Read Don Quixote in Spanish with English translation — parallel text
Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605. Project Gutenberg ebook 2000 is the Spanish original, and it opens with the sentence almost every reader of Spanish has already met: a gentleman in a place in La Mancha whose name the narrator will not recall. He eats simply, keeps a thin horse, and has read so many books of chivalry that he decides to become a knight. The language is early modern Spanish, a C1 text, with long sentences and old forms. It is still the best reason to push into older Spanish, because the scene is funny and physical. This page shows the opening beside an English translation written for LingoRead.
Original / Translation
| Español | English |
|---|---|
| En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda. El resto della concluían sayo de velarte, calzas de velludo para las fiestas, con sus pantuflos de lo mesmo, y los días de entresemana se honraba con su vellorí de lo más fino. Tenía en su casa una ama que pasaba de los cuarenta, y una sobrina que no llegaba a los veinte, y un mozo de campo y plaza, que así ensillaba el rocín como tomaba la podadera. Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta años; era de complexión recia, seco de carnes, enjuto de rostro, gran madrugador y amigo de la caza. Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada, que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los autores que deste caso escriben; aunque, por conjeturas verosímiles, se deja entender que se llamaba Quejana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento; basta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad. | In a corner of La Mancha whose name I prefer to leave unsaid, there lived, only a short while back, a hidalgo of the kind that keeps a lance in the rack, an ancient leather shield, a bony horse, and a greyhound made for the run. A stew with rather more beef in it than mutton, a cold meat hash on most nights, eggs and bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and the odd young pigeon added on Sundays, consumed three quarters of his income. The remainder went on a broadcloth cloak, velvet breeches for feast days with slippers to match, and on weekdays he dressed with a sense of his own dignity in the finest homespun he owned. His household was a housekeeper past forty, a niece still short of twenty, and a hand for both field and town, who saddled the horse as readily as he took up the pruning hook. Our hidalgo was approaching fifty. He was robust in frame, spare of flesh, thin in the face, much given to rising early, and fond of the hunt. The claim is that his surname was Quijada, or Quesada, since the authors who write about this matter disagree; though plausible conjecture indicates that he was called Quejana. But this is of small importance to our tale. It is enough that the narration of it never departs by a single point from the truth. |
| Es, pues, de saber que este sobredicho hidalgo, los ratos que estaba ocioso, que eran los más del año, se daba a leer libros de caballerías, con tanta afición y gusto, que olvidó casi de todo punto el ejercicio de la caza, y aun la administración de su hacienda. Y llegó a tanto su curiosidad y desatino en esto, que vendió muchas hanegas de tierra de sembradura para comprar libros de caballerías en que leer, y así, llevó a su casa todos cuantos pudo haber dellos; y de todos, ningunos le parecían tan bien como los que compuso el famoso Feliciano de Silva, porque la claridad de su prosa y aquellas entricadas razones suyas le parecían de perlas, y más cuando llegaba a leer aquellos requiebros y cartas de desafíos, donde en muchas partes hallaba escrito: La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de la vuestra fermosura. Y también cuando leía: ...los altos cielos que de vuestra divinidad divinamente con las estrellas os fortifican, y os hacen merecedora del merecimiento que merece la vuestra grandeza. | It should be known, then, that this same hidalgo, during the stretches when he had nothing to do — and those made up most of the year — devoted himself to reading romances of chivalry with such liking and such relish that he very nearly abandoned hunting altogether, and the care of his property along with it. His curiosity and his madness on this point went so far that he sold many fanegas of land under seed so as to buy romances of chivalry to read, and thus he carried home every copy of them he could get. Among the whole lot, none seemed to him as fine as the ones composed by the celebrated Feliciano de Silva, for the lucidity of that writer's prose and the knotted arguments he spun seemed to him pearls, above all when he reached the lover's compliments and the challenge letters, where in many passages he found written: The reason of the unreason that is done to my reason weakens my reason in such a fashion that with reason I complain of your beauty. And likewise when he read: ...the lofty heavens that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, and make you deserving of the deserving that your greatness deserves. |
