Tom Miller : On Reading Cervantes Aloud in Madrid

Cartoon by Juan Carlos Pedreira Fernández / Galería Cubarte.
'En un lugar de la Mancha...'
On reading Cervantes aloud in Madrid

By Tom Miller / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2010

All together now: “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.”

If you don’t recognize those 33 words, go to the back of the class. The rest of you can identify the opening line from Don Quixote de la Mancha, the world’s best-loved and most translated novel. Since its initial publication in the early 17th century (in two parts; 1605 and 1615) the Quixote has been considered the first modern novel and its author Miguel de Cervantes has come to symbolize the Spanish language. If you grew up in a Spanish-speaking country you likely can recite those words in your sleep.

Ground zero for Cervantes, of course, is Madrid, where he lived off and on, and died April 23, 1616. William Shakespeare, who symbolized another language, died April 23, 1616 as well. In those days Spain followed one calendar while England used another, so although Miguel de Cervantes’ and William Shakespeare died the same date, they did not die the same day. (Or, as I explain to friends in Tucson, one followed the calendar from El Charro, and the other, from Mi Nidito.)

April 23 has evolved into El Día del Libro in Spain, a very literary day on which the King awards the annual Cervantes Prize for outstanding work in the Spanish language, and kiosks and big displays of books line the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, and elsewhere. (In Barcelona, it’s also Sant Jordi day, which, in addition to celebrating books, includes giving a rose to a lover or someone you’d like to be a lover. Books and lovers; I ask you, could there be a more fertile combination?)

Madrid’s main activity takes place in the Circulo be Bellas Artes (CBA), a huge building on a broad mid-town boulevard with galleries, rooms for workshops, theater, meetings, and exhibits, as well as a nicely stocked bookstore named for the poet Antonio Machado. And it’s here every year that the Lectura Continuada, the marathon reading, of the thousand-page Don Quixote takes place.

The first reader, always, is the winner of the Cervantes Prize, in this case, the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco. He’s followed by politicos, actors, high-ranking cultural bureaucrats, and the like. Each reader gets a paragraph or two at most. The CBA has a high-tech approach to the Quixote, and arranged for teleconferencing from readers in cities throughout Africa, the Americas, and Asia. And, it was web-streamed, so from whatever distance, if you cranked up your computer during the marathon, you could have heard more than a thousand readers, including… me.

A month earlier I made an international call to the phone number listed on the CBA web site, but the nine-hour time difference made that window of opportunity difficult to jump through. So shortly after I arrived in Spain I went to the CBA building and found the registration table. “When would like to read?” a woman asked ingenuously. “We have a lot of openings at this point.” I chose 6 p.m. the first day simply out of convenience. Because of the ebb and flow, you never knew your precise passage until 30 seconds before you read. For those of us for whom os and vuestra are not part of our normal Spanish, this could be a bit intimidating.

Except for the stage, the main room was always dark so the whole process could be video’d. A big screen showed clips from the many film versions of Don Quixote. Great stuff! And you deaf readers, imagine Don Quixote in sign language! These signers were as much actors as translators, taking on the roles of el Quixote and Sancho Panza and the whole cast of characters. To add to the literary carnival a few excerpts were acted out by local theater groups.

The process ran smoothly. Like every other reader, I checked in at a table outside the main room at my appointed time and got a ticket. I was then directed to a line on the side of the auditorium, where, when I reached the front, someone verified my name with a list. While the person three ahead of me was reading out loud from the podium, the fellow two ahead of me was sitting with the ringmistress, as I called her, following the passage on stage so he’d know where his own segment began, while the chica directly in front of me was at the front table on stage signing paperwork.

At one point I got the nod and proceeded to the front table where I signed my name and gave my employment ("¿A que te dedicas?” the fellow whispered.) A minute later I moved up to the second-to-top rung, sitting next to the ringmistress following along with the reader before me.

The previous weekend I spent in Argamasilla de Alba, a small village in La Mancha that Cervantes was known to have visited and said to have been imprisoned in for a spell. Unbeknownst to me A de A was having its own Lectura Continuada, and the cervantistas invited me to take part. The town was so small they only had enough people to read the novel’s first part, and for that students from local public schools took turns. Unlike in Madrid, these people could show me my section ahead of time. I found it in the English translation always by my side, and eventually was called to the stage which really wasn’t a stage, more like a table covered by a big cloth in the front of a big room.

