Nabokov on Don Quixote: A cruel and crude old book

under which of those things you listed fall all the tiresome monologues of quixote filedl with boring common sensicalisms just show DUDE HES LIKE REASONABLE IN EVERY OTHER ASPECT WOW

Maybe cos Nabokov was a fool lost in books, just like the Don.

Because he spent his whole life trying to write something as immortal as the first line of DQ and couldn't. The mere iconography of this or that episode will survive the whole of Nabokov's oeuvre.

Eat your vegetables

how is it cruel

Jealousy. Nabokov was a butterfly collecting hack who belonged in the looney bin.

Because in moments when Cervantes' didactic tendencies prevailed he had the subtlelty of a brick.

Hmm, he's not wrong.
We are laughing at a protagonist with a mental illness for the whole story.

the story is so multifaceted though, you can't just say it's about a character with a mental illness

The more I read by and about Nabokov, the less I like him. He was talented but he comes across as such a smug piece of shit.

>But it doesn't mean that the book isn't the greatest book of all time

Not even close. War and Peace and Anna Karenina, for example, are far superior to Dom Quixote. Tolstoy’s prose was livelier and poetic, he knew humanity better and he portrays a much wider range of characters and scenes.

>Because he spent his whole life trying to write something as immortal as the first line of DQ and couldn't.

Nabokov’s language is much more poetic and exuberant than the old-styled, harsh and provincial language of Dom Quixote. Prose for prose, there are far more riches in Nabokov than in Cervantes.

I am not talking of character and plot here, but simply of style. In this criteria Nabokov is greater than Cervantes.

Also, Lolita is an enormous cultural symbol in the world, as famous and rooted in the collective psyche as the Dom. It will probably remain as a figure that everyone knows even if they don’t have read the book (like Romeo and Juliet, for example).

>Jealousy.

If there was a writer he would be jealous of it was Shakespeare (who, by the way, is enormously superior to Cervantes). Yet Nabokov admired him and acknowledged his superiority in the use of a poetic language.

>The more I read by and about Nabokov, the less I like him. He was talented but he comes across as such a smug piece of shit.

He was doing a very honest job: he was trying to be completely honest about what he thought was great art and what was mediocre art, and he did not let fame or reputation or canonical status intimidate him: he was a free thinker. You should try to be like him in this aspect: don’t honor something just because generations have been doing so.

Not saying you should agree with Nabokov’s opinions, but at least know that it is better to be intellectually honest than to just respect tradition and avoid problems.

>as famous and rooted in the collective psyche as the Dom
You're deluded m8. Don is the symbol of imagination against reality. He is immortal so long as man has art and fantasy. Also how good your style is doesn't actually mean anything when it comes to canonicity. You can't possibly contend that Nabby is worth more as a writer than Cervantes.

he was a pleb and a hack

funny how this board requires everyone to love every book in le epic western canon

Because he was a pleb who didnt know spanish

>criticizing cervantes' prose
did you even read it in spanish?

People on this board actually use words like "superior" and "mediocre" when talking about art.

For some reason, Don Quixote has one of the most rabid fanbases on Veeky Forums, but I suspect it's mostly the spics who crawl out of their holes when a Shakespeare thread comes up to screech autistically.

Also, Cervantes is a one book wonder and Persiles and Sigismunda was the biggest dungpile of melodramatic trash I have ever read.

>one book wonder

Well so is Dante, but everybody rates him anyway.

Kys, faggotron

Yes, I read it in Portuguese and comparing all the time with the Spanish original (as you know both languages are extremely alike, especially when written).

To be honest, some English translations actually make the work better.

Cervantes style is as crude and cliché-filled as the one of Camões and Gil Vicente (both Portuguese).

they even use them "unironically"

>For some reason, Don Quixote has one of the most rabid fanbases on Veeky Forums,

There are many Spanish speakers here. They are doing this more out of patriotism than anything else.

Not that the Anglo-fags don’t do the same with Shakespeare, but at least Shakespeare is indeed great – in spite of all the nationalistic assholes that defend him mostly to feel good about their own culture - .

Nabokov never said he didn't like Don Quixote, he's just remarking on the immense suffering that Sancho and Quixote endure.

>Cervantes Clique
lel, if I were you I'd kill myself right now

>>>r/books

>I suspect it's mostly the spics who crawl out of their holes when a Shakespeare thread comes up to screech autistically.
No, user, it's actually the jews who orchestrate all this Cervantes-shilling. No way could people honestly think that DQ is a great novel, that's just ridiculous, it has to be a conspiracy.

>one of the most rabbit fanbases on Veeky Forums

>Well so is Dante, but everybody rates him anyway.

