Reviewer Terry Castle is enamored with the new Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote.
So the best thing to say up front, perhaps, is get hold of Don Quixote and make time for it. It will be worth the television sitcoms you skip, the thirty or so quiet evenings you spend on it. Edith Grossman actually makes it easy for you, O frazzled reader, because she has produced the most agreeable Don Quixote ever. Don’t be put off by Harold Bloom’s introduction (major windbag alert in effect); go right to the thing itself. Don Quixote, famously, is the first major work of Western literature to take ordinary human life for its subject—specifically, a life that is replete with accidents, fiascoes, and indignities—and make it over into something luminous with meaning. It does so without pomp or sententiousness—it’s the friendliest and least formal of all the Great Books—yet will overwhelm you, in the end, with its moral and imaginative splendor….
I confess that I wasn’t especially looking forward to my second reading of the work—so shopworn, at this point, was much of my existing mental Quixote imagery (think cheap Picasso posters, Man of La Mancha, a groggy Frank Sinatra singing “The Impossible Dream”). But the book quite staggered me with its charm, beauty, and profundity. Once you enter (or re-enter) its expansive, ruminative, deeply nourishing world, the literary equivalent of eating “slow food,” it’s hard not to become a bit of a bore about how stupendous it is.