Synopses & Reviews
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written,
Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read
Don Quixote."Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman's version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman's translation that I believe has not been achieved before. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to her heightened quality of diction. Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes's darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake."
From the Introduction by Harold Bloom
Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.
Review
"Against the odds, Grossman has given us an honest, robust and freshly revelatory Quixote for our times." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[A] Don Quixote that is contemporary without being irreverent....Grossman succeeds...in being faithful to Cervantes's comic spirit and natural style." Library Journal
Review
"A major literary achievement." Carlos Fuentes, New York Times Book Review
Review
"Edith Grossman actually makes it easy for you, O frazzled reader, because she has produced the most agreeable Don Quixote ever....Don Quixote, famously, is the first major work of Western literature to take ordinary human life for its subject specifically, a life that is replete with accidents, fiascoes, and indignities and make it over into something luminous with meaning. It does so without pomp or sententiousness it's the friendliest and least formal of all the Great Books yet will overwhelm you, in the end, with its moral and imaginative splendor." Terry Castle, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)
Synopsis
The 17th-century Spanish masterpiece, recently voted the world's best work of fiction by a poll of the world's leading authors in the definitive English translation by Edith Grossman, translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Synopsis
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece, in an expanded P.S. edition
Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
About the Author
Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write
Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of
Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.
Edith Grossman is the distinguished prize-winning translator of major works by leading contemporary Hispanic writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, and Mayra Montero. Her new translation of Don Quixote is Edith Grossman's excursion into the classic literature of an earlier time, a natural kind of progression in reverse. Now she employs her many years' experience translating modern classics to bring us an elegantly contemporary translation of Don Quixote.