Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [307]
“You can tell that to my grandpa!” responded the village girl. “I just love listening to crackpated things! Step aside and let us pass, and we’ll thank you for it.”
Sancho stepped aside and let her pass, delighted to have gotten out of his difficulty so easily.
As soon as the peasant girl who had played the part of Dulcinea was released, she spurred her pilfer with a goad that she had on the end of a stick and began to gallop across the meadow. And since the goad irritated the jenny more than usual, she began to buck and threw the lady Dulcinea to the ground; when Don Quixote saw this, he hurried to help her up, and Sancho began to adjust and tighten her packsaddle, which had slipped under the donkey’s belly. When the saddle had been put in place, and Don Quixote tried to lift his enchanted lady in his arms and put her back on the donkey, the lady got up from the ground and saved him the trouble, because she moved back, ran a short distance, and, placing both hands on the donkey’s rump, jumped right into the saddle, as agile as a hawk and sitting astride as if she were a man; and then Sancho said:
“By St. Roque, our mistress is faster than a falcon, and she could teach the most skilled Cordoban or Mexican how to ride! She was over the hind bow of the saddle in one jump, and without any spurs she makes that palfrey run like a zebra. And her damsels are not far behind; they’re all running like the wind.”
And it was true, because when Dulcinea was mounted, they all spurred their mounts and fell in behind her and broke into a gallop and did not look back for more than half a league. Don Quixote followed them with his eyes, and when he could no longer see them, he turned to Sancho and said:
“Sancho, what do you think of how the enchanters despise me? Look at the extent of their malice and ill will, for they have chosen to deprive me of the happiness I might have had at seeing my lady in her rightful person. In truth, I was born to be a model of misfortune, the target and mark for the arrows of affliction. And you must also know, Sancho, that it was not enough for these traitors to have changed and transformed my Dulcinea, but they had to transform and change her into a figure as low-born and ugly as that peasant, and take away something that so rightfully belongs to noble ladies, which is a sweet smell, since they are always surrounded by perfumes and flowers. For I shall tell you, Sancho, that when I came to help Dulcinea onto her palfrey, as you call it, though it looked like a donkey to me, I smelled an odor of raw garlic that almost made me faint and poisoned my soul.”
“Oh, you dogs!” shouted Sancho. “Oh, you miserable, evil enchanters, if only I could see you all strung by the gills like sardines on a fisherman’s reed! You know so much, and can do so much, and do even more evil. It should have been enough, you villains, to turn the pearls of my lady’s eyes into cork-tree galls, and her hair of purest gold into the bristles of a red ox tail, and all her good features into bad, without doing anything to her smell, because from that we could have imagined what was hidden beneath her ugly shell; though to tell you the truth, I never saw her ugliness, only her beauty, which was made even greater by a mole she had on the right side of her lip, like