Posts filed under 'Don Quixote'

A Metaphysical Mistake: On Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death

June 13, 2024 | in Reviews | by Sebastián Sánchez

Death, to Cannetti, is not one part of what we might call a life-cycle, but rather a metaphysical mistake.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated from the German by Peter Filkins, Fitzcarraldo/New Directions, 2024

The fact that the twentieth century saw the greatest number of conflict-related deaths in human history might be considered fundamental in explaining the over two-thousand pages Elias Canetti wrote in preparation for his book against death. However, reading the abridged version—published by Fitzcarraldo (UK) and New Directions (US)—one will find that Canetti would object strenuously to this causal explanation. This relation between factuality and literature, Canetti would say, concedes far too much to death in two ways. Firstly, it allows death quantity: by remarking on the sheer numbers, we suggest that the tragedy of death is quantifiable; that the more death there is, the greater the tragedy. Secondly, it allows death quality: by remarking on the specific kind of death—those caused by conflict—we suggest that its calamity is measured in part by the nature of the dying. To Canetti, a lone Don Quixote who ceaselessly struggled for life in a century of death, all death is singular and its tragedy is infinite. In order to better understand this, we must turn to one death: his mother’s.

June 15, 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. . . I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Dulces Sueños, Don Quixote

August 12, 2020 | in Essays | by Edwin Alanís-García

Reciprocal listening—everyone listening to everyone—had become more important than ever. There was an entire world that needed to be heard.

One of the most devastating outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the damage it inflicted on the education of children worldwide. As schools shut their doors and valued programs reluctantly halted, both kids and their educators were cut off from their communities and, for some, their places of refuge. In the following essay, assistant blog editor Edwin Alanís-García shares his experience working with one of these programs and spaces in New York City, a literary haven fittingly called Still Waters in a Storm.

The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote is a modern-day musical reimagining of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of which the translators and performers are a community of young writers and thinkers ranging in age from seven to sixteen. To call this project “ambitious” would be an understatement—Traveling Adventures is a thorough reinterpretation of a four-hundred-year-old masterpiece of Hispanophone literature, being adapted into songs, theater performances, and even metafictional meditations on social justice, immigration, and the process of translation itself. It is a translation project years in the making, and the children were finally ready to present the first installments to the world.

Their visit to my alma mater was a confluence of the two literary worlds I’d known in New York City: the MFA program at New York University, and the sanctuary of Still Waters in a Storm, an after-school program in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I volunteered at Still Waters during my last year of study, and was lucky to have witnessed the genesis of Traveling Adventures.

On a Friday morning in February, 2018, I took a train from Cambridge, MA to Boston’s South Station. The five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York stopped just a few blocks shy of the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers’ House in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a literary landmark in a city of literature, and a space that has welcomed many of the world’s greatest poets and writers. It was a fitting venue for the Kid Quixotes. Though the performance space was smaller than some of the college classrooms and theater stages they’d been using on the tour, that intimacy provided a near theater-in-the-round experience. As one young performer described it, it felt more like doing a show in someone’s living room.

Friends and teachers spilled into the parlor. We sat close to the “stage,” a blocked-in area designated by the performers. At this distance, we weren’t just spectators, we were participants in a tale that began in seventeenth-century Spain and continued into twenty-first-century New York. The frame story begins with our protagonist (played by eight-year-old actor and author Sarah Sierra) being called to bed by her mother. Young Sarah wants to stay awake and read Don Quixote—she wants to become Don Quixote. In doing so, she adopts the persona of Kid Quixote, protector of the abused and oppressed. The dialogue is in Spanish, but quickly becomes bilingual when the scenes from the novel come to life. As she walks to school, Kid Quixote jumps into a scene from Chapter IV; a farmer is whipping a boy, and she cannot abide this injustice. What would be a horrifying scene of violence is reimagined by the children into an act of resistance, and the cruel farmer is made to look like a fool. Kid Quixote’s mission to help the downtrodden is set to “The Rescuing Song,” a plea and a promise to help those in need of protection. It is a song about belonging, and ultimately about “home.”