Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman], page 120
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7. A ritual in which cardinals change their hoods on Easter Sunday.
16. “Farewell” in Latin.
3. A traditional expression that means “I don’t want things that can cause trouble.”
6. The hippogryph, a winged horse, and Frontino, the horse of Ruggiero, Bradamante’s lover, appear in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso; Frontino is also mentioned by Boiardo in Orlando innamorato.
3. A ruse allegedly used by Gypsies to make their animals run faster.
1 As Martín de Riquer points out, Leonela says “us” because she was complicit in their affair.
2 Martín de Riquer indicates that Dorotea uses this term mockingly.
7 Cervantes, who was not an officer, apparently joined the fleet in Messina on September 2, 1571; it set sail on September 16, and the battle of Lepanto, the definitive defeat of the Turks by the Christian alliance, took place on October 7.
4 Hasán Bajá, king of Algiers between 1577 and 1578, was born in Venice in 1545; he was captured by the Turks, renounced Christianity, and led the Turkish landings at Cadaqués and Alicante; Cervantes met him during his own captivity.
4 In this context, the word means a Moor who knew a Romance language.
2 The phrase is based on the one used when the excommunicated return to the Church. The Latin that follows is equivalent to “as it was in the beginning.”
1 “The tailor who wasn’t paid” is the first part of a proverb (the second part usually is not cited) that roughly translates as “The tailor wasn’t paid, and had to supply his own braid,” meaning that one can lose twice: by not being paid a fee for a service and by not being reimbursed for the expenses incurred in performing the service.
3 Gonzalo Fernández was the Great Captain, so called for his military exploits during the reign of the Catholic Sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella.
1 Penitents in Spain, for example those still seen today in Holy Week processions, and those brought before the tribunals of the Inquisition, wore sheets and hoods that bear an unfortunate resemblance to the outfits of the Ku Klux Klan.
4 The Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Cervantes’s protector.
2 The ordinary clothing of the clergy and of scholars; the term is used here mockingly, as if it were the habit of one of the great military orders, such as the order of Santiago (St. James).
6 The housekeeper, mentioned a few sentences down, clearly comes in now, too, but because of an oversight or an error, by Cervantes or his printer, she is not alluded to here.
4 It was the custom in universities to write on the walls, in red paint, the names of those who had been awarded professorships.
6 Cranes were supposed to post sentinels at night, when the rest of the flock was sleeping, and during the day, when they were feeding. All of these concepts regarding animals were fairly commonplace.
4 Augustus exiled Ovid to these islands in the Black Sea.
3 A village near Madrid.
2 The reference is to the expert swordsman whom they met on the road at the beginning of chapter XIX and who obviously accompanied them throughout the episode of Camacho’s wedding.
12 A monastery near Naples that is visible from the sea and invoked by mariners.
10 The episode was mentioned in chapter V of the first part.
2 The characters and story are taken from Spanish ballads. Gaiferos, Charlemagne’s nephew, was about to marry Charlemagne’s daughter Melisendra, when she was captured by Moors. For some reason Gaiferos spends seven years in Paris, not thinking of her, until Charlemagne persuades him to free her. Roland lends him weapons and a horse, Gaiferos reaches Sansueña, where Melisendra is being held by King Almanzor, and sees her at a window. He rescues her and they flee, pursued so closely by the Moors that Gaiferos has to dismount and do battle with them; he is victorious, and he and Melisendra return to Paris in triumph.
4 This was a nickname given to the Andalusian town of Espartinas because, as the story goes, a clock was needed for the church tower, and the priest sent away to Sevilla for a “nice little pregnant female clock” (relojais the nonexistent feminine form of reloj, or “clock”) so that the baby clocks could subsequently be sold. The same story was also told about other towns.
2 An adage that means “Life is full of surprises.”
2 This is an allusion to death.
3 The original proverb is “Straw and hay and hunger’s away” (De paja y de heno, el vientre lleno).
5 A wizard, the supposed chronicler of the Knight of Phoebus.
1Lobo is “wolf,” and lobuna is “wolflike”; in the next phrase, zorro is “fox,” and zorruna is “foxlike.”
9 The constellation of the Pleiades.
3 Cervantes uses a phrase, dar pantalia, whose exact significance is not clear. It can mean either polishing or repairing shoes (Shelton translates it as “cobble,” but the contemporary French and Italian versions differ).
7 The story, in fact, dates back to the popular life of the saints called The Golden Legend (Legenda aurea) by the Italian Dominican Iacopo da Varazze (1228?–1298).
