Behold the Madman! - more of Unamuno's Quixote - All of which is literary criticism, and of small concern to us.

The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho is in some sense a work of literary criticism, a comment on the Cervantes novel.  It moves through the novel chapter by chapter and includes substantial quotations.  From each chapter, each adventure, Miguel de Unamuno extracts the principles of Quixotism, and to a lesser degree Sanchopanzism (“a good Quixotist has to be a Sanchopanzist as well,” 462) and by default the system that is his enemy, with which modern Spain is infected, Cervantism.  “We are as short of Quixotism as we are long on Cervantism.”

Unamuno freely skips anything that does not, let’s say, fire up his imagination.  I was so looking forward to Chapter 6, when the curate and the barber go through Alonso Quijano’s books.  Here it is, all of it:

Chapter Six

Cervantes here inserts that Chapter Six in which he describes the grand and clever scrutiny which the curate and the barber made of the library of our ingenious hidalgo. All of which is literary criticism, and of small concern to us.  It is a matter of books and not of life.  Let us pass over it in silence.  (52)

A lesson for me – my interest in the topic is a sad example of my corrupt Cervantism.  I am like the “curious documentalists devoted to factology” (354) who search for errors in Unamuno’s Quixotist writing, never finding them.  In the prologue to the third edition of his book, Unamuno addresses a mistake in which he moves a speech from Sancho Panza to another character.  But that is the attribution, argues Unamuno, in the original Arabic text.  “[I]t was Cervantes who misread the text, so that my interpretation, and not his, is the faithful one” (7).

It is all too possible that Jorge Luis Borges has permanently damaged Our Lord Don Quixote, making it unreadable as anything but a Pierre Menard-like act of imagination.  I would only counter that Borges, Unamuno, and more or less every permutation of fiction is already inherent in Don Quixote.

I was delighted – this is an aside – to see Unamuno recognize Henry Fielding, in “Gloss to a Passage by Fielding, the Cervantine,” as “the greatest, if not the first, of English Cervantines,” and Joseph Andrews (1742) as the great descendent of Don Quixote – the novel that retroactively turned Don Quixote into the “first novel.”  But Unamuno thinks “it [DQ] gains in translation” and “has been better understood outside of Spain.”

Like a novel, but not exactly like the specific novel Don Quixote, Unamuno’s books climaxes in the long episode with the Duke and Duchess.

Your Passion has begun, and the bitterest type of passion at that: passion by mockery…  You are dequixotized to a certain extent, but in exchange all those that mock you are quixotized…  “Behold the man!” they cried in mockery of Our Lord Christ.  “Behold the madman!” they will say to you, my Lord Don Quixote, and you will be the madman, unique, The Madman.  (122)

I need to read someone with more specialized knowledge to know exactly how heretical this heresy was at the time.  Unamuno does a heck of a job ushering in modern (Modern) literature, adapting Quixote for a new century.

What atrocious ideas! - Miguel de Unamuno's Our Lord Don Quixote - Grant me the gift of your madness, our eternal Don Quixote

Our Lord Don Quixote by Miguel de Unamuno, a book with a title so packed with meaning that it has influenced my thinking about Don Quixote ever since I learned the book existed twenty years ago.  Even better, Unamuno never wrote a book with this title.  He wrote The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (1905), and someone, perhaps the translator, Andrew Kerrigan, chose the more pungent title for the English version, which is also filled out by a number of related essays.

Still, the phrase is Unamuno’s.

Not even madness is understood here [Spain] any longer.  They go so far as to say and think that a madman must have a hidden reason or an economic motivation for being mad.  The “reason of unreason” has become a fact for these wretches.  If Our Lord Don Quixote were to rise from the dead and return to this Spain, they would seek out the ulterior motives behind his noble extravagance.  (9)

Yes, Our Lord Don Quixote is an example of everyone’s favorite genre, the Lucianic satire, a genuine sequel to The Praise of Folly (1511).  The truest sequel I can think of, since even more than Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833) it is a book-length praise of folly, a defense of Quixotism and Sanchopanzism.  As with Carlyle’s novel, it can be hard to tell when the author is serious and when he is joking or rhetorizing.  My sense with both books is that the more outrageous the idea, the more serious the author.  That is more or less the point of writing this kind of book.

