« I, like Don Quijote invent passions to exercise myself ». This gentle declaration by Voltaire encapsulates, so I think, the finest and subtlest interpretation of Cervantes. For Don Quijote is not crazy, and even less so Cervantes. That, we know it from the beginning of the book. Don Quijote is a fiftyish bachelor hidalgo that, arrived at this point of life, decides to take a qualitative step and change the reality of the books for the irreality of life, much more palpitating, burning and exciting than the merely written. Don Quijote principles, or nearly, for making a metaphore reality, the windmills that look like giants, and spurs on against a literary reality that squanders him, as so many things are going to twart his plans along his new way. Let us learn this : that Don Quijote never confronts himself but against metaphors of life, undoes alegories and Yangoises, or rests on some mooring bollards, in a way that madness begins with reality and never before. Voltaire foresaw clearly that the mature man either takes this step I refer to or just conforms to a post in life, which is death, and shall not achieve. Don Quijote guesses right at that moment when he decides to change life himself, change of mount, of companionship –Sancho Panza- of priests and garrulous ones, ladies and nieces, of the same sun on the same walls. The books he read were taking by stealth the poetry of action with the poetry, poetic and cheap of the diction. Thus he even invents, between the errant and military passions, a new passion and amorous, a distant wench he saw once in the market, letting love itself elevate her to princess rank.

It is the first lesson Cervantes gives us in his book. Life has a second part that would correspond to Aristotle’s third youth. It is Cervantes himself who breaks up with his mediocre life, palely extoled with belic glories, launching a book where lies his rage to the world, his energy at last liberated for his own sake, not the energy anymore tamed and servile of the taxman and other sorts. Cervantes is ironic by anachrony. He has started late his adventure and knows it. The Quijote is not a book that comes but the unlived life, and does not show this character as an example for anything nor somebody’s gentlemanry, but as the singular case of a man who decided to take the step and that step is himself who takes it in the figure of Don Quijote, and even makes a poor man filled with sloth and conformity take it as well, thus being that Sancho never loses the sense, that useless and poor common sense of the people, but he neither loses the distance or irony to mock his lord with all respect. Don Quijote goes scandalously into the new age and Sancho traverses all the frontiers like a sack of rye. We have, therefore, that step unfolded three times. Cervantes as he gets fame with a book, Don Quijote as he takes by storm the liberty of his life beyond age and will. Sancho, who first belching and then at full throttle lives the life of the cavalier while not having read such books. It is the first Spanish rebellion of the intellectual bourgeois, the first bourgeois revolution of the precedent hidalgo and the first mutiny of the Castillian people, just one’s only mutiny, Sancho’s, that is worth all to come. Still today, and today more than ever, the man who does not produce that own revolution, who does not take that adjacent step, shall be swallowed by the power, shrouded by the stablishment’s conventions and dead-shit rotten.

Spain took the Quijotesque step because Don Quijote is the methaphore of Spain, yes, but not in the Dominic and festive fashion in which is said by those that use to. Spain invents passions to survive herself, to become something more than a well governed flock of sheeps, and a province of Latin that we shall call Castillian. The passion for America, the imperial passion, the passion for Europe, the passion for the world move all Spains and take us to the forefront of the century, of the centuries. There is a monarchic light illuminating all battles, and there is a popular and ambitious light enrapturing all peoples. Spain does not yet suffer stiffness on the empire but wants to arrive to Charles V, wants to Escorialize herself in Phillipe II, wants to give birth to her great Barroque, of which is pregnant, because the passion of Spain, before mistic or ambitious is creative, a plebeian movement and of kings towards the tectonic and violent of that which Stendhal should define as the last people with a character of its own left in Europe. Spain is not a bourgeois compromise, as Sartre tells us of the man and it is France or other states. Spain is a warriorlike compromise for self affirmation, for expansion, for existing, for fulfilling her impossible passions, and in summa for doing exercise. The Spaniards love the live for its own sake, not for the mistic or the pompe, and various generations and three centuries come in love with Aldonza Lorenzo, the uncouth and sweet Dulcinea who waits each one of us around the corner, as the little Ulises that is.

