IN a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income.
這回讀屠孟超譯本前的陳凱先之『前言』，發現他引著錢鍾書翻譯的海涅論文，卻不說明譯者。可見似有忌諱？ 不過這不重要，對我比較重要的是： 我 之前讀Rudolf Arnheim, Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989，他提醒應該注意《堂吉訶德》中堂吉訶德的「抓狂的不同認知模式」。我把他這筆記當做課題，興趣頗高重讀。不料，這回陳凱先之『前言』將解答說出，讓我覺得有點「掃興」。
可見許多教育過程，解答其實沒什麼意思。
*****
"吉訶德" 轉引{堂吉訶德}是透過大江健三郎的。
"桑丘"在書末說，"書不言處（之妙），請取{堂吉訶德}一覽便知......"
偶爾讀到另外一引句，特別博兩位一粲：
"`Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un caballo rucio rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?' `Lo que veo y columbro,' respondio Sancho, `no es sino un hombre sobre un as no pardo como el mio, que trae sobre la cabeza una cosa que relumbra.' `Pues ese es el yelmo de Mambrino,' dijo Don Quijote."--CERVANTES.
"`Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a dapple-gray steed, and weareth a golden helmet?' `What I see,' answered Sancho, `is nothing but a man on a gray ass like my own, who carries something shiny on his head.' `Just so,' answered Don Quixote: `and that resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino.'"
外文系張淑英教授榮膺西班牙皇家學院對等院士 西班牙皇家學院 （RAE- Real Academia Española / Royal Spanish Academy）在4 月 23 日，塞萬提斯和莎士比亞兩大文豪逝世四百週年紀念日前夕，連續兩週於院士全會中選出「外籍院士」17 名。這是繼 2009 年之後，再度從全球西班牙語學者中遴選，外文系張淑英教授膺選這 17 名「皇家學院外籍對等院士」，共五位女性學者的殊榮。
Miguel de Cervantes was held captive in Algiers for five years. Ahead of the 400th anniversary of his death, Fiona Macdonald finds out how trauma shaped his greatest works.
BBC.COM|由 FIONA MACDONALD 上傳
‘Don Quixote’ then and now
Four centuries after Cervantes’ death, we can see the novel as a response to a media revolution that in some ways mirrors our own
In January 1605, an ageing veteran of Spain’s wars against the Ottoman Empire published the strangest of books. Unlike the bestsellers of the day, it was not a chivalric romance, a pastoral drama or the fictional confession of an outlaw. Instead, it told the story of a gentleman so besotted with reading those kinds of books, especially the ones about knights errant and their magical adventures, that he loses his mind and begins to believe they are real.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was an immediate and roaring success. Demand for copies was so high that within a few months its author, Miguel de Cervantes, was having the book distributed throughout the Iberian peninsula while his publishers began work on a second edition. Two pirated versions appeared in London, along with two others in Valencia and Zaragoza; stacks of copies were loaded on to the galleons embarking for the New World. By June the book’s two central characters had become iconic figures, their effigies carried in parades and imitators popping up in celebrations both royal and plebeian.
Don Quixote would become perhaps the most published work of literature in history. Its influence on writers has been unparalleled. When the Norwegian Nobel Institute polled 100 leading authors in 2002 to name the single most important literary work,Don Quixote was a handsome winner; no other book came close.
While Cervantes may have been surprised by his novel’s success, he was certainly not innocent of the fact that his style was something new. In the preface he penned for the publication of his collection Exemplary Novellas eight years after the success of Don Quixote, he took pride in his originality, pointing out that while “the many novellas that are in print in [Castilian] are all translated from foreign languages … these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen; engendered by my wit, born of my pen, and now being raised by the printing press”.
Here we can appreciate something of the disruption that Cervantes wrought to the old Aristotelian categories of poetry and history into which literary texts were supposed to fall. Fantastical in the sense that they were born exclusively of his own imagination, and thus a vehicle for universal, philosophical truths, his stories were also intended to have real pertinence to his readers’ lives: they aspired to the condition of the highest literature even as they laid claim to the territory of the most popular.
“I have given them the name exemplary,” Cervantes wrote of the 12 novellas, “and if you look at it well, there is not one from which you cannot take some profitable example.” To understand that example, to unearth the “mystery hidden in them that raises them up”, his public would have to approach these stories in a new way, not merely as external judges of an entertaining and false image of the world, but as “attentive readers” attuned to how their own prejudices helped create that image.
Today, 400 years after his death, we rightly fête Cervantes as the creator of the modern novel. What is less appreciated is the extent to which his innovations were a response to a media revolution that in some respects mirrors our own. Don Quixotewas published at a time when the print industry was booming. Literacy had exploded during the previous century, and now extended beyond the clergy and nobility to many commoners and townspeople, merchants and farmers.
We see the presence and influence of books in the very first pages of Cervantes’ novel: not only are they the ostensible cause of Quixote’s madness, they also quickly become the subject of commentary from almost every character encountered, no matter what his or her station in life. As Quixote is escorted home after his first ill-fated outing, his housekeeper cries at the top of her voice: “Woe is me! Now I know, and it’s true as the death I owe God, that those accursed books of chivalry he’s always reading have driven him crazy.”
