Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (mobile ebook reader .txt) 📖

to one side or the other is observed; and por filo means nothing more than “exactly,” or “on the very line of midnight.” ↩

As a matter of fact the church tower of El Toboso is an unusually massive and conspicuous one. ↩

Proverb 235. ↩

Proverb 218. ↩

“Mala la hubistes, Franceses,
La caza de Roncesvalles”⁠—

the beginning of one of the most popular of the ballads of the Carlovingian cycle. Lockhart has in his own fashion given the substance of it in The Admiral Guarinos. The correct form of the first line is “Mala la vistes, Franceses.” ↩

Another even more popular ballad of the same group, beginning, “Ya cabalga Calaínos.” Both are in the undated Cancionero of Antwerp, and in Duran’s Romancero, numbers 402 and 373. ↩

In the original editions this chapter begins with the words which will be found at the beginning of Chapter XVII. As Hartzenbusch points out, they are quite out of place here. ↩

Proverb 58. ↩

A muddle by Sancho of the proverb (226) so often quoted. ↩

Proverb 129. ↩

Two lines from one of the Bernardo del Carpio ballads, Con Cartas y Mensageros. (Cancionero de Romances, 1550.) ↩

Proverb 199; literally and in full the phrase runs, “Fall, thunderbolt, yonder on Tamayo’s house”⁠—meaning, it is all the same to me, provided it does not fall on mine. ↩

Proverb 103. ↩

Proverb 134. As bachelors swarm in Salamanca, to go there looking for the bachelor, with no other address, would be the height of hopelessness. ↩

Proverb 144. ↩

Proverbs 13, 153. ↩

I.e., the lists of bachelors qualified for degrees. ↩

Ordinary brocade had only a triple border. ↩

Sancho perverts the word hacaneas into cananeas, which, if it means anything, means “Canaanites.” Possibly Cervantes may have intended a joke on the supposed Oriental origin of the ass, like that in the English slang title “Jerusalem pony.” ↩

Jo! que te estrego, burra de mi suegro!⁠—In all the translations I have seen, this exclamation is either omitted or misunderstood. Shelton and Jervas suppose it to be addressed by the girl to the ass she is riding. It is in reality a popular phrase (as may be perceived by the rhyme), and commonly used when a person takes amiss something that is intended as a favour or a compliment. The girl uses it here ironically, fancying that Sancho’s complimentary language is, as we should say, “chaff,” and striving to pay him off in his own coin. ↩

A line from Garcilaso de la Vega, Égloga III. ↩

See this note. ↩

A saddle with a high pummel and cantle and short stirrups. ↩

A scrap, apparently, of some song. ↩

The sarzo, a framework of reeds or canes on which the tilt is stretched in the country carts in Central and South Spain. ↩

A theatrical manager and dramatist of Toledo who flourished about 1580. ↩

Sopa de arroyo⁠—a slang phrase for pebbles. ↩

Proverb 167. ↩

In place of comparación⁠—“similitude”⁠—some correctors would read comparición⁠—“appearance” in the legal sense, as in the phrase “to put in an appearance;” but I think the original reading makes better sense. ↩

Impotent pieces of the game he plays
Upon this chequer-board of nights and days,
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.

Omar Khayyám

Don Quixote, it will be seen, held Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy of clothes. ↩

The first quotation is from one of the ballads on the dissensions of the Zegris and Abencerrages in Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras Civiles de Granada. I do not know who “sang” the other, but it is a popular phrase, and in full is “from friend to friend (or ‘between friends’) the bug in the eye.” Tener chinche en el ojo, or Sangre en el ojo is “to keep a sharp lookout.” ↩

A reference to the often quoted proverb, por el hilo se saca el ovillo. ↩

The pieces of verse introduced in the Second Part are more or less burlesques, and sometimes, as here and in Chapter XVIII, imitations of the affected poetry of the day. The verses in the First Part (except, of course, the commendatory verses, and those at the end of the last chapter) are serious efforts, and evidently regarded by Cervantes with some complacency. The difference is significant. ↩

Proverb 173. ↩

Proverb 50. ↩

Proverb 64. ↩

Crudo⁠—“raw”⁠—means also cruel, but even with this explanation the squire’s humour is not very intelligible. ↩

Proverb 44. “I get more than my share of ill-luck.” ↩

Tener alma de cántaro⁠—to be simplicity itself. ↩

Either as big, or following one another as closely, as the knots on a tether. ↩

The bean of the carob tree; “St. John’s bread.” ↩

Anyone who has ever watched a Spanish peasant with a bota knows how graphic this is. ↩

The chief town of La Mancha, and also of the great wine-growing district of which