I do not want to be reasonable in accordance with that wretched reasoning which feeds the opportunists.  Madden me, my Don Quixote!

Long live Don Quixote!  Long live Don Quixote in his battered defeat!  Long live Don Quixote in death!  Grant me the gift of your madness, our eternal Don Quixote, and let me rest in your bosom.  If you know how I suffer, my Don Quixote, among these countrymen of yours, whose entire reserves of heroic madness you seem to have used up, leaving them only the presumptuous madness which undid you!  (281)

Setting aside the specifically Spanish aspect of the book, which I did find a little cryptic – for example, the call to a mad heroism as a response to Spain’s recent defeat in the Spanish-American War, if I am getting that right, which I doubt – the core argument is that faith in unreason is a better way to live than a corrosive, inevitably faithless reason.  It is a proto-existentialism, where futile activity beats sensible inaction.

Don Quixote has just freed the galley slaves, and Unamuno has defended the action at length:

At this point I can see you, timid readers, raising your hands to your head and exclaiming: What atrocious ideas!  And then you will talk of social order and security and other such gibberish. (106)

These satires always abuse their readers.

Reader, listen: though I do not know you, I love you so much that if I could hold you in my hands, I would open up your breast and in your heart’s core I would make a wound and into it I would rub vinegar and salt, so that you might never again know peace but would live in continual anguish and endless longing.  If I have not succeeded in disquieting you with this Quixote of mine it is because of my heavy-handedness, believe me, and because the dead paper on which I write neither shrieks, nor cries out, nor sighs, nor laments, and because language was not made for you and me to understand each other.  (305)

How rarely a book so perfectly lives up to its title.

Never in unison, but in a kind of satisfying harmony - Edith Grossman on How To Translate

The last two chapters of translator Edith Grossman’s slim new book, Why Translation Matters (2010), are excellent.  So let’s start there.  One is on the mechanics of translating Don Quixote; the other is on translating Spanish-language poetry, and is packed with side-by-side examples.  As a brief guide to How Translation Is Done, one could hardly do better.  The arguments are non-technical, the examples are clear, and the reader who is, in the end, dissatisfied with some of Grossman’s decisions has learned something about how translation really works.

Grossman was commissioned to translate Don Quixote and given a two year deadline.  Best known for her translations of Gabriel García Márquez and other contemporary writers, Grossman says she “repeatedly asked the published whether he was certain he had called the right Grossman” (78).  Accepting the job, she had to confront “centuries of Cervantean scholarship,” at least twenty previous English translations, and four centuries of distance from Cervantes and his language.

Grossman thinks of herself as an actor, playing “the Cervantean part.”   Those of us who recently read Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” might start at hearing that, but Grossman does have a sort of Menardian conception of translation.  She wanted to “catch a glimpse of Cervantes’ mind”, and is at her best “when I can begin to imagine that the author and I have started to speak together – never in unison, but in a kind of satisfying harmony” (82).  Pierre Menard rejects actually becoming Cervantes as both “too easy” and impossible. Grossman argues that it is plenty hard, and possible, if “metaphorical.”

Grossman has a defense of including the errors of Cervantes that is both sensible (she picked an edition and stuck with it, however imperfect) and ludicrous (incorporating Cervantes’ own corrections would “scholarship[] away that enthusiastic, ebullient quality, what I think of as the creative surge”) (85).

The chapter on translating poetry is in part inspired by Grossman’s first-rate 2006 collection of Golden Age Spanish poetry, which I enjoyed way back here and recommend to everyone.  My great criticism of that book was that it was too short.  Now I can see why.  Her method is not honed for speed.  Grossman essentially memorizes the poems before translating them, since “I believe that of all these poetic elements, the most important is rhythm” (96).  She takes the music and the complexity of the sound entirely seriously.

In the poems Grossman supplies in Why Translation Matters, I can sometimes see what she is doing, and sometimes not.  Here are the first four lines of Jaime Manrique’s “Mambo”:

Contra un cielo topacio
y ventanales estrellados
con delirantes trinitarias
y rojas, sensuales cayenas;
***
Against a topaz sky
and huge windows starry
with delirious heartsease
and sensual red cayenne; (pp. 102-3)

The poem, I am told “recreates the dance rhythm of the mambo” (101) which, I have to admit, I can’t hear in either the original or in Grossman.  Poems are generally rhythmic, right?  Is this one more rhythmic?  But I suspect my ear is faulty.  And I like (both) poems for their imagery and characters – the poem is told by an adult remembering aunts dancing during his childhood, “and I dance hiding in their skirts.”

