Stories like “The Big Fire” and “The Talking Goat” are preserved through an oral tradition. Parents or village elders tell these stories out loud―often with many dramatic effects―to teach each new generation about the beliefs and values of the culture. Of course, when children get older, they may decide to write these stories down. At that point, the stories might go anywhere.
Don Quixote is the protagonist of one of the most famous “traveling” stories. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha is a novel by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. Many historians consider Don Quixote, as it’s often called, the first modern novel in any language―even though it was written over 400 years ago!
Why is Don Quixote so influential? How did it shift readers’ ideas about literature? The article “Some Kind of Hero” explains it well. Listen to the beginning of the article as you read along. Then finish reading the article on your own.
Some Kind of Hero
Have you ever heard someone described as “off fighting windmills”? It means that the person is engaged in a pointless struggle―usually for a cause that he or she believes in very strongly. If you imagine a knight attacking a windmill with a sword, you may know something about 17th-century Spanish literature. Both the expression and the image can be traced to the famous novel Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes.
Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote tells the story of a Spanish nobleman who reads too many romantic stories of chivalry, or knightly honor, and loses his mind. Don Quixote comes to believe the fictional stories are literally true. Moreover, he fancies himself a knight like the heroes of those tales. Determined to seek adventure, he puts on an old suit of armor and climbs onto his tired workhorse, Rocinante. He also enlists a simple, down-to-earth peasant named Sancho Panza as his reluctant squire. Together they set out on a comical series of would-be heroic quests. They battle a windmill “dragon,” fight imaginary villains, and “rescue” a damsel who isn’t actually in distress.
Don Quixote was a wildly popular story in Cervantes’ time, and it is still a beloved classic of Spanish literature. Some consider it to be the first―and even the best―modern novel ever written. It’s not surprising, then, that Don Quixote’s misadventures have become a part not only of Spanish culture, but world culture. Along with the expression “battling windmills,” Cervantes’ novel has given us the English word quixotic, which means “romantic or idealistic to a degree that isn’t practical.”
Don Quixote has influenced countless other literary works over the centuries, including Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If an idea, plot, or literary form appears in Don Quixote, then it probably has made its way into other writers’ works.
Cervantes made fun of a certain type of story―the chivalric stories and poems that Don Quixote read and believed. The “conceits,” or figurative comparisons, of these writings are so complicated that they drive Don Quixote mad. Cervantes quotes imaginary passages of overblown chivalric writing like this one:
The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty.
If that sentence had you scratching your head and saying “Huh?” then you had exactly the reaction Cervantes intended.
At the same time that Cervantes poked fun at one type of writing, he popularized other styles and forms by weaving them into Don Quixote. One of these literary forms is a type of poetry that Cervantes himself seems to have invented. It is called the ovillejo, a word that means “little bundle of yarn.”
Let’s unravel an ovillejo to see what it contains.
The ovillejo starts with three two-line stanzas. The first line asks a question, and the second gives a short answer. Here are the first three stanzas of an ovillejo from Don Quixote:
What makes my quest of happiness seem vain?
Disdain.
What bids me to
abandon hope of ease?
Jealousies.
What holds my heart in anguish of suspense?
Absence.
The ovillejo then ends with a four-line stanza. The fourth line cleverly “bundles up” the previous stanzas by including all three last lines from the question-and-answer stanzas. That pattern may sound complicated, but the form may seem more natural when you see how Cervantes pulls it off.
Here is the last stanza of Cervantes’ ovillejo. Notice how he weaves in the three answer lines at the end:
If that be so, then for my grief
Where shall I turn to seek relief,
When
hope on every side lies slain
By Absence, Jealousies, Disdain?
Cervantes’ ovillejo is about a jealous lover whose object of affection disdains and avoids him. However, a modern ovillejo could be about anything you like. How about a poem about the virtues of your bicycle, or a series of questions and answers about your favorite place in the world? Are you ready to give it a try? Although Cervantes’ ovillejo follows a rhyme scheme, yours doesn’t have to.
Once you have a topic in mind, you may find it easier to start with the answers instead of the questions. Write down three words that name or describe your topic. For example, for an ovillejo about a skateboard, those words could be speed, beauty, and style or sleek, souped-up, and bright red.
Next, write the questions to which those words are answers. For example, speed might be the answer to the question, “What sets my skateboard apart from all the rest?”
In the final four-line stanza, try to build on the first three stanzas to say something new or to offer a surprising insight.
Most of all, have fun with the ovillejo form! Play with it to create something unexpected, as Cervantes did.
