The prize-winning translation of Miguel de Cervantes's mock-epic masterwork

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote's fancy leads them wildly astray, tilting at windmills, fighting with friars, and distorting the rural Spanish landscape into a fantasy of impenetrable fortresses and wicked sorcerers. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with.

John Rutherford's landmark translation of Don Quixote won the 2002 Premio Valle Inclan prize for translation. His introduction discusses the traditional works parodied in Don Quixote and issues of literary translation.

'John Rutherford makes Don Quixote funny and readable ... His Quixote can be pompous, imposingly learned, secretly fearful, mad and touching' Colin Burrow, The Times Literary Supplement

TRANSLATED BY EDITH GROSSMAN

Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.

Don Quixote, a man driven by chivalrous ideals and wild delusions, adopts sword and lance as a knight-errant to defend the weak, slay the ignoble, and win the heart of the farm girl he envisions as a princess. In his world of fantasy—where inns are castles, peasants are kings, and windmills are beasts—Quixote, his nag, and his sound but devoted squire, Sancho Panza, set forth on a picaresque adventure conceivable only to a man obsessed.

One part legendary quest, one part metareflection of that very legend, Don Quixote remains, after four centuries, one of the most radical, profound, playful, and heartbreaking epics ever dreamed.

Revised edition: Previously published as Don Quixote, this edition of Don Quixote (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.