DQ has inspired a great many derivative works...some more successful than others. Here's a smattering, but first, common phrases that come from Don Quixote.
"in a pickle" "too much of a good thing" "wink of sleep" "sky's the limit"
"give the devil his due" "wild-goose chase" "mind your own business"
"within a stone's throw" "thou has seen nothing yet" "cry my eyes out"
"the truth, and nothing but the truth" "I smell a rat" "the fair sex"
"turn over a new leaf" "haves and have-nots" "no love lost"
"honesty's the best policy" "my word is as good as my bond" "mum's the word"
"born with a silver spoon in his mouth"
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My first exposure to DQ was through the musical version, first performed in 1966. There are some problems with it (the flamenco-infused soundtrack is for some inexcusable, since flamenco didn't yet exist in 1600), but it does capture some of the Don's romanticism. While The Impossible Dream
is now the best -known song from it, I, Don Quixote is my favorite. Surely Richard Kiley's baritone is what a real singing hero would sound like. And yes, I just wrote "real singing hero."
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There have been several film versions of Don Quixote, but none of them have really succeeded either artistically or commercially. Ironically, the two versions that had the best chance never made it through production. Orson Welles began shooting a version of DQ that placed the Don and Sancho in contemporary Mexico. Financial difficulties and Orson's own craziness doomed the project
and no authoritative version has ever seen the light of day. What I have seen of it is really quite beautiful, even without post-production. (Note: There is a long introduction by a Welles scholar that's not terrible, but if you want to skip to the main course, the actual footage starts at the 5 minute mark). The other version I'm keeping in my pocket for now...
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Those of you who have any exposure to Kafka are probably not surprised that he was fascinated by DQ. He even went so far as to write a counter-fable, which I include here in its entirety:
THE TRUTH ABOUT SANCHO PANZA by FRANZ KAFKA
Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of
years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and
adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself
his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon
set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the
lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza
himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically
followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of
responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to
the end of his days.
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And finally, getting back to Cervantes himself, here is an audio version of Chapter 1 in the original Spanish. This is absolutely useless to me, but if you have some Spanish, perhaps it is interesting (?).
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Final note: Our weekly image is Picasso's "Don Quixote"
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