It's The Divine FUCKING Comedy. The thing is LOADED. If you're a poet, that's all you really need. Like Leaves of Grass. Or The Flowers of Evil. Or The Cantos (although Pound wrote other things).

My enthusiasm for Nabokov has heavily waned since I first read him, but I do agree with your assessments of Cervantes, Nabokov, and Shakespeare in their relative talents. It shouldn't surprise anyone here that Cervantes' prose is a bit rough compared to Nabokov considering it's basically the novel in embryo (funny to imagine someone from the 17th century attempting to read Nabokov). And you are right that "Lolita" is a term that will never leave the popular conscience so long as the West exists, just as "quixotic" is permanent.

Sometimes I even think calling Don Quixote the first novel is misleading because obviously there are little or no comparable works we could equally call novels from the 17th century. And if people are willing to call Don Quixote the first novel, then what do they have to say about Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is older yet hardly ever is referred to as the "first novel" despite having similar traits?

I think the 18th century is when the first bona fide novels came about, although my perspective is probably Anglo-biased. It's just that you have so many novelists all of the sudden in England all around the same generation such as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Swift, etc. writing works that can be unambiguously labeled as novels, whereas there are times when Don Quixote seems more similar to the Decameron or Canterbury Tales.

He found Spanish a vulgar and plebeian language.

>portuguese is similar to spanish
uma delicia

Fuck Leaves of Grass my dude, don't compare that to Dante come on

The same could be said for Don Quijote.

Cervantes died on the same day as Shakespeare.

same person, duh.

I can't believe out of Whitman, Baudelaire and Pound you decide to shit on Whitman. LoG may have some bloated trash but a majority of his earlier work is is better than anything the other two did.

Cervantes' taste is unmatched. His style is playful and self-aware centuries before that was even an option. Cervanes is literally the height of the Spanish language, rivaled only by Borges in dominace.
Also
>i read him in Portuguese; its close enough
I hope you dont actually believe you understand Cervantes 16th century Spanish by your modern Portuguese reading of him.

> reads it in Portuguese
> critiques the prose of Spanish because they're similar

Do you also critique French and Italian writers based off Portuguese translations, faggot?

His not though; why do anglos love to parade their ignorance as a badge of honor? Novelas Ejemplares and his Entremeses are both highly praised and common place to read in Spanish literature.

Don Quijote is the first modern novel and the degree of self awareness and the style of it is still centuries ahead. It's a pinnacle of world literature and humanity and every serious lit critic accepts that. It is the definitive tragicomedy. The range of sensibilities (romantic, realist, modernist, postmodernist, etc.) is unmatched. Shakespeare althought culmulatively more important, has no single work that matches DQ single handedly. Not Hamlet, not Macbeth, not King Lear, none.

Okay maybe I'm just scarred from torturous undergrad essays on Whitman

>Cervanes is literally the height of the Spanish language

That's bullshit. Cervantes' style is clumsy and tedious, it's the story which deserves the fame, not the prose.

you guys should read The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader by Borges

>To be honest, some English translations actually make the work better.
I love to hear this
Redirects my bloodflow

>le epic western canon

underage

People forget that the 2 volumes of Quijote were written in 1605 and 1615, the work is more popular today than it ever was. Lolita is certainlya great achievement, but i will never have the power of Cervantes' magnum opus.

Cervantes threads seem to attract lots of plebs

"The prose is not gud"
"Not the first novel"
"Only Spaniards think this guy is good"

You should try to write something as "crude" an "cliché-filled" as Camões and Cervantes then. There is a reason that these writer are remembered hundreds of years after their death.

Even Harold Bloom considered Cervantes as important as Shakespeare. Besides, Shakespeare was a reader of Quixote.

The jews are siding with the Spaniards for that one

Haven’t you guys read the part where I tell that I read the Portuguese translation comparing it to the original Spanish?

Also:

>Do you also critique French and Italian writers based off Portuguese translations, faggot?

C’mon, you know as well as I do that French and Italian, although being romance languages, are far more different from Portuguese than Spanish is. Spanish and Portuguese are indeed very similar languages, especially when one reads them. The accent of the speakers might make them sound different, but when the words are put to paper they are like twins who grow somewhat different because they had different routines, but the same genectic.