There are three reasons to be a hero, as Salvador Dalí would say. In Cervantes these reasons would be to invent himself passions, the capability to exercise himself against time and having broken up with the bourgeois contract of the novel and the life. The man who invents passions is as much of a hero as the one who lives them. The man who does daily exercise, we do not know wether for the life or death, is the one who wants to exhaust it all here and, as Juan Ramón Jiménez said, that when death comes only find an empty hide, because our sowing has been fecundously spread. Just to cast some light on these things, we shall say that Don Quijote effectively, is a novel character, but there where I see the metaphorical man is in Cervantes himself, who gives us the average level of the spaniard, always like a lay saint, like a folded hero or a commoneer among the people. We love Cervantes not so much for being illustrious as for being the average man that borders on ironically the failure only to succed in the official Spain with his real Spain, populated with girls and tamers, exploiters and those tossing one in a blanket, of treacherous dukes and impossible love affairs.
The chivalry novel was a bourgeois compromise with the bourgeois of the time, namely the hidalgos. An economic, literary and cultural compromise, a market of fantasies, give and take of anachronic dreams. There has always been in these European countries a picaresque culture that has had a lazy bourgeois hostage as the good. That continuity with the mediocre is broken with the barroque, broken by Cervantes, broken by the generation of 1898, and 1927, broken always by a youth to come, and the ironical heroism of Cervantes is in making himself alone the revolution of the young when he is already an old man. Let us admit cautiously that Spain is a country of midle classes, also intellectually, and with them makes the writer or the artist a pact of convenience, survival, and comfortability. This pact is what explains the slowness of our country at some moments of history, but we already see that this delay is promptly sorted out with a book, with a sword, with an errant cavalier. Cervantes, yes, comes to tear down the bourgeois contract of the novel of chivalry, breaching for a new literature, which is that of Quevedo, Torres Villaroel, etc. Lope de Vega’s public were the plebeians at the comedy played in the corral. The public of the novelist were the decadent and feudal or hidalgos who were literate and read cheap books. After Cervantes, not being himself barroque but renacentist, barroquism is not only a figure but also a current, and in it is Góngora, the quoted Quevedo an Torres, Calderón’s theatre and the religious imagery lifted by a historically late counterreform, but already ripe and autumn-like in Berruguete and all the catholic lust of ritualism that has become empty and therefore can gratuitously dedicate itself to the form for its sake, something that we can not call but modernity.
Hence Cervantes legacy. The man who set Spain topsy-turvy, saw a culture burn and died like his character with the sun on the walls. Cervantes is modernity for everything that has been said and for his two war machines : one hidalgo and one puppet filled of sun and wind. With that artillery only he sets the Spains on foot, leaves a revolution where he passes by, a trace of justice, law, kingdomship, that would rejoice readers, but this gaiety is curative and predisposes, as we see, for bigger changes. The man who invents passions for the sake of exercising, finds later in life that these passions are real, that Dulcinea exists, at leasts as Aldonza, and that personal and total renovation has to be taken seriously. Cervantes begun exercising against himself and ended against all, unhinging all lives he comes across and even writting a second part to the book because slacks and scoundrels are pirating his book and the official or burocratic Spain denies him the deserved prestige and ignores the validity of his reformation. The author invents a second book on which he had written before, as he invents a second, proud and atrocious life over his life of being a soldier, sales taxman, frustrated courtesan, and poor Manchego hidalgo. Before than the great men of his century breaks up with the bourgeois compromise of the novel and brings one that Unamuno called the bible of Spain. Cervantes is avant-garde, as avant-garde is rebellion, and a rebel leaves a legacy. Nobody in our progresist core has renegated of him, although many have used him as the golden inkpot of their inquisitorial clerkship.
Only us have the present, we templated men, and a very pure present, very active, is the life of Cervantes, Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, with their horses and donkeys. Only for this we have come here today. To conquer the present for all.