1 There were, at the time, two Asturian provinces: Asturias de Oviedo and Asturias de Santillana.
2 Aranjuez is a royal palace famous for its fountains; fuenteis the word for both “fountain” and “issue,” which allows the wordplay.
1 The phrase is based on a proverb: “When you have a good day, put it in the house,” which is roughly equivalent to “Make hay while the sun shines.”
4 A person of Muslim descent, living in territory controlled by Christians, who had ostensibly, and often forcibly, been converted to Christianity.
1 Vireno abandoned Olimpia in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso; Aeneas abandoned Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid.
10 A hunter who came upon Diana when she was bathing; she turned him into a stag, and he was then torn to pieces by his own dogs.
11 This is the Catalan word for “thieves,” used here as an insult.
6 Martín de Riquer points out that the book has not been identified and that in Italian the title would be Le Bagattelle, not Le Bagatele. There has been speculation that this might be an anagram for Le Galatee, by Giovanni della Casa, which was translated into Spanish in 1585 by Dr. Domingo Becerra, who was a prisoner in Algiers at the same time as Cervantes.
5 The Spanish word for “priest” that is used here is cura.
1 The earliest Greek poets, including Orpheus, were allegedly from Thrace.
3 The sun, in Greek mythology.
3 An embroidered cloth or tapestry, bearing a knight’s coat of arms, that was draped over pack mules.
8. Published anonymously, it has two parts, which appeared in 1521 and 1526, respectively.
9. An unfaithful prose translation of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (Roland in Love), it was published in three parts in 1533, 1536, and 1550, respectively. The first two are attributed to López de Santa Catalina and the third to Pedro de Reynosa.
10. The archbishop of Reims, whose Fables (1527) are a fictional Carolingian chronicle. He is constantly cited for his veracity in The Mirror of Chivalry.
11. Matteo Boiardo was the author of Orlando innamorato; Ludovico Ariosto, who wrote Orlando furioso, referred only to the Christian God in his work. Cervantes disliked the Spanish translations of Ariosto, including the one by Captain Jerónimo de Urrea (1549), which he refers to in the next paragraph.
12. The references are to two poems, the first by Agustín Alonso (1585) and the second by Francisco Garrido Vicena (1555).
13. The first of the Palmerín novels, published in 1511, is of uncertain authorship. The Palmerín of England was the third novel in the series; it was written in Portuguese by Francisco Moraes Cabral and translated into Castilian by Luis Hurtado (1547).
14. Written by Jerónimo Fernández and published in 1547.
15. As indicated earlier, this was first published in 1490; composed in Catalan by Johanot Martorell and continued by Martí Johan de Galba, the anonymous Castilian translation was published in 1511.
16. In the translation of this sentence, which has been called the most obscure in the entire novel, I have followed the interpretation offered by Martín de Riquer. One of the problematic issues in Spanish is the word galeras, or “galleys,” which can mean either ships or publisher’s proofs.
17. As indicated earlier, this was the first pastoral novel in Spanish.
18. A very poor continuation by Alonso Pérez, a Salamancan physician, printed in 1564; also published in 1564 is the highly esteemed Diana enamorada (Diana in Love) by Gil Polo.
19. Published in 1573; according to Martín de Riquer, Cervantes’s praise is ironic, since he mocked the book in his Viaje del Parnaso (Voyage from Parnassus).
21. Published in 1582 by Luis Gálvez de Montalvo.
22. Published in 1580 by Pedro de Padilla.
23. Published in 1586 by Gabriel López Maldonado and his collaborator, Miguel de Cervantes.
24. This pastoral novel was the first work published by Cervantes, in 1585; the often promised second part was never published and has been lost.
25. Epic poems of the Spanish Renaissance, they were published in 1569, 1584, and 1588, respectively.
26. Published in 1586 by Luis Barahona de Soto.
1. The first two are epic poems by Jerónimo Sempere (1560) and Pedro de la Vecilla Castellanos (1586); the third work is not known, although Luis de Ávila did write a prose commentary on Spain’s wars with the German Protestants. Martín de Riquer believes that Cervantes intended to cite the poem Carlo famoso (1566) by Luis Zapata.
2. The enchanter Frestón is the alleged author of Don Belianís of Greece, a chivalric novel.
3. A Latinate word for “island” that appeared frequently in novels of chivalry; Cervantes uses it throughout for comic effect.