Grossman makes translating poetry seem like such fun.  If only her book were titled How Translation Is Done.

Mendele Mocher Sforim - Benjamin III, Don Quixote, and the limits of satire

Don Quixote is a satire on romances. Don Quixote has his brain addled by tales of knights and heroes, but discovers that the world has changed, or was never really like that in the first place. Common sense reigns, so don't tilt at windmills.

Actually, I have never read that book. In the Don Quixote I read, Quixote may be crazy, but much of the rest of the world is completely insane. Quixote, to his benefit, travels the country, makes a new friend, and genuinely lives in the world he has imagined. I am exaggerating certain aspects of the novel to make this point, but before dismissing Our Lord Don Quixote, I ask two questions: have you read Part II, and do you want to side with the priest and the barber as they throw books out the window?

I mention this because Mendele Mocher Sforim's Yiddish Quixote has the same mixed purpose. It's a satire on the sterile ignorance that results from the religious education of his fellow Jews. But it also in some ways celebrates the foolish Benjamin and his sidekick Senderel. They're incurable ignoramuses, but they also do something original and perhaps even noble.*

In other words, Benjamin may be wrong to blindly believe the stories he absorbs, and is mistreated in various ways while he wanders from town to town. But he's happy in the innocent world he has created, and anyway, life in the real world, in Jewish Russia, is not so hot:

"The town's newly appointed Chief of Police ruled it with an iron hand: he had snatched the skullcaps off several Jews, cut an earlock from another, locked up several townsmen overnight for not having their passports with them; while from still another he had confiscated a goat merely because the animal had eaten all the straw from a neighbor's newly thatched roof." (Ch. 1, p. 19)

I mentioned yesterday that Benjamin III is unfinished. Soon after it was published in 1878, Abramovitsh / Mendele Mocher Sforim stopped writing for eight years, partly for personal and financial reasons, and partly because of worsening conditions in the Jewish Pale. After the 1881 assassination of the reformist Czar Alexander II, under whom Abramovitsh had begun his career as a writer, things grew even worse - pogroms and harsher restrictions on Jewish life. The great Jewish emigration began, mostly to America and Palestine. Abramovitsh himself eventually ended up in Switzerland.

When he returned to writing, he was no longer interested in satirizing or improving the character of his own people. They had enough problems. So he never returned to Benjamin, which is too bad.

* The wives in the story may have a different view of this. There's a separate stratum of the story, suggesting that although the men may be able to wander about with their heads in the clouds, if the women did the same, everyone would starve.

Several books without which, like a craftsman without his tools, he would have been helpless - The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin III

My "Currently Reading" pile has spun out of control. It's all the fault of my Yiddish literature project. There are so many good books; they are not novels, mostly, which encourages me to dip into book after book. A Peretz fable here, a Sholem Aleichem monolgoue there, a few shtetl postcards from Yiddishland. So I end up with bookmarks in six or seven books, with a dozen more piled here and there. It's all been enjoyable.

Even the Yiddish novels are short, at least at the time I'm studying. Big bricks, like Chaim Grade's The Yeshiva (1967-68), seem to be a 20th century phenomenon. I've seen this pattern before, where new literatures from low-literacy populations results in short books. Big books come later.

S. Y. Abramovitsh's / Mendele Mocher Sforim's The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin III (1878), for example, fills 116 pages.* It's a little marvel, the best thing I've read by him so far. Benjamin is a shtetl Jew who decides to explore the world, like Alexander the Great, and like two previous (actual) Jewish explorers named Benjamin. He is an educated man, but only in Jewish religious texts, with no knowledge of geography beyond his own town. He's not alone:

"Once, by pure chance, someone brought a date into Tuneyadevka. How the townfolk flocked to gape at it! On opening the Pentateuch someone discovered that dates were referred to in the Holy Writ! Think of it! Dates grew in the Land of Israel, actually!" (Ch. 1, p. 19)

