the three poets and a half allowed to be famous by Samson Carrasco; but probably Cervantes only intended a malicious little joke at the expense of the whole swarm of poets of his day, and their mutual admiration cliques. ↩

The decima is properly a stanza of ten eight-syllable lines; in the redondilla, which is more commonly a four-line stanza, the last line rhymes with the first. The acrostic was one of the poetical frivolities of the day. ↩

Proverb 101. ↩

Proverb 109. ↩

Proverb 113. ↩

Teresa inverts the proverb after Sancho’s fashion; see this note. ↩

Proverbs 148 and 91. ↩

The Infanta Urraca was the daughter of Ferdinand I of Castile and León, who, finding herself omitted in her father’s will, threatened to disgrace him by taking to a disreputable life. He in consequence altered his will and left her the city of Zamora, adding his curse upon him who should attempt to take it from her; a curse which shortly afterwards took effect when her brother Sancho, besieging the city, was treacherously slain by Vellido Dolfos. The story is the subject of two ballads⁠—Morir vos Queredes, Padre, and Acababa el Rey Fernando. ↩

Almohada is a cushion, which Sancho supposes to have had something to do with the origin of the sect of the Almohades. ↩

Proverb 62. ↩

There can be very little doubt, as Pellicer points out, that Molière took the scene between Monsieur Jourdain and his wife in act III of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme from this dialogue between Sancho and Teresa. ↩

One of the most important of the preliminaries in a formal combat was placing the men, so that neither should be at a disadvantage by having the sun in his eyes. So in the Poem of the Cid, the marshals portion out the sun to the Cid’s champions and the Infantes of Carrion. ↩

The garment worn by penitents, who have been tried by the Inquisition and have confessed. ↩

The reader should bear in mind that caballero⁠—“knight”⁠—means also “gentleman.” It is in the latter sense that Cervantes uses the word in the following passage, as the context will show. ↩

Hidalgos. ↩

Garcilaso de la Vega, elegy on the death of Don Bernardino de Toledo, brother of the Duke of Alva. ↩

Venturas, which the honsekeeper mistakes for aventuras, would mean strokes of good fortune. ↩

According to an old popular rhyme, Santa Apollonia complained of a toothache to the Blessed Virgin, who thereupon forbad any tooth, double or single, ever to trouble her again. The spell is alluded to in the Celestina act IV. ↩

Proverb 40⁠—if you have a thing in writing, words are unnecessary. ↩

Proverb 74⁠—Quien destaja no baraja; always mistranslated “He who cuts does not shuffle,” which would be meaningless here. It has nothing to do with cards. Destajar means to lay down conditions, to stipulate; Barajar certainly means to shuffle, to jumble things together, but in old Spanish it meant also to wrangle or dispute. ↩

Proverb 227. ↩

Proverb 149. ↩

Proverb 59, i.e. to butcher. ↩

Proverbs 100, 141, and 11. ↩

The play upon the words here cannot be translated. Sancho, blundering as usual, changes the common phrase rata por cantidad⁠—“ratably,” or “in proportion”⁠—into gata (cat) por cantidad, and Don Quixote corrects him by saying, “a rat (rata) may be sometimes as good as a cat.” ↩

Proverb 169. ↩

Proverbs 97 and 197. In the second, Shelton and Jervas mistranslate queja “demand;” thereby weakening the force of a proverb, the truth of which has been always recognised by politicians, diplomatists, and agitators. ↩

Proverb 174. ↩

Garcilaso de la Vega. Égloga III. ↩

Cid Hamete Benengeli might have objected with more reason to this than to Sancho’s speeches in Chapter V. ↩

Proverb 73. ↩

The Pantheon: the ascent of the dome by Charles V in 1536 is historical, but none of the memoirs mention the story of the Roman gentleman. ↩

Julio is “July” as well as “Julius.” ↩

The obelisk that now stands in front of St. Peter’s. ↩

San Diego de Alcalá, canonized in 1588, and San Salvador de Orta, or San Pedro de Alcántara, in 1562. ↩

Media noche era por filo⁠—the beginning of the ancient ballad of Conde Claros. Ticknor, apropos of this ballad, makes a strange mistake, assuming that the words por filo refer to some early contrivance for measuring time, and therefore indicate a date before the invention of clocks. Filo here is the line marked on a balance, by which the deviation of the index