Dallying with the Don

8/26/2012: 82% and lollygagging

Mood: Equable

Drink: Tap water

One -yes, at last, one!- interesting thing about Don Quixote: Cervantes has begun to evidence a fillip of self-awareness.  He's set up his book as a history of a history, a scholarly work several steps removed from the events in play.  This allows him to do some narrative layering -sometimes with spot-on results. 

I read this passage and thought, YES, OH GOD YES.

"It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate it as he wrote it- that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting.  He said, too, that to go on, mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable drudgery..."