On hearing this, one of the goatherds treats his ear with rosemary, salt, and saliva, and then bandages it. Don Quixote gives him leave to go to bed, but asks that Sancho first care for his ear - the ear that was sliced half off by the Biscayan in Chapter IX. The knight is uncharacteristically astute, seeing right through his squire. After the song, Don Quixote wants to hear another, but Sancho, being tired from the effects of the wine, wants to sleep. After the speech, a shepherd friend arrives and performs a ballad.Īll the time that Don Quixote was pontificating and the shepherd was singing, Sancho was drinking. In the speech, he manages to cram just about every cliche regarding this mythical time. This causes him to give a grandiose speech about the Golden Age. At the end of supper, the sight of the acorns in his hand throws Don Quixote into a reverie. In Chapter XI, the goatherds provide our protagonists with a meal of dried goat meat and acorns. They were lucky, however, to come upon a small group of goatherds. Chapter XIĪt the end of Chapter X, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were looking for lodging but ended the day without find it. Given how popular this translation is, and how highly it is regarded, it provided an excellent opportunity to see how Putnam’s work - first published in 1949 - compared to the current state of the art. Although it is only one of six translations that I own, it is the most recent. To some extent, this is an arbitrary decision.

I decided to use Edith Grossman’s translation to supplement my reading.

I became so involved with the story that I read the next 200 pages before I caught myself, went back to “A Pastoral Interlude,” and started work on this article. If I weren’t also writing about the book, I would have left it there.

The first time through this section, I read Putnam’s abridged version with his editorial summaries and I was well pleased. It seems as though Cervantes understood that he had pushed his character to the edge of reader acceptance, because he follows it with “A Pastoral Interlude” - Chapter XI through XIV - in which Don Quixote redeems himself to some extent. There is much to dislike about him: he has a quick temper - especially when people do not pretend to accept his delusions he has a romantic vision of knights-errant that is too real and unpleasant he leaves a trail of innocents’ pain in his wake. When last I discussed Don Quixote, I had come to dislike the character Don Quixote.

Don quixote grossman