« I, like Don Quijote invent passions to exercise myself ». This gentle declaration by Voltaire encapsulates, so I think, the finest and subtlest interpretation of Cervantes. For Don Quijote is not crazy, and even less so Cervantes. That, we know it from the beginning of the book. Don Quijote is a fiftyish bachelor hidalgo that, arrived at this point of life, decides to take a qualitative step and change the reality of the books for the irreality of life, much more palpitating, burning and exciting than the merely written. Don Quijote principles, or nearly, for making a metaphore reality, the windmills that look like giants, and spurs on against a literary reality that squanders him, as so many things are going to twart his plans along his new way. Let us learn this : that Don Quijote never confronts himself but against metaphors of life, undoes alegories and Yangoises, or rests on some mooring bollards, in a way that madness begins with reality and never before. Voltaire foresaw clearly that the mature man either takes this step I refer to or just conforms to a post in life, which is death, and shall not achieve. Don Quijote guesses right at that moment when he decides to change life himself, change of mount, of companionship –Sancho Panza- of priests and garrulous ones, ladies and nieces, of the same sun on the same walls. The books he read were taking by stealth the poetry of action with the poetry, poetic and cheap of the diction. Thus he even invents, between the errant and military passions, a new passion and amorous, a distant wench he saw once in the market, letting love itself elevate her to princess rank.

It is the first lesson Cervantes gives us in his book. Life has a second part that would correspond to Aristotle’s third youth. It is Cervantes himself who breaks up with his mediocre life, palely extoled with belic glories, launching a book where lies his rage to the world, his energy at last liberated for his own sake, not the energy anymore tamed and servile of the taxman and other sorts. Cervantes is ironic by anachrony. He has started late his adventure and knows it. The Quijote is not a book that comes but the unlived life, and does not show this character as an example for anything nor somebody’s gentlemanry, but as the singular case of a man who decided to take the step and that step is himself who takes it in the figure of Don Quijote, and even makes a poor man filled with sloth and conformity take it as well, thus being that Sancho never loses the sense, that useless and poor common sense of the people, but he neither loses the distance or irony to mock his lord with all respect. Don Quijote goes scandalously into the new age and Sancho traverses all the frontiers like a sack of rye. We have, therefore, that step unfolded three times. Cervantes as he gets fame with a book, Don Quijote as he takes by storm the liberty of his life beyond age and will. Sancho, who first belching and then at full throttle lives the life of the cavalier while not having read such books. It is the first Spanish rebellion of the intellectual bourgeois, the first bourgeois revolution of the precedent hidalgo and the first mutiny of the Castillian people, just one’s only mutiny, Sancho’s, that is worth all to come. Still today, and today more than ever, the man who does not produce that own revolution, who does not take that adjacent step, shall be swallowed by the power, shrouded by the stablishment’s conventions and dead-shit rotten.

Spain took the Quijotesque step because Don Quijote is the methaphore of Spain, yes, but not in the Dominic and festive fashion in which is said by those that use to. Spain invents passions to survive herself, to become something more than a well governed flock of sheeps, and a province of Latin that we shall call Castillian. The passion for America, the imperial passion, the passion for Europe, the passion for the world move all Spains and take us to the forefront of the century, of the centuries. There is a monarchic light illuminating all battles, and there is a popular and ambitious light enrapturing all peoples. Spain does not yet suffer stiffness on the empire but wants to arrive to Charles V, wants to Escorialize herself in Phillipe II, wants to give birth to her great Barroque, of which is pregnant, because the passion of Spain, before mistic or ambitious is creative, a plebeian movement and of kings towards the tectonic and violent of that which Stendhal should define as the last people with a character of its own left in Europe. Spain is not a bourgeois compromise, as Sartre tells us of the man and it is France or other states. Spain is a warriorlike compromise for self affirmation, for expansion, for existing, for fulfilling her impossible passions, and in summa for doing exercise. The Spaniards love the live for its own sake, not for the mistic or the pompe, and various generations and three centuries come in love with Aldonza Lorenzo, the uncouth and sweet Dulcinea who waits each one of us around the corner, as the little Ulises that is.