| Con estas razones perdía el pobre caballero el juicio, y desvelábase por entenderlas y desentrañarles el sentido, que no se lo sacara ni las entendiera el mesmo Aristóteles, si resucitara para sólo ello. No estaba muy bien con las heridas que don Belianís daba y recebía, porque se imaginaba que, por grandes maestros que le hubiesen curado, no dejaría de tener el rostro y todo el cuerpo lleno de cicatrices y señales. Pero, con todo, alababa en su autor aquel acabar su libro con la promesa de aquella inacabable aventura, y muchas veces le vino deseo de tomar la pluma y dalle fin al pie de la letra, como allí se promete; y sin duda alguna lo hiciera, y aun saliera con ello, si otros mayores y continuos pensamientos no se lo estorbaran. Tuvo muchas veces competencia con el cura de su lugar —que era hombre docto, graduado en Sigüenza—, sobre cuál había sido mejor caballero: Palmerín de Ingalaterra o Amadís de Gaula; mas maese Nicolás, barbero del mesmo pueblo, decía que ninguno llegaba al Caballero del Febo, y que si alguno se le podía comparar, era don Galaor, hermano de Amadís de Gaula, porque tenía muy acomodada condición para todo; que no era caballero melindroso, ni tan llorón como su hermano, y que en lo de la valentía no le iba en zaga. | On speeches of this sort the poor gentleman was losing his mind, and he sat up at night in the effort to understand them and to pull their sense out of them — a sense that Aristotle himself would neither have extracted nor grasped, had he come back to life for that single task. He was uneasy about the wounds Don Belianís dealt and took, for he pictured that, no matter how eminent the masters who had doctored him, the knight's face and his entire body must have been covered with scars and traces. All the same, he commended the author for closing the book on the promise of that adventure without an end, and more than once the desire came over him to take up a pen and finish the story exactly as it is promised there. He would certainly have done it, and would even have succeeded, if other thoughts, larger and never letting up, had not blocked him. Many times he argued with the priest of his village — a learned man, a graduate of Sigüenza — about which had been the finer knight, Palmerín of England or Amadís de Gaula. But Master Nicolás, the barber of that same village, would say that neither reached the Knight of Febo, and that if anyone could be set beside him it was Don Galaor, the brother of Amadís de Gaula, because his temper fitted him for anything. He was no dainty knight, nor such a weeper as his brother, and where valor was concerned he did not fall a step behind. |
| En resolución, él se enfrascó tanto en su letura, que se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio; y así, del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le secó el celebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio. | In the end he plunged so deep into his reading that the nights passed him by as he read from one daylight clear through to the next, and the days from one dimness to another; and thus, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dried out, so that he came to lose his reason. |
| Llenósele la fantasía de todo aquello que leía en los libros, así de encantamentos como de pendencias, batallas, desafíos, heridas, requiebros, amores, tormentas y disparates imposibles; y asentósele de tal modo en la imaginación que era verdad toda aquella máquina de aquellas sonadas soñadas invenciones que leía, que para él no había otra historia más cierta en el mundo. | His imagination filled with all that he read in the books — enchantments, and likewise brawls, battles, challenges, wounds, flirtatious speeches, love affairs, storms, and impossible absurdities — and it fixed itself so firmly in his fancy that the entire contraption of those celebrated, dreamed inventions he read was the truth, and that for him no history in the world was more certain. |
| Decía él que el Cid Ruy Díaz había sido muy buen caballero, pero que no tenía que ver con el Caballero de la Ardiente Espada, que de sólo un revés había partido por medio dos fieros y descomunales gigantes. | He would say that the Cid, Ruy Díaz, had been a very good knight, but that he could not compare with the Knight of the Burning Sword, who with only one backhand blow had cleft two savage and gigantic giants straight through the middle. |
| Mejor estaba con Bernardo del Carpio, porque en Roncesvalles había muerto a Roldán el encantado, valiéndose de la industria de Hércules, cuando ahogó a Anteo, el hijo de la Tierra, entre los brazos. | He thought more highly of Bernardo del Carpio, because at Roncesvalles he had slain the enchanted Roldán by means of the trick of Hercules, when Hercules smothered Anteo, the son of the Earth, in his arms. |
