Te compano en u pesar
Tr. I accompany you in your sorrow. One joins humanity — friends, family and strangers — by listening sympathetically, by responding, by not turning away.
The sharing of stories — stories about real life, not the fabrications of romance — has the power to assuage madness, loneliness, and pain. Don Quixote and Pancho Sanchez are great, life-saving conversationalists. Their friendship lives on and dilates in the absurd, meandering, yet touching debates they have with each other.
hearing another voice, taking in another’s story, is the essential thing — the humanizing component in an otherwise bleak landscape. It saves us from our lunacy and pride, both personal and cultural.
The hardships Cervantes faces seem to have opened him to the world. And it is this openness, finally, that makes him still so valuable now.
It’s a breathtaking transformation of personal trauma — war, injury, loss, enslavement — into a cosmopolitian allegory of mutual attraction and restored human connection.
The book does have a moral vision, though — one inextricably bound up with its warmth and humor. This comes through in his sociability, in the way he honors other people in his unwavering respect for those who, like knights of old, remain open and courteous to strangers.
There is no malice in Senor Quixote. A child could convince him it’s night in the middle of the day, and because he’s simple I love him with all my heart and couldn’t leave him no matter how many crazy things he does.
Excerpts from a review of Don Quixote translated by Edith Grossman
