The Latin American exile of Don Quixote

Carlos Fuentes said that Cervantes and Columbus were spiritual twins: “Both died without being fully aware of their discoveries.

Columbus believed that he had reached the Far East by sailing west;

Cervantes thought that he had only written a satire of the chivalric novels.

Neither of them imagined that he had landed on the new continents of space —America— and of fiction —the modern novel—”.

The continent that Cervantes founded was written in Spain, but it is on the other side of the sea, in Latin America, where it has flourished best and where to this day it retains all its validity because here, in its land, many years ago it ceased to illuminate the enormous most novelists.

Don Quixote was published in the year 1605 and a good number of copies of the first edition that circulated only in Castile, arrived in Mexico and Peru that year.

There, on the other side of the sea, the novel began to grow in a different way.

The words with which Cervantes tells us that prodigious story took root with greater force in Latin America, and the same happened with the narrative instrumental of Don Quixote, which starts from those three great Erasmian themes that, according to Fuentes himself, are the nerve center of the novel: the duality of truth, the illusion of appearances and the praise of madness.

Don Quixote is made up of 381,104 words, of which 22,939 are different from each other.

Many of these words, which in Spain have fallen into disuse, are still valid in Mexico.

I am going to write down a few examples: "That

I would set out on my way," Don Quixote tells the goatherd.

In the novel the characters

when they talk and what is strange or curious is what is

.

The

is a knot or a ball of mud, whose meaning extends, from the other side of the sea, to designate a fat person and also, in Mexico, to refer to bodoquitos,

are small children.

The

is the staff of the traveler and the

, which in Quixote is a mess or a mess, in Mexico is a foolish or foolish person, that is, messed up.

the

, which in the novel is a small leather patch, in Mexico it has become the snack that accompanies the drink, served in short portions that have the size of the Cervantine patch.

,

and

are other Cervantine words that are used every day in Mexico.

The mop is, in Don Quixote, the butt of a weapon;

This word in the 21st century, in Mexico, designates a self-righteous person, perhaps because of how unfunny a butt is, while in Spain mocho is the mop, which in Mexico is called a mop.

From the extremely rich lexical universe that we have at our disposal in Cervantes's novel, we would have to rescue very sonorous and colorful words such as aborrascarse, albar, skirtamentos, poltrón, gañir or the playful cachidiablo.

The ferment that Cervantes's novel left in Latin America, his torrent of words and his contagious exuberance burst into Spain, with the violence of a pirate landing, many years later, when Rubén Darío's poems arrived.

Then it became clear that in that continent they wrote differently.

The influence of Don Quixote gradually faded here as he grew on the other side and then the Franco dictatorship came to consolidate his exile.

The Spanish novel settled mostly on realism and eradicated the narrative tools of Quixote, that "streaky madman, full of lucid intervals", according to Diego de Miranda, where humor, nonsense, parody, derision, satire, time distortion, multiple point of view, experimentation.

Miguel Delibes observed that García Márquez, one of Quixote's outstanding students, "is the best heir to the sense of humor of classic Castilian literature, which, unfortunately, is being lost."

What remains on both shores is the quixotic perspective on the world that, precisely these days, is manifested in the political battle for identity, where a person is not what he is, but what he believes he is, as was the The case of the gentleman with the sad figure: "What looks like a barber's basin to you looks like Mambrino's helmet to me...".

After the dictatorship came democratic reconstruction, reintegration into Europe and an economic boom that had very little to do with the glorious misery of the Don Quixote characters, which by the way continues intact on the other side of the Atlantic.

The exemplary Spanish middle class, which of course any Latin American country would like, achieved that a majority of citizens have a standard of living that is unthinkable in those countries.

I am going to venture a modest hypothesis, which is nothing more than the observation of a Mexican novelist who has read Don Quixote, in various circumstances, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Spanish economic boom has also had an impact on the language;

The richness and exuberance of the Spanish that Cervantes wrote has been exchanged for a more practical, more useful language, more in keeping with the effectiveness and speed imposed by our time.

The economic boom smoothed out, to a large extent, the social differences that in Don Quixote, and in Latin America, are very noticeable.

The characters in the novel speak from the social class to which they belong, from that flagrant asymmetry whose only virtue is the humus in which words flourish and multiply, a torrent of diverse words, twisted, enriched, with which each class is identified.

The number of words used by the common citizen, as shown by statistics, is decreasing;

we are very far from the 22,939 different words that Cervantes used to write Don Quixote.

Right now, for example, we are witnessing the enthronement of the word

, which is already expelling the word

, even though they do not mean exactly the same thing.

To the Latin American exile of Quixote, we must add the finishing touch that the cultural agenda of the Government of Felipe González gave to Cervantes's novel, as Pablo Sánchez illustrates for us in his essay Literaturas en cruce

(Verbum, 2018).

"One of the priorities of the González government was a new transformative agenda for culture (...) to the industrial reconversion, cultural reconversion was added," writes Sánchez.

The idea was to recover the capital of literature in Spanish that had already been stolen twice, once by Rubén Darío and another by the writers of the

.

“It was necessary to turn the Spanish democratic citizen into a consumer of novels, and for this the first recipe was to offer them a non-radical novel, neither ideologically nor technically”, that is, I say, an anti-Cervantine novel.

This bias caused a restructuring in the publishing market that, once the

had faded, returned to betting on Spanish authors "and looking for an often postmodern and not very political narrative that fits well with the anxiety of Europeanism recently satisfied politically and economically", we says Pablo Sanchez.

After discovering the new continent of fiction, Cervantes's novel settled in Latin America, where his Quixote still rides, to make us see "how necessary knights-errant were to the world in past centuries, and how useful they would be in the present if They will be used".

Jordi Soler

is a writer, author of

(Siruela).

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