Then there was the theatre, which in Renaissance Europe had an impact comparable to that of television and film today. In the continent’s fast-growing urban centres, up to 90 per cent of the populace had some experience of the stage by the early 17th century, with tickets priced for all social demographics.
Cervantes’ disillusionment with his society led him to create not just a picture of the world, but a picture of how people pictured the world and got it wrong
These books and theatrical productions, heavily controlled and often sponsored by the monarchy and its thought police, the Inquisition, tended to paint a very specific picture of what was right and desirable for a citizen of the Spanish state. Honour was available to all men as long as they were free of even the slightest stain of suspicion concerning the religious purity of their ancestry or the sexual purity of their women. This insidious ideology metastasised throughout Spanish society almost in inverse proportion to the control the Spanish crown was able to exert over its diverse subjects, its economy and its foreign policy conflicts.
Cervantes obsesses over this world in his fiction. His entire literary creation is bent on exploring the ramifications of a media age in which everyone has access to multiple, often conflicting portrayals of reality. More than that, though, he was highly sceptical about the reality readers and theatregoers were being led to believe in — a scepticism that had much to do with the peculiar circumstances of his life.
Born in the middle of the 16th century in a university town at the heart of what was then the world’s most powerful empire, Cervantes was always on the move: first as the son of an itinerant father whose efforts to support a growing family led him further and further into debt; later as a fugitive, soldier, captive and tax collector. On the run from Spain after wounding another man in a duel, the young Cervantes made his way to Italy, where he joined the Papal forces and sailed against the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Lepanto off the Greek coast. Gravely injured there, he recovered in Sicily and Naples before attempting a return home by ship several years later, when misfortune struck again and he was captured by Barbary pirates.
For the next five years Cervantes suffered in the squalor of Algiers’ dungeons, attempting escape no fewer than four times — each one a failure that could have led to his death. Finally ransomed and returned to Spain, the former PoW might have expected a hero’s welcome. Instead, a bankrupt monarchy repeatedly rebuffed his attempts to secure a pension or a post worthy of his sacrifices, and he ultimately stooped to becoming a requisition and tax collector for a deeply unpopular government.
In his fifties by the time he published Don Quixote, Cervantes had become deeply disillusioned with the ideals his society trumpeted but failed to live up to. This more than any other single factor accounts for the extraordinary success and innovation ofDon Quixote. For in it, Cervantes created not just a picture of the world but a picture of how people pictured the world and got it wrong. This approach to fiction continues today and extends far beyond the novel: characters in plays, television and movies all need to be constructed in a way that allows us to experience the limits of their point of view, and this convinces us of their “reality”. And of course, we ourselves are split in similar ways, since we demand that sense of reality while remaining perfectly aware that what we are reading or viewing is invented.
The point to grasp is that Cervantes’ innovation was a reaction — a brilliant, once-in-a-millennium reaction — to a world in which media had blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality. The state-controlled theatre industry and the monarchy’s censors and official historians kept a sharp eye on the content of plays and books, and actively propagated a vision of the nation that helped sustain the monarchy’s fragile alliance with the landed aristocracy while co-opting a complacent bourgeoisie and peasantry with fantasies of honour and blood purity. Such fantasies in turn depended on an extended and multi-pronged media campaign demonising both Jews, most of whom had been expelled or converted at the end of the 15th century, and Moriscos, the former Muslims who were now living as Christians but still retained some Moorish cultural practices.
Cervantes, clearly unable to reconcile his own experiences with this picture of the world, did something different: he made dissonance the subject of his writing. This is why so many people today who finally decide to return to that great classic are stunned to find in Don Quixote so much that they consider “modern”: a preface in which the author appears as a character; an obviously fictional frame story that insists that what is being recounted is utterly real; characters making mention of the author as if he were another character in the book; and, finally, in the second half of the novel, published 10 years after the first, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza reflecting on their own fame as literary characters and the miserable attempt of a plagiarist to replace them during the years separating the first and second publication of their adventures.
In a short play published towards the end of his life, Cervantes depicts a small town whose leaders decide to hire a team of puppeteers to put on a magical puppet show. The conman who convinces them to invest in his phoney scheme tells them that they will see marvels beyond their wildest dreams on the makeshift stage, but also warns them that the magic of the performance is denied to anyone “who has any trace of that other faith, or who was not born and procreated by parents bound in legitimate matrimony”.
The men of the town naturally begin to bluster and protest. As the town elder says: “I can tell you that, for my part, I can go safely to the test, because my father was the mayor of this town; and I’ve got rancid old Christian meat four inches thick on the four flanks of my lineage; you tell me if I’ll have any problems seeing the show!” And see it they do, earning nothing but a fleecing for their efforts, and the broadside of a soldier’s sword when they try to use their old Christian privilege to avoid billeting the King’s troops.
What Cervantes realised, and what we should perhaps remind ourselves today, is that precisely because media are immersive, they are capable not only of persuading us, but of making us take them for reality itself. When media threaten to blur that border, fiction is on call. Its job is to jog our awareness, shake our complacency, and show us how we’ve taken the bait.
William Egginton is a professor in the humanities and of German and Romance languages and literatures at the Johns Hopkins University. His book ‘The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World’ is published in the UK by Bloomsbury on June 16
Photographs: Neue Pinakothek, Munich; Hulton Archive