| Decía mucho bien del gigante Morgante, porque, con ser de aquella generación gigantea, que todos son soberbios y descomedidos, él solo era afable y bien criado. | He had much good to say of the giant Morgante, for, though he came of that giant lineage, all of them haughty and ill-mannered, he alone was friendly and well bred. |
| Pero, sobre todos, estaba bien con Reinaldos de Montalbán, y más cuando le veía salir de su castillo y robar cuantos topaba, y cuando en allende robó aquel ídolo de Mahoma que era todo de oro, según dice su historia. | But above every one of them he favored Reinaldos de Montalbán, most of all when he watched him leave his castle and rob whomever he ran into, and when, in lands overseas, he carried off that idol of Muhammad which, so his history says, was solid gold. |
| Diera él, por dar una mano de coces al traidor de Galalón, al ama que tenía, y aun a su sobrina de añadidura. | To be allowed to land a flurry of kicks on the traitor Galalón, he would have given the housekeeper he kept, and his niece on top of her. |
| En efeto, rematado ya su juicio, vino a dar en el más estraño pensamiento que jamás dio loco en el mundo; y fue que le pareció convenible y necesario, así para el aumento de su honra como para el servicio de su república, hacerse caballero andante, y irse por todo el mundo con sus armas y caballo a buscar las aventuras y a ejercitarse en todo aquello que él había leído que los caballeros andantes se ejercitaban, deshaciendo todo género de agravio, y poniéndose en ocasiones y peligros donde, acabándolos, cobrase eterno nombre y fama. Imaginábase el pobre ya coronado por el valor de su brazo, por lo menos, del imperio de Trapisonda; y así, con estos tan agradables pensamientos, llevado del estraño gusto que en ellos sentía, se dio priesa a poner en efeto lo que deseaba. | So it was that, his wits now wrecked, he arrived at the strangest notion that ever lodged in a madman's head anywhere in the world. It was this: it struck him as proper and needful, as much for the growth of his own honor as for the service of his country, to turn himself into a knight-errant and travel the whole world with his weapons and his horse, looking for adventures and training himself in everything he had read that knights-errant trained in, undoing every sort of injury, and putting himself into trials and perils from which, once he had finished them, he would win an eternal name and fame. Already the poor man saw himself crowned, through the valor of his arm, with nothing less than the empire of Trapisonda; and so, on the strength of these pleasant thoughts, swept along by the strange delight he felt in them, he made haste to carry out what he wanted. |
| Y lo primero que hizo fue limpiar unas armas que habían sido de sus bisabuelos, que, tomadas de orín y llenas de moho, luengos siglos había que estaban puestas y olvidadas en un rincón. Limpiólas y aderezólas lo mejor que pudo, pero vio que tenían una gran falta, y era que no tenían celada de encaje, sino morrión simple; mas a esto suplió su industria, porque de cartones hizo un modo de media celada, que, encajada con el morrión, hacían una apariencia de celada entera. Es verdad que para probar si era fuerte y podía estar al riesgo de una cuchillada, sacó su espada y le dio dos golpes, y con el primero y en un punto deshizo lo que había hecho en una semana; y no dejó de parecerle mal la facilidad con que la había hecho pedazos, y, por asegurarse deste peligro, la tornó a hacer de nuevo, poniéndole unas barras de hierro por de dentro, de tal manera que él quedó satisfecho de su fortaleza; y, sin querer hacer nueva experiencia della, la diputó y tuvo por celada finísima de encaje. | The first thing he did was to clean some pieces of armor that had been his great-grandfathers'. They were taken with rust and thick with mildew, and for long centuries they had stood forgotten in a corner. He cleaned them and fitted them up as well as he was able, but he saw that they had one great defect, namely that there was no visored helmet among them, only a plain morion. His own inventiveness made up the lack, for from pasteboard he fashioned a kind of half-helmet which, locked onto the morion, made the appearance of a whole helmet. True enough, when he went to test whether it was stout and could face the risk of a slash, he drew his sword and gave it two blows, and with the first he undid in a moment what he had spent a week making. The ease with which he had broken it to bits did not sit well with him, and, to secure himself against that danger, he built it afresh, putting iron bars on the inside, in such a fashion that he was content with its strength; and, not wishing to try a new experiment on it, he rated it and held it to be the finest of visored helmets. |
