Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [17]
have Homer’s Calypso; valiant captains, and none other than Julius Caesar will give you himself in his Commentaries, and Plutarch will provide you with a thousand Alexanders. If you write about love, with the couple of ounces of Tuscan that you know you’ll run right into León Hebreo,12 who will inflate your meters. And if you don’t care to travel to foreign lands, right at home you have Fonseca’s Del amor de Dios,13 which summarizes everything that you or the most ingenious writer might wish to know about the subject. In short, all you have to do is to name the names or touch on the histories that I have mentioned, and leave it to me to put in annotations and notes; I swear to you that I’ll fill up the margins and use four quartos of paper at the end. Let’s turn now to the citation of authors, found in other books and missing in yours. The solution to this is very simple, because all you have to do is find a book that cites them all from A to Z, as you put it. Then you’ll put that same alphabet in your book, and though the lie is obvious it doesn’t matter, since you’ll have little need to use them; perhaps someone will be naive enough to believe you have consulted all of them in your plain and simple history; if it serves no other purpose, at least a lengthy catalogue of authors will give the book an unexpected authority. Furthermore, no one will try to determine if you followed them or did not follow them, having nothing to gain from that. Besides, if I understand it correctly, this book of yours has no need for any of the things you say it lacks, because all of it is an invective against books of chivalry, which Aristotle never thought of, and St. Basil never mentioned, and Cicero never saw, and whose unbelievable absurdities do not enter into the calculations of factual truth, or the observations of astrology;14 geometrical measurements are of no importance to them, and neither is the refutation of arguments used in rhetoric; there is no reason for your book to preach to anyone, weaving the human with the divine, which is a kind of cloth no Christian intelligence should wear. It only has to make use of mimesis in the writing, and the more precise that is, the better the writing will be. And since this work of yours intends only to undermine the authority and wide acceptance that books of chivalry have in the world and among the public, there is no reason for you to go begging for maxims from philosophers, counsel from Holy Scripture, fictions from poets, orations from rhetoricians, or miracles from saints; instead you should strive, in plain speech, with words that are straightforward, honest, and well-placed, to make your sentences and phrases sonorous and entertaining, and have them portray, as much as you can and as far as it is possible, your intention, making your ideas clear without complicating and obscuring them. Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it. In short, keep your eye on the goal of demolishing the ill-founded apparatus of these chivalric books, despised by many and praised by so many more, and if you accomplish this, you will have accomplished no small thing.”
In deep silence I listened to what my friend told me, and his words made so great an impression on me that I did not dispute them but acknowledged their merit and wanted to use them to write this prologue in which you will see, gentle reader, the cleverness of my friend, my good fortune in finding the adviser I needed in time, and your own relief at finding so sincere and uncomplicated a history as that of the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, who is thought by all the residents of the district of Montiel15 to have been the most chaste lover and most valiant knight seen in those environs for many years. I do not want to charge you too much for the service I have performed in introducing you to so noble and honorable