Don Quixote ~ MIGUEL DE CERVANTES ~ Arion Press ~ 2009 Edith Grossman

Description: New as received from Arion Press. Will be packed with care. By Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman, with 97 prints by William T. Wiley, two volumes, Publication 86 in 2009 and Publication 89 in 2010. The Arion Press edition of Don Quixote takes its place in a distinguished tradition of illustrated versions of Cervantes’ comic masterpiece. Over the centuries, the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have inspired artists and illustrators, including Rowlandson, Fragonard, Boucher, Goya, Doré, and Picasso. The Arion edition is illustrated by the acclaimed contemporary artist William T. Wiley. It was the reception this brilliant translation by Edith Grossman received, rising on the best-seller list in the months following its release (rather like the surprising popularity of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in 2000) and the delight we experienced in reading it that led us to consider producing an Arion Press edition. This has been an enormous undertaking, comparable in effort to the earlier Arion editions of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1979) and Joyce’s Ulysses (1988). Don Quixote is considered to be the first modern novel and among the greatest works of literature in the world. It was published in two volumes, the first in 1605, the second in 1615. Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, on September 29, 1547. He enlisted in the Spanish militia at twenty-three and fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto in 1571, where he was wounded in his left hand and permanently crippled. After four years at sea he was captured by Barbary pirates and enslaved for five years. Cervantes began to write Don Quixote in debtor’s prison. During the ten-year interval between the two volumes, an imposter seeking to profit from pent-up demand wrote a sequel to Book I. Cervantes revenged this transgression in Book II, when Don Quixote visits a printing house in Barcelona where the pirated edition is being printed and he disparages it. The artist for Don Quixote is William T. Wiley. Though Wiley has made art for two previous Arion editions, The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti in 2001, and Godot, an imaginary staging of the play by Samuel Beckett in 2006, he seems to have been destined to do Cervantes. When the project was proposed to him, Wiley said, “Oh, I couldn’t to that; it’s too much me!” Eventually he came around, and in his typically generous manner has made forty-two full page prints for Book I, and fifty-five for Book II. The incidents from the novel Wiley depicts are comedic and tragic. It was as ludicrous in 1605 as it would be today for a delusional man to dress up in armor, to arm himself with sword and lance, and to go forth upon a broken-down nag to right wrongs and rescue maidens. Wiley has, of course, shown the famous scenes of Don Quixote going mad in his library while reading and believing books on chivalry, the burning of his books, the Don and his horse Rocinante vanquished by a windmill, Sancho Panza tossed in a blanket, the Don’s antics at his retreat in the wilderness, Quixote slashing wineskins, the errant knight captured, caged on an oxcart, conveyed to his home, and put to bed, and much, much more. Edith Grossman is one of the most important translators working today. Her 2003 translation of Don Quixote has been acclaimed as the unsurpassed version in English. Born in 1936, she holds graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University and has specialized in Spanish-language literature from Latin America and Spain, including works by Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. She lives in New York City. In Don Quixote, artist William T. Wiley has produced one of Arion Press’s most generously illustrated editions. The artist was born in 1937 in Bedford, Indiana and was raised in Indiana, Texas, and Richland, Washington. He earned a M.F.A. at the California School of Fine Arts in 1962. His first one-man museum show was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Wiley has had works in the Venice Biennial (1980) and the Whitney Biennial (1983). Other important exhibitions were held at the M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco (1996), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2005). The Arion Press edition of Don Quixote was celebrated in New York in March 2011 with a symposium at the Americas Society and an exhibition at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute. THE TRANSLATIONWhen this new translation was released in 2003, Carlos Fuentes wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Edith Grossman delivers her Quixote in plain but plentiful contemporary English. Yet there is not a single moment in which, in forthright English, we are not reading a seventeenth-century novel. This is truly masterly: the contemporaneous and the original co-exist.” In a separate review in the Times, Richard Eder wrote: “. . . the most transparent and least impeded among more than a dozen English translations going back to the seventeenth century. Ms. Grossman has provided a Quixote that is agile, playful, formal, and wry.” Edith Grossman is one of the most important living translators. She has specialized in Spanish-language literature from Latin America and Spain, including works by Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. She was born in Philadelphia in 1936, received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and received a Ph.D. degree from New York