Here, just look the translation from the first paragraph of the Quixote in Portuguese and compare it to the original (in the pic):

NUM lugar da Mancha, de cujo nome não quero lembrar-me, vivia, não há muito, um fidalgo, dos de lança em cabido, adarga antiga, rocim fraco, e galgo corredor.Passadio, olha seu tanto mais de vaca do que de carneiro, as mais das ceias restos da carne picados com sua cebola e vinagre, aos sábados outros sobejos ainda somenos, lentilhas às sextas-feiras, algum pombito de crescença aos domingos, consumiam três quartos do seu haver. O remanescente, levavam-no saio de belarte, calças de veludo para as festas, com seus pantufos do mesmo; e para os dias de semana o seu bellori do mais fino. Tinha em casa uma ama que passava dos quarenta, uma sobrinha que não chegava aos vinte, e um moço da poisada e de porta a fora, tanto para o trato do rocim, como para o da fazenda. Orçava na idade o nosso fidalgo pelos cinqüenta anos. Era rijo de compleição, seco de carnes, enxuto de rosto, madrugador, e amigo da caça. Querem dizer que tinha o sobrenome de Quijada ou Quesada (que nisto discrepam algum tanto os autores que tratam da matéria), ainda que por conjecturas verossímeis se deixa entender que se chamava Quijana. Isto porém pouco

>People forget that ______
>more ____ today than it ever was
>___ is certainly great but it will never have the power of _____
>magnum opus
>there is a reason these writers are remembered
jesus christ have you ever written an original sentence in your life?

That's not important

Which part do you prefer Veeky Forums? Part 1 or 2?

ninja self-bump

they are both great

“I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”

The second is much better desu senpai.

Nabokov was butthurt throughout his life because he had to write his later books in a meme language. The dude was straight up pathetic.

M I S S E D O P P O R T U N I T Y

W E W

Simon Leys says that it was because he was offended on behalf of Quixote because of all the indignities that Cervantes made him suffer.

The only thing I read there is uma delicia, go eat some sopa de macaco, you monkey.

He did not "have" to write them in any language, you retard, the man loved English and dedicated his life to mastering it, and he succeeded.

Don Quijote is the best book ever written and Nabokov is an overrated memewriter.

Just finished the first part of the book. Gearing up to read the second.

>Cliché filled

Perhaps because other authors after him imitated him and turned it into clichés?

clichés are centuries old senpai, the first novels emerged in ancient greece
I read Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy recently and was absolutely fucking shocked at the number of tropes and sayings that date back to roman times

>cruel and crude
You know what though? some of the humor is crude actually. BUT, Nabokov is absolutely not to be taken as a critic of value since he had a habit of saying sensational things for attention (cf. his comments on Dostoyevsky etc. ad nauseam)

Part 2 is better than the first part

>Why, why did he not like Cervantes?
Because he was a stupid pseud.

When someone mentions Nabokov's comments, I say
NABOKOV?!
NO, BACK OFF!

I like Terry Gilliam but does anyone know whats up with this?

imdb.com/title/tt1318517/

This of course

>go eat some sopa de macaco, you monkey.

A monkey that is far smarter than you are. What that makes you, then? The lice in the monkeys fur?

Am I the only one who enjoyed both Lolita and Don Quijote?

I did like Lolita more, but they were both were good reads. I think I must've read Lolita 4-5 times by now...

>Nabokov insulted an author I was instructed to like
>therefore he's a h-hack!
Lol

Wrong. Read his letters, he was sincere.

That's fine, but he did have a tendency to word things in an attention-getting way (his comments get mentioned here quite a bit, for example, moreso than more nuanced critiques from others)

>chapter starts with Don Quixote and Sancho getting over their injuries from the last chapter
>Don Quixote sees a [insert normal thing here]
>"my dear Sancho, it seems that our luck has turned at last. Just over there I can see a [extraordinary thing from chivalry novel]
>"surely you are mistaking my lord, for that is not a [extraordinary thing] as you say, but simply a [ordinary thing]
>"you naive squire, how little you know of adventuring, for if you were a knight errant such as myself you would understand that that is truly a [extraordinary thing] and that it is my duty to [attack innocent person] in the name of my most perfect lady, Dulcinea del Toboso
>*Don Quixote charges at [person] with his lance, he and Sancho proceed to get their asses kicked*
>"my brave lord, it seems that all this adventuring has brought us nothing but bruises and missing teeth"
>"Do not feel discouraged my squire, for it is well know that all knight errants are to be rewarded by the king, and more often than not their squires are made governors of Insulas
>*repeat for every chapter in the book*
Truly the greatest novel ever written

Brainlet attempt at literary criticism

You could do this with everything
Lolita ( great novel in my opinion):
Pedo goes to america
Marries woman to prey on hwe daughter
Wife dies, gets the guard of her daughter
Keeps having sex with the daughter while traveling America
They both die at the end

>cultural icons have lasting power

You could apply this logic to everything. It isn't an argument.