| Fue luego a ver su rocín, y, aunque tenía más cuartos que un real y más tachas que el caballo de Gonela, que tantum pellis et ossa fuit, le pareció que ni el Bucéfalo de Alejandro ni Babieca el del Cid con él se igualaban. Cuatro días se le pasaron en imaginar qué nombre le pondría; porque, según se decía él a sí mesmo, no era razón que caballo de caballero tan famoso, y tan bueno él por sí, estuviese sin nombre conocido; y ansí, procuraba acomodársele de manera que declarase quién había sido, antes que fuese de caballero andante, y lo que era entonces; pues estaba muy puesto en razón que, mudando su señor estado, mudase él también el nombre, y le cobrase famoso y de estruendo, como convenía a la nueva orden y al nuevo ejercicio que ya profesaba. Y así, después de muchos nombres que formó, borró y quitó, añadió, deshizo y tornó a hacer en su memoria e imaginación, al fin le vino a llamar Rocinante: nombre, a su parecer, alto, sonoro y significativo de lo que había sido cuando fue rocín, antes de lo que ahora era, que era antes y primero de todos los rocines del mundo. | Next he went to look at his nag, and although the animal had more quarter-cracks than a real has quarters, and more flaws than Gonela's horse, which tantum pellis et ossa fuit, it seemed to him that neither Alexander's Bucephalus nor Babieca, the Cid's horse, could match it. Four days slipped by while he tried to imagine what name he would give it; because, as he told himself, it was not reasonable that the horse of so famous a knight, a horse so good in its own right, should go without a name that people knew. He therefore tried to suit a name to it that would state what it had been before it was a knight-errant's horse, and what it was at present; for it was entirely reasonable that, when its master changed his condition, the horse should change its name too, and acquire one that was famous and full of noise, as suited the new order and the new practice he had now taken up. And so, after many names that he shaped, scratched out, and dropped, added, pulled apart, and made over again in his memory and his imagination, he finally came to call it Rocinante — a name, in his opinion, high, resonant, and significant of what it had been when it was a nag, before what it was now, which was ahead of and first among all the nags in the world. |
| Puesto nombre, y tan a su gusto, a su caballo, quiso ponérsele a sí mismo, y en este pensamiento duró otros ocho días, y al cabo se vino a llamar don Quijote; de donde —como queda dicho— tomaron ocasión los autores desta tan verdadera historia que, sin duda, se debía de llamar Quijada, y no Quesada, como otros quisieron decir. Pero, acordándose que el valeroso Amadís no sólo se había contentado con llamarse Amadís a secas, sino que añadió el nombre de su reino y patria, por Hepila famosa, y se llamó Amadís de Gaula, así quiso, como buen caballero, añadir al suyo el nombre de la suya y llamarse don Quijote de la Mancha, con que, a su parecer, declaraba muy al vivo su linaje y patria, y la honraba con tomar el sobrenombre della. | Once his horse had a name, and one that pleased him so well, he wanted to give a name to himself, and that thought occupied him for another eight days. At the end of them he settled on calling himself Don Quijote. From this — as already noted — the authors of this wholly true history took their grounds for concluding that he must certainly have been called Quijada, and not Quesada, as other people have preferred to claim. But, calling to mind that the brave Amadís had not been satisfied to be simply Amadís, and had joined to it the name of his kingdom and his native land in order to make that land famous, and so became Amadís de Gaula, he wished, like a proper knight, to add his own country's name to his and to call himself Don Quijote de la Mancha. In his view this set out, very vividly, his lineage and his homeland, and did that homeland honor by taking its name as his surname. |
Top words in this book
| Word | Translation |
|---|---|
| don | Don |
| quijote | Quixote |
| sancho | Sancho |
| dijo | said |
| tan | so |
| todo | all |
| respondió | replied |
| señor | sir |
| había | there was |
| merced | grace |
| pues | well, then |
| vuestra | your |
| todos | all |
| sino | but rather |
| caballero | gentleman |
| decir | to say |
| he | behold |
| dios | God |
| hacer | to do |
| señora | madam |
| mí | me |
| son | are |
| mal | bad |
| cosa | thing |
| buen | good |
| está | is |
| verdad | truth |
| tal | such |
| allí | there |
| tanto | so much |
| ver | to see |
| tengo | I have |
| mundo | world |
| luego | then |
| sé | I know |
| tiene | has |
| todas | all |
| dicho | said |
| dar | to give |
| buena | good |
| parte | part |
| cosas | things |
| ahora | now |
| vida | life |
| panza | Panza |
| tenía | had |
| menos | less |
| lugar | place |
| gran | great |
| soy | I am |
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Text from Project Gutenberg #2000. The original is public domain. The translation on this page was written for LingoRead.