Miguel de Cervantes - Legacy

Legacy

Cervantes' novel Don Quixote has had a tremendous influence on the development of prose fiction. It has been translated into all major languages and has appeared in 700 editions. The first translation was in English, made by Thomas Shelton in 1608, but not published until 1612. Shakespeare had evidently read Don Quixote, but it is most unlikely that Cervantes had ever heard of Shakespeare.

Carlos Fuentes raised the possibility that Cervantes and Shakespeare were the same person, in the sense that Homer, Dante, Defoe, Dickens, Balzac, and Joyce are all the same writer whose spirit wanders through the centuries. Francis Carr, who is a noted promoter of conspiracy theories such as the one that Mozart was poisoned by his wife Constanze and a lover of hers, took Fuentes' statement literally and suggested that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and Don Quixote, both claims which are considered ridiculous by mainstream scholars and critics. Shelton renders some Spanish idioms into English so literally that they sound nonsensical when translated — as an example he always translates the word dedos as fingers, not realizing that dedos can also mean inches. (In the original Spanish, for instance, a phrase such as una altura de quince dedos, which makes perfect sense in Spanish, would mean fifteen inches high in English, but a translator who renders it too literally would translate it as fifteen fingers high.)

Don Quixote has been the subject of a variety of works in other fields of art, including operas by the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello, the French Jules Massenet, and the Spanish Manuel de Falla, a Russian ballet by the Russian-German composer Ludwig Minkus, a tone poem by the German composer Richard Strauss, a German film (1933) directed by G. W. Pabst, a Soviet film (1957) directed by Grigori Kozintsev, a 1965 ballet (no relation to the one by Minkus) with choreography by George Balanchine, an American musical – Man of La Mancha (1965) – by Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, and Joe Darion. which was made into a film in 1972, directed by Arthur Hiller, and a song by Brazilian tropicalia-pioneers Os Mutantes. Don Quixote's influence can be seen in the work of Smollett, Defoe, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the classic 19th-century novelists Scott, Dickens, Flaubert, Melville, Twain, and Dostoevsky, and in the 20th -century works of James Joyce, Giannina Braschi, and Jorge Luis Borges. The theme of the novel also inspired the 19th-century French artists Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré.

The Euro coins of €0.10, €0.20, and €0.50 made for Spain bear the portrait and signature of Cervantes. The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, a digital library, hosted by the university of Alicante, the largest digital archive of Spanish-language historical and literary works in the world, is named after Cervantes.