Bigger Than I Expected
What were you thinking, asked people when I exclaimed over how huge the Sistine Chapel was.
“A little room, 20 feet square maybe, with a six foot ceiling. You know, a ceiling that you can actually imagine someone painting.”
How big did you think he was going to be, asked people when I stared up and up at David’s statue in the Accademia in Florence.
“Seven feet, tops. Bigger than life, sure, but not more than double!”
As I mentioned in my oil-change story, there are a lot of things that I simply don’t know until I experience them myself.
I was reminded of these gaffes when I went to the library yesterday. Over the past several months, references to Don Quixote have been accumulating in my mind, making me ever more aware of this gap in my cultural literacy. Terry Gilliam made “Lost in La Mancha,” a documentary that detailed his failed attempt to make Don Quixote into a movie. A new translation of Don Quixote was published to much acclaim, and a weblog was created in response. My friend Duff recommended The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters in spite of its cover; it features a fictional attempt to commit Don Quixote to film.
It’s time, I thought. I reserved it from the library, and was bursting with excitement when I went to pick it up. Then I literally picked up the Neal Stephenson”•sized* volume. I had NO IDEA that Don Quixote was such a long book. My enthusiasm evaporated.
Until I read the translator’s note, that is.
The extraordinary significance and influence of this novel were reaffirmed, once again, in 2002, when one hundred major writers from fifty-four countries voted Don Quixote the best work of fiction in the world….
And his writing is a marvel: it gives off sparks and flows like honey. Cervantes’s sytle is so artful it seems absolutely natural and inevitable; his irony is sweet-natured, his sensibility sophisticated, compassionate, and humorous. If my translation works at all, the reader should keep turning the pages, smiling a good deal, periodically bursting into laughter, and impatiently waiting for the next synonym (Cervantes delighted in accumulating synonyms, especially descriptive ones, within the same phrase), the next mind-bending coincidence, the next variation on the structure of Don Quixote’s adventures, the next incomparable conversation between the knight and his squire.
My enthusiasm returned, more cautiously this time. Maybe, I thought, just maybe I can read Don Quixote. I can give up my “one book at a time” rule while I do, so it isn’t the only thing I’m reading. And if I read 50 pages a day, I can finish in three weeks.
Am I brave or foolhardy to take on this tome? Will I fail? Readers, I will let you know.
Works mentioned here:
*Copyeditor’s note. To be precise, I am using an en dash in an adjectival phrase consisting of an open compound (here, a proper name) to another word. The Chicago Manual of Style only mentions this use with prefixes, though. As the CMS notes, this is a bit fussy, but I’ve spent so much time looking it up that I’ve included it.
April 20th, 2005 at 5:27 am
maybe there’s an abridged version?
i know it was of biblical proportions, likely why I don’t think I’ve ever read the entire thing.
i hope you caught V. Mars…. more kissing! woot!
April 20th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
Don Quixote is really a very very good book, I’ve had the joy of reading it in both English and Spanish…AND I had an abridged version that I read when I was like 14 and I didn’t realize just how much of it I was missing.
They tend to leave out the different narrators and focus JUST on Don Quixote’s foibles, and really the two narrators are the best part.
April 22nd, 2005 at 3:01 pm
I made it through the translator’s intro, which was charming, Harold Bloom’s intro, which I found needlessly abstruse, and 50+ pages into the book itself, which I enjoyed, though it did hurt my wrists to hold the book unsupported.
As a child, one of my favorite books was Little Women, which I read again and again. I was shocked as an adult to discover that I’d only ever read an abridged version, so I was in my mid-thirties before I read all of Little Women.