I said, “Para mostrar el alcance internacional de Cervantes y el Quixote, voy a leer mi fragmento en otro idioma.” (One should never be too far from one’s own copy of el Quixote.) And with that, I read the occasionally testy conversation in Part One, chapter twelve, between Don Quixote the shepherd Pedro about the late student -- shepherd Grisótomo.

The ringmistress in Madrid nodded me over to the chair next to hers as the previous participant stood at the lectern. We followed the passage being read on a large-type edition -- the exact same edition on the lectern. After just a few sentences from the reader right before me, the ringmistress said “Gracias,” and motioned me up. Her “Gracias” was sort of like the hook of an exceptionally bad performance, except in this case it was simply used to hurry the reading along. Move along little dogies.

I was temporarily disoriented and the ringmistress had to walk over to point out where I should start. The sign language translator, with whom I’d been chatting in the lobby, gave me a supportive smile. We were in Part One, chapter 21, when the good don and Sancho are having one of their near-quarrels. In all I read 77 words. As I left the stage there was the obligatory smattering of applause that followed every reader.

Afterward I stood by myself in the back listening to the readers who followed me. One of them, a South American, came up, and in a low voice, said: “Your accent. Are you from Germany?"

[Tom Miller’s most recent book is Revenge of the Saguaro: Offbeat Travels Through America’s Southwest. He is working on Don Quixote’s Trail -- Through the Wilds and Windmills of the World’s Best Loved Novel. His web site is www.tommillerbooks.com.]

Also see:

• Tom Miller : When Jerry Rubin Came to Tucson / The Rag Blog / January 25, 2010

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Tilting at Windmills : Don Quixote, the Israel Ballet, and the Dance of Apartheid

Don Quixote goes mad. Engraving by Gustave Doré. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Showing Israel's 'prettier face':
Don Quixote comes to Burlington

Whether conscious or not, there is a deep irony in the choice of Don Quixote as a touring piece for the Israel Ballet.

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / February 22, 2010

Last Shabbat, as part of "Brand Israel," the state-supported ballet arrived in Burlington with their lavish production of Don Quixote, to bring (according to their website) "honor to the state of Israel."

Given the unruly contents of that extraordinary book, I thought it curious to pick that story to, in the words of the Foreign Ministry, "show Israel's prettier face" as "an enlightened center of arts and technology." So I wrote a little piece which our group, Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel, thought we might distribute to the incoming audience, so that they might have something to read while waiting for the show to begin, and to ask them, gently, to understand the burgeoning movement toward boycotting Israeli produce as was done to end a similar apartheid in South Africa.

This is what I wrote:

A modern Don Quixote

Whether conscious or not, there is a deep irony in the choice of Don Quixote as a touring piece for the Israel Ballet.

For the company here presents a story of enchantment and self-enchantment, delusion and self-delusion, a fairytale of madness and delusory nobility, the story of a dreamer driven mad by ancient books, his mental state now lucid, now insane.

Tonight you will meet The Knight of Sorrowful Countenance, surrounded by enemies and magicians, battling the world of evil. He is cruelly used, physically and mentally, beaten and scorned by the powers around him. Normally grave and self-controlled, he can be goaded into mad fits of rage, unable to distinguish between his fantasies and the world's realities.

By the end of the book, our hero's soul is taunted by doubt, by the suspicion that his quest to reestablish the past through arms and armor may be an illusion. "I find myself, Niece," he says, "at the point of death, and I would die in such a way as not to leave the impression of a life so bad that I shall be remembered as a madman: for even though I have been one, I do not wish to confirm it on my deathbed."

There are lessons here for all of us.

You art-lovers, people of conscience, members of the international community of intellectuals, have historically stood with the ancient -- perhaps quixotic -- moral responsibility to fight injustice -- as you did, for instance, in helping abolish wage slavery among grape-pickers in California, or apartheid in South Africa -- through various forms of boycott.

