“We have announcements of festivals and parades where people dressed up as Don Quixote and Sancho and Dulcinea - in Mexico City and Lima.When last I discussed Don Quixote, I had come to dislike the character Don Quixote. The novel was forbidden throughout the colonies, said Stavans, but Don Quixote was pirated, "taken secretly against the rules on boats,” he said.
Don Quixote in the barber and priest’s cage, illustrated by the Mexican artist Eko. But settlers in modern-day Mexico and Peru smuggled the book into the colonies, making Spain’s most famous knight one of the first "undocumented immigrants" in the hemisphere. Stavans explained that Spanish authorities in the Americas banned fiction books in favor of the Bible and other religious texts to promote high moral standards. The growing disproportion between Spain’s ideals during Cervantes’ lifetime and the reality of everyday Spaniards also impacted Don Quixote. Don Quixote and the Knight of the White Moon, illustrated by the Mexican artist Eko. And Cervantes, like his beloved Don Quixote, was deeply humiliated because his life did not measure up to the heroic success stories of other soldiers. The author, who had also been kidnapped by pirates and was sold into slavery for 5 years after returning from war, spent most of his life in debt, wandering from job to job to make ends meet.
And just seven years later, Cervantes found himself in jail for losing Spanish Royal Treasury money to a bankrupt banker. The author applied in 1590 to immigrate to the Americas but Spanish authorities rejected him.
This battle between fantasy and reality inside Don Quixote’s head dramatizes the real-life tensions that defined Miguel de Cervantes’ life. Stavans explained that even though the bookworm knight defended the chivalric ideals of early Spanish conquistadores, Cervantes mocked those values to show the differences between our beliefs-how we see ourselves-and reality. “Don Quixote” was published in the 17th century, when Spain had already established itself as an empire in the Americas.
Cervantes’ masterpiece about a sad but funny knight who goes crazy after reading too many books has been considered for generations - and recently by top contemporary writers like Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie-as the world’s best book.
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