Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) is renowned for his masterpiece Don Quixote. Born in Alcalá, near Madrid, Spain, he spent much of his life in obscurity and poverty. After time as a soldier and a prisoner of pirates, he began to write plays, including Los Tratos de Argel and La Numancia (both 1582). La Galatea (1585), a pastoral novel, was his first attempt at fiction. After the breakdown of his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, Cervantes suffered financial difficulties and was imprisoned several times. During this period, he wrote Part I of Don Quixote, which was published in 1605, receiving immediate success; Part II was published in 1615. He was also an accomplished short-story writer (Novelas Ejemplares, 1613), poet (Viaje del Parnaso, 1614) and playwright, writing dozens of plays, out of which only a handful survive, including Ocho Comedias y Ocho Entremeses (1615). His final novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda, completed days before his death, was published posthumously (1616). Despite the success of Don Quixote, he was never a wealthy man, and died in Madrid in April 1616.   Ilan Stevans (abridgement and new introduction) is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, USA. He is publisher of Restless Books and host of the NPR show In Contrast. He has rendered Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Juan Rulfo into English; Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Richard Wilbur into Spanish; Isaac Bashevis Singer from Yiddish; Yehuda Amichai from Hebrew; and Miguel de Cervantes, Dickens and Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince into Spanglish. His award-winning books, adapted for radio, TV and theatre, have been translated into 20 languages. In 2018, he adapted Don Quixote de la Mancha into a best-selling graphic novel (illustrated by Venezuelan cartoonist Roberto Weil).