1. A monstrous giant in Greek mythology who had fifty heads and a hundred arms.
2. An entrance to the mountains of the Sierra Morena, between La Mancha and Andalucía.
3. A historical figure of the thirteenth century.
4. Agrajes, a character in Amadís of Gaul, would say these words before doing battle; it became a proverbial expression used at the beginning of a fight.
5. The “second author” is Cervantes (that is, the narrator), who claims, in the following chapter, to have arranged for the translation of another (fictional) author’s book. This device was common in novels of chivalry.
6. Cervantes originally divided the 1605 novel (commonly called the “first part” of Don Quixote) into four parts. The break in the narrative action between parts was typical of novels of chivalry.
1. These lines, probably taken from a ballad, appeared in Alvar Gómez’s Spanish translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi, although nothing comparable is in the Italian original.
2. A commonplace in chivalric fiction was that the knight’s adventures (Platir’s, for example) had been recorded by a wise man and then translated, the translation being the novel.
3. Published in 1586 and 1587, respectively.
4. A Moor who had been converted to Christianity.
5. An allusion to Hebrew, spoken by the Jews who were merchants in the Alcaná.
6. Cide is the equivalent of señor; Hamete is the Arabic name Hamid; Benengeli (berenjenain Spanish) means “eggplant,” a favorite food of Spanish Moors and Jews. In chapter II of the second volume (1615), the “first author” is, in fact, referred to as Cide Hamete Berenjena.
7. Two arrobas is approximately fifty pounds; two fanegasis a little more than three bushels.
8. Zancas means “shanks”; panza, as indicated earlier, means “belly” or “paunch.”
1. Cervantes apparently divided this portion of the text into chapters after he had written it, and he did so in haste: the adventure with the Basque is concluded, and the Galicians do not appear for another five chapters.
2. The Santa Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, was an armed force that policed the countryside and the roads.
3. Sancho confuses homicidios (“homicides”) and omecillos (“grudges”).
4. Lint was used in much the same way that absorbent cotton is used in modern medicine.
6. An azumbre was the equivalent of a little more than two liters.
7. Loosely based on an episode in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, in which Reinaldos de Montalbán takes the enchanted helmet of the Moorish king Mambrino from Dardinel (not Sacripante) and kills him in the process.
8. A reference to an episode in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, in which Agricane’s army, consisting of “twenty-two hundred thousand knights,” laid siege to Albracca.
9. This name appears in a novel of chivalry, Clamades y Clarmonda (1562); in later editions of Don Quixote it was changed to “Sobradisa,” a kingdom mentioned in Amadís of Gaul.
1. Don Quixote’s soliloquy incorporates all the elements traditionally associated with the classical idea of the Golden Age.
2. A precursor of the violin, mentioned frequently in pastoral novels.
1. The lines are from Orlando furioso. “Roland” is the English (and French) for “Orlando.” The Spanish version of the name is “Roldán.”
2. Virgil requested that the Aeneid be burned at his death.
1. According to a medieval legend, the wounds of a murder victim would bleed in the presence of the killer.
1. There is a Yanguas in the modern province of Soria and another in the province of Segovia; in the first edition, however, Cervantes calls the drovers “Galicians.” For the sake of clarity, I have called them “Yanguesans,” which is how they are referred to in part II.
2. Sancho misremembers the name (Fierabrás) associated with the healing potion.
3. The humor here stems from wordplay based on costas (“costs”) and costillas (“ribs”).
4. The “merry god” is Bacchus.
5. Cervantes erroneously describes the city entered by Silenus as having one hundred gates, which refers to Egyptian Thebes; Silenus rode into Thebes in Boeotia, which had seven gates.
1. A span is approximately eight inches.
2. Sancho is mistaken (or lying): he and Don Quixote have been traveling for three days.
3. According to Martín de Riquer, muledrivers were usually Moriscos, and Cervantes is suggesting a connection between this character and Cide Hamete Benengeli.
4. A book of chivalry based on an earlier French poem and published in Spanish in 1513.
1. The phrase recalls the opening of a traditional ballad about El Cid.
2. A coin of little value, worth about one-sixth of a maravedí.
3. Tossing a dog in a blanket was a Carnival diversion.
4. An ancient Spanish coin of very little value.
1. The reference is to Amadís of Greece, the great-grandson of Amadís of Gaul.
2. The Greek and Roman name for Sri Lanka. The names of the warriors in this section are parodies of the kinds of grandiloquent names typical of novels of chivalry (Alifanfarón is roughly equivalent to “Alibombast,” Pentapolínto “Pentaroller”). The listing of combatants appears to be a brief detour by Cervantes into the world of the epic poem.