Benjamin reads about the Ten Lost Tribes and the legendary Lost Jews and the Great Viper, and sets off to find them (to avoid the last one, actually). On his first trip he makes it less than two miles from home before he gets lost in the woods. For the next attempt, he recruits a companion, Senderel the Housewife, the lowest of the low, as you can tell from his nickname. They sneak off from their wives:

"Next morning, long before the cowherds had driven their cattle to pasture, our Benjamin, hugging a bundle, was standing impatiently near the windwill. That bundle contained all the items he deemed essential for such a journey, to wit: prayer shawl and phylacteries, the prayer book Path of Life, the book A Statute for Israel, the Psalms and several books without which, like a craftsman deprived of his tools, he would have been helpless." (Ch. 4, p. 46)

Any reader packing books for his vacation will sympathize, or perhaps wince. Even Don Quixote did not take a pile of books with him on his travels. Yes, this is Don Quixote - the man addled by books, the abortive first expedition, the recruitment of Sancho Panza. Some of the later adventures parallel Cervantes closely, while others are original. Most are pretty funny, but the jokes are more at the expense of Benjamin's, and others', ignorance than his delusions. Abramovitsh's satirical purpose is quite different than Cervantes'. Maybe I'll postpone that for tomorrow.

The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin III has one serious defect that some readers may see as a fatal flaw. It is unfinished; it merely stops. Presumably more adventures were in the offing, but Abramovitsh never wrote them. I have a guess as to why - that's for tomorrow, too.

* I read the 1949 translation by Moshe Spiegel. There's a more recent version in a volume titled Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, which also includes Fishke the Lame.

Cervantes and the notarized ending

Last year many readers gnashed their teeth when they got to the epilogue of the last HP book, which the author used as a way to constrain post-copyright abuse and writers of fan fiction. Why she cared, I don't understand, since she could so easily distract herself by buying an island or something. Maybe it was an act of self-discipline, to remove the temptation of writing more of the same thing.

Anyway, there is a canonical precedent. Part 2 of Don Quixote (1615) was published 10 years after Part 1 (1605). At first, Cervantes has great fun with the idea that everyone Quixote and Sancho Panza meets already knows them, having, of course, read Part 1, a smash bestseller. But then, while in the middle of writing the novel, Cervantes (the actual Cervantes) come across a continuation of Don Quixote, published in 1614, and the fun turns sour. Cervantes is furious.

In Chapter 59, Don Quixote (the character) comes across the faux Don Quixote (the book) in an inn. Don Quixote (the "real" character) is on his way to the tournament in Saragossa, but it turns out that the "fictional" Don Quixote goes to Saragossa. So:

"Don Juan informed him that this new history told how Don Quixote, whoever he might be, in that same tournament had participated in a tilting at the ring but that the description given had shown a sorry lack of inventiveness, especially with regard to the mottoes of the knights and their liveries, in which regard it was impoverished in the extreme though rich in foolishness.

'For that very reason,' said Don Quixote, 'I will not set foot in Saragossa but will let the world see how this new historian lies, by showing people that I am not the Don Quixote of whom he is speaking.'"

So they go to Barcelona instead. The false Don Quixote keeps turning up.* The "real" Don Quixote visits a notary, to get a sworn statement that he is the real Don Quixote. And then there's more notarizing at the end:

"Perceiving that their friend was no more, the curate asked the notary to be a witness to the fact that Alonso Quijano the Good, commonly known as Don Quixote, was truly dead, this being necessary in order that some author other than Cid Hamete Bengali might not have the opportunity of falsely resurrecting him and writing endless histories of his exploits." (Ch. 74)

This is why people talk about Don Quixote as the first postmodern novel, this and the "Cid Hamete Bengali" business.

Dickens fought a similar problem most of his life. His serialized novels took 18 months or so to publish. Theatrical versions, with their own endings, would appear before he was done. Nicholas Nickleby has an ill-judged chapter where Nicholas rants about this evil, targeting a specific hack writer. Dickens would write his own "official" theatrical versions which would be rushed into production a few days after the last installment of the serial appeared. Notarization did not help; enforcement of copyright law did.

* The false Don Quixote, but never, per Nabokov's suggestion, the false Don Quixote. Nabokov wanted the "real" and "false" Don Quixotes to joust.