Now reading: El ingenioso Hildago Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. I think it is one of those books that the world knows well, but I never really read. You know some of the main scenes and even the first line of the book, but maybe many of us have never actually read it. I remember trying to read it year ago in my childhood, but was put off by the “old Spanish” language used.
Before Don Quixote was written, in 1605, the model of literature used was that of chivalric novels. Cervantes makes with Don Quixote, among other things, a satire of that model of literature. It is considered as the summary and the end of the Renaissance genres and the beginning of a more complex and conflictive vision, the first modern novel. I am reading it in Spanish in an edition published digitally by the Secretaría de Cultura de México . So here we go:
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acodarme…