There are three reasons to be a hero, as Salvador Dalí would say. In Cervantes these reasons would be to invent himself passions, the capability to exercise himself against time and having broken up with the bourgeois contract of the novel and the life. The man who invents passions is as much of a hero as the one who lives them. The man who does daily exercise, we do not know wether for the life or death, is the one who wants to exhaust it all here and, as Juan Ramón Jiménez said, that when death comes only find an empty hide, because our sowing has been fecundously spread. Just to cast some light on these things, we shall say that Don Quijote effectively, is a novel character, but there where I see the metaphorical man is in Cervantes himself, who gives us the average level of the spaniard, always like a lay saint, like a folded hero or a commoneer among the people. We love Cervantes not so much for being illustrious as for being the average man that borders on ironically the failure only to succed in the official Spain with his real Spain, populated with girls and tamers, exploiters and those tossing one in a blanket, of treacherous dukes and impossible love affairs.
The chivalry novel was a bourgeois compromise with the bourgeois of the time, namely the hidalgos. An economic, literary and cultural compromise, a market of fantasies, give and take of anachronic dreams. There has always been in these European countries a picaresque culture that has had a lazy bourgeois hostage as the good. That continuity with the mediocre is broken with the barroque, broken by Cervantes, broken by the generation of 1898, and 1927, broken always by a youth to come, and the ironical heroism of Cervantes is in making himself alone the revolution of the young when he is already an old man. Let us admit cautiously that Spain is a country of midle classes, also intellectually, and with them makes the writer or the artist a pact of convenience, survival, and comfortability. This pact is what explains the slowness of our country at some moments of history, but we already see that this delay is promptly sorted out with a book, with a sword, with an errant cavalier. Cervantes, yes, comes to tear down the bourgeois contract of the novel of chivalry, breaching for a new literature, which is that of Quevedo, Torres Villaroel, etc. Lope de Vega’s public were the plebeians at the comedy played in the corral. The public of the novelist were the decadent and feudal or hidalgos who were literate and read cheap books. After Cervantes, not being himself barroque but renacentist, barroquism is not only a figure but also a current, and in it is Góngora, the quoted Quevedo an Torres, Calderón’s theatre and the religious imagery lifted by a historically late counterreform, but already ripe and autumn-like in Berruguete and all the catholic lust of ritualism that has become empty and therefore can gratuitously dedicate itself to the form for its sake, something that we can not call but modernity.
Hence Cervantes legacy. The man who set Spain topsy-turvy, saw a culture burn and died like his character with the sun on the walls. Cervantes is modernity for everything that has been said and for his two war machines : one hidalgo and one puppet filled of sun and wind. With that artillery only he sets the Spains on foot, leaves a revolution where he passes by, a trace of justice, law, kingdomship, that would rejoice readers, but this gaiety is curative and predisposes, as we see, for bigger changes. The man who invents passions for the sake of exercising, finds later in life that these passions are real, that Dulcinea exists, at leasts as Aldonza, and that personal and total renovation has to be taken seriously. Cervantes begun exercising against himself and ended against all, unhinging all lives he comes across and even writting a second part to the book because slacks and scoundrels are pirating his book and the official or burocratic Spain denies him the deserved prestige and ignores the validity of his reformation. The author invents a second book on which he had written before, as he invents a second, proud and atrocious life over his life of being a soldier, sales taxman, frustrated courtesan, and poor Manchego hidalgo. Before than the great men of his century breaks up with the bourgeois compromise of the novel and brings one that Unamuno called the bible of Spain. Cervantes is avant-garde, as avant-garde is rebellion, and a rebel leaves a legacy. Nobody in our progresist core has renegated of him, although many have used him as the golden inkpot of their inquisitorial clerkship.
Only us have the present, we templated men, and a very pure present, very active, is the life of Cervantes, Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, with their horses and donkeys. Only for this we have come here today. To conquer the present for all.

Im not quite sure how all these themes link together, to be honest; the first piece is saying, (i think) that if we forget the intellectual 'heroes' (for want of a better term) we end up with the fakes. If so, I agree.
But moving on to the equally interesting reply, my first thought is "who wrote it"? Is it a lecture by Sartre ? If so, why not provide the reference ? But if its by an Indy reader, then to whom does s/he compare Cervantes, Voltaire and Don Quixote ? Sartre or Fortuyn ? Or perhaps the writer of the original posting ? Giving away copies of "Nausea" to anyone who wants one does seem a little Quixotic when you think about it ! all told, some thought provoking ideas here.

?

the text is not a lecture by sartre -i love jp. it is a discourse pronounced by umbral when he won the cervantes price, the translation is mine. does not link? so what! link it as you like. barthes said in his discouse too of the abandonment of literature when welcomed to the école. i agree with the first post and also very much with the poser in his enquiring of this. my idea was just to do that: give u a pleasing time of literature, rather than anyother thing.
pleasure. that ppl do not read? ok. i do it in three languages and wish i could do it in as many as i please myself. ppl do not read? let them! maybe their antiintellectualism is too a weapon against conscious barbarians. do not pester ppl with the fact that their ignorant. they may be good too.