Don Quixote in English

Asked whether Don Quixote could become a bridge between North and South America, Jorge Luis Borges replied, “Yes, I think it would be a splendid idea. It has been a bridge between Spain and South America also. Because we think of Don Quixote as if we had written it” (Borges 1997, cited under Scholarly Tradition: Latin American and US Latino). Indeed, Cervantes’s novel is the acknowledged classic uniting the entire Spanish-speaking world. At the same time (though this is less widely understood), its impact on Anglo-American literature is unparalleled by any other foreign-language work. No serious writer in English since the 17th century has been free of its influence, and such major figures of the United States as Melville, Twain, and Faulkner have been enthusiastic readers. Cervantes’s masterpiece is thus uniquely situated to bridge the cultural traditions converging in the Latino experience. Moreover, Don Quixote has also left its impression on the literatures of immigrant communities that contributed significantly to US identity over the last two centuries, most notably those expressed in Yiddish and Russian. This pervasive presence is a testament to the place of the Hispanic element within the culturally heterogeneous Western Hemisphere, including those areas where English remains the predominant language. As the Latino element of North American identity comes to the fore, the relevance of the book for negotiating cultural understanding within and across ethnicities only grows stronger. Given its role as an established classic of world literature, integrating this work as part of Latino identity strengthens the prestige of a family of cultures all too often associated in the Anglophone media with the most negative effects of modernity: poverty, poor education, marginality. Always keeping in mind the particular relevance of this topic to Latino studies, this article surveys translations of Don Quixote into English and scholarship on its reception in England and the United States, at the same time as it provides a roadmap of the principal examples of that reception in fiction and essays, with some reference to stage and screen adaptations as well. Given the Latino studies focus, the British reception of the work is treated in a somewhat more cursory fashion, emphasizing the most historically important examples in order to allow a more expansive handling of the reading and recycling of Don Quixote in America.