No clue, hope it turns out well. I've always wondered whether Gilliam was influenced by DQ; all the stuff in his films about mad knights and futile rebellion owes a debt to the novel.

t. Stopped Reading Before the Pastoral Segment

>Nabokov gave a controversial opinion
>therefore it's t-true!
kek

He means that's the entirety of a doorstopper novel in which that same sequence of actions repeat over and over again, while you just wrote the plot outline for Lolita. The only brainlet here is you, friend.

>Truly the greatest novel ever written

No, you're missing the turn that keeps it fresh - when Sancho begins to deliberately manipulate the Don's madness, and then a couple of further turns after that.

Plus remarks herein:

This is a symptom of not reading it in spanish.

Continúa siendo plebeyo por siempre, anónimo.

Mira user, no quiero ser maleducado contigo. Pero de igual forma he leído yo obras portuguesas y brasileñas en traducción al español, así como las he comparado lado a lado con mi rudimentario entendimiento del portugués (basado en esa similaridad que mencionas) y, he encontrado insuficiencias al asimilar la ritmicidad de la prosa, siempre ganando el original. En fin, no seas tan pretencioso ¡Por Dios! Incluso en la traducción que copiaste, al leerla en voz alta, el estilo cambia completamente. Piensa que una traducción, sin importar el idioma, es una re interpretación del estilo y ritmo original.

>not mentioning the dialogues of Don Quixotic concerning military engagement and the work of letter.
>Not reading the perfect use of musicality and metric in the original spanish
>willfully leaving out the dialogue between Don Lorenzo and Don Quijote concerning poetry and vernacular language.

user,you could try. You know?

Ah here we go, classic spic damage control. Well, I'm sure seeing what uma delicia it is in original, I would even bring myself to oversee Cervantes' tedious inclination to constant didacticism. Pity there's like ten languages with richer literary canon overall I'd rather learn sooner.

Jesus Christ, how can you be such a gigantic butthurt pseud? Sure you've read all great works of world literature in their original language, Pedro.
Also, this:

>"This superstition is so established that no one dares admit to an absence of style in compelling works, especially in the classics. There is no good book without its own style, which no one can deny-except its writer. Let us take the example of Don Quixote. Confronted with the proven excellence of this novel, Spanish literary critics have suppressed the thought that its greatest ( and perhaps only irrefutable) worth may be its psychological acumen, and they ascribe to it a stylistic brilliance which many readers find mysterious. One need only review a few paragraphs of the Quixote to realize that Cervantes was not a stylist (at least in the current acoustical or decorative sense of the word) and that he was too interested in the destinies of Don Quixote and Sancho to allow himself to be distracted by his own voice. In his Wit and the Art of Genius, Baltasar Gracian-who lavished so much praise on other narrative prose, such as the chivalresque novel Guzman de Alfarache-does not even mention Don Quixote. Quevedo farcically versified
his death and then forgot all about him. One might object that these two examples are negative; in our own era, Leopolda Lugones has criticized Cervantes explicitly: "Style is his weakness, and the damage caused by his influence has been severe. Colorless prose, redundancies, flimsy narrative structure, panting paragraphs unwinding in endless convolutions that never get to the point, and a complete lack of proportion comprise the legacy received by those who consider its style to be the immortal work's ultimate achievement; they have only scratched the surface whose rough edges hide its true strengths and flavor" (El imperio jesuitico, 59). Our own Groussac has declared: "If things are to be described as they are, we must admit that at least half of Cervantes' work has a weak, disheveled shape, which completely justifies his rivals' claim about his ' humble language.' I am referring not only to his verbal improprieties, intolerable repetitions and wordplays, to those overbearing moments of heavy-handed grandiloquence, but mostly to the generally bland texture of his post-prandial
prose" ( Critica literaria, 41 ) . Post-prandial prose, Cervantes' prose, spoken and not declaimed, was precisely what he needed. The same observation would be just, I believe, in the case of Dostoevsky, Montaigne, or Samuel
Butler."

Borges: The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader

fuck, my phone messed this shit up

this, so much

>If there was a writer he would be jealous of it was Shakespeare

Actually it was Joyce. He went full autist after Ulysses won the top 100 books of the 20th century and Lolita came it second.

Why do people pretend Don Quixote is the first novel when The Golden Ass exists as well as the various Medieval Romances? Like, why do the books Cervantes is satirizing/praising not count, but his book does? It's a really bullshit and nonsensical argument. One might argue that Don Quixote is the first "good" novel, but that's a question of taste, not that said books aren't novels.

nabokov even admitted to being inferior to joyce, doesn't sound like jealousy to me desu.

Definetly part 2

I found the stories on part 1 pretty corny. The denouement at the inn was worthy of the mexican soap opera.

I dont doubt you, but I would like a source on this (it would be interesting to see what Nabokov said about it).

>Lolita came it second.
Really? Good for Nabby