Given that the UN has many times condemned Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal, and that six decades of diplomacy have until now failed to convince Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its oppression of the people of Palestine, we ask you in the future to support a general boycott of Israeli goods and cultural offerings -- an international non-violent effort to impel the Israeli government to end its occupation of Arab lands, to end the house demolitions, dismantle the walls, recognize the claims of Arab citizens of Israel to full equality, and to promote the globally recognized rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

As it is not anti-American to call for ending our own wars, it is not antisemitic to call on the Israeli government to change its policies in the name of freedom and justice.

Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel (vtjp.org).

Israel Ballet performs Don Quixote.

Eight of us from vtjp left 249 one-pagers in the hands of audience members, and thought we had achieved a good opening for a larger community discussion, and more active events in the future. As one audience member wrote to the website,

Last night I attended the Israeli Ballet at the Flynn Theater. As I
was going in I was handed a flier [sic] -- A Modern Don Quixote. This was
done respectfully and the message thought-provoking. Whether we
agree with the message or not, it was a very good way to get your
message out and make us Think.

But her message was headed "What Were You Thinking??!!!" She continued,

A few minutes after the performance began your guys marched to the front of the room with large banners of protest. What were you thinking? For those of us who have been supportive or at least try
to understand the Palestine/Israel situation, this was a slap in the face... you lost the support you had. And, that's what I'm mad about.

You have a message. You need support. And by doing something crazy like this you lost it! I know of many Jews in that audience who decry what Israel has done/is doing, but I can just bet that they are pretty angry with what you did last night. And to do so to those who work in the arts? Just because they live in Tel Aviv
you do not know that they are against you. My interactions with performers across the world is that the majority of them try to bring peace between nations, especially the ones they are all wrapped with. This was a very inappropriate action!

Please, really do what your mission states - Just Peace. Try to make it work, too, and the rest of us will be more willing to support you.

The fact is, it wasn't "our guys," but rather four independent human rights activists -- one of the four Israeli -- who, unknown to us, planned, actually bought $50 tickets for front row seats, and carried out the inside-the-theater event you may watch here.

And now things get really interesting. Somehow Yedioth Ahronoth, a major Israeli newspaper, learned of the evening's events, and with, let's say... excessive imagination, described them to the readers of its on-line English version, YNetnews.com. You may read the article here. The forcing a way into the theater, the security personnel, the police, the escorting out, the intermission were all -- well, let's just say poetic license, if poor reporting. Maybe it sells newspapers.

But what is most interesting of all are the now more than 50 comments. I suggest you begin with #28, written by one of the protesters, not to prioritize it, but just so you get the facts of what actually went on. Then, if you have time and interest, read the flow of other comments -- an extraordinary display.

The controversy, though a tempest in the teapot of middle class, ballet-going, mostly liberal Burlington, gives us a glimpse at several key threads in the quest to end the four-decade Israeli occupation of Palestine and to achieve peace with justice in the core of the core of the middle east.

I will only name some of the issues, since this space is inadequate to discuss them. (Our website, vtjp.org, has great depth, gets 30,000+ hits a week, and can serve as a good introduction to the problems, present and historical.)

1. It's very hard to discuss rationally anything that presents with the word Palestine in it. The 250th copy of our mild-mannered flyer was brought back to us by an elderly man who had walked all the way back from inside against the incoming crowd. It was crumpled up in a ball. His instructions were "You can shove this up your ass!"


2. The question of whether Israel is practicing "apartheid" or not is still an issue, though the upcoming intensifying of the Gazan situation with the underground fourth wall now under construction to choke off the very last trickle of goods and food (and yes, no doubt some weapons -- though the $3 billion a year worth of rather larger weapons the U.S. sends to Israel, is seen as "military aid" and not "smuggling") may very well modulate from a question of apartheid to one of frank genocide, as 1.5 million captives are starved to death. Jimmy Carter ran afoul of these semantics with the title of his book. And many South African activists assert that what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank is not apartheid, but much worse, with far tighter restrictions and far more brutal behavior.


3. This issue is important because the American public generally understands that boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) were key in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa -- a piece of modern history generally approved of. In the face of half a century of U.S.-supported Israeli intransigence to the norms of international law and behavior, it is looking as if a similar BDS campaign may be the only way to effect change in that world-poisonous situation. Our flyer was meant to ask the audience to consider the need for such a strategy.

The Palestine-Israel struggle is one of many fronts of extreme turbulence we face today. We will need many approaches to shake things up from their pathological gestalt.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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