Don Quixote class, Day 1

Today, for the first day of our Don Quixote class, we did a close reading of the first paragraph of Chapter 1, possibly the most famous opening paragraph in all of Spanish literature:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda. El resto della concluían sayo de velarte, calzas de velludo para las fiestas, con sus pantuflos de lo mesmo, y los días de entresemana se honraba con su vellorí de lo más fino. Tenía en su casa una ama que pasaba de los cuarenta, y una sobrina que no llegaba a los veinte, y un mozo de campo y plaza, que así ensillaba el rocín como tomaba la podadera. Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta años; era de complexión recia, seco de carnes, enjuto de rostro, gran madrugador y amigo de la caza. Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada, que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los autores que deste caso escriben; aunque por conjeturas verosímiles se deja entender que se llamaba Quijana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento: basta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad.

I don't want to translate the whole thing right now, but basically my goals for this exercise had to do with strangeness and familiarity.

First of all, there's the strangeness of the language. This is modern Spanish, but it doesn't feel modern to today's students. It feels as unfamiliar as the English of the King James Bible. But by working through it together I hope to show them that its unfamiliarity is not an insurmountable barrier. it's important not to be put-off by the language, because much of Cervantes's humor is built on irony and witty turns of phrase and it's easy to get so bogged down in trying to make sense of the unfamiliar that we miss the comic elements.

I want them to appreciate the strangeness of the Spanish and of the world this book inhabits. Ironically, part of this strangeness is its utter ordinariness -- something we don't always recognize because 400 years separate our world from Don Quixote's. The world of the novel is not our world and the language is not our language. When I teach Don Quixote I try to acknowledge distance and I see it as my function -- especially with undergraduates -- to bridge the gap between those two worlds. As I said above, that gap can prevent us from recognizing just how ordinary the world of Don Quixote is. Cervantes was writing a parody of chivalric romances, which adventure books that were often set in exotic lands. For his parody, Cervantes chose La Mancha, possibly the least exotic place in all of Spain. This is perhaps unfair to California's great Central Valley, but I tell the students to imagine a superhero, whose mission in life is to protect not Metropolis or Gotham, but Bakersfield and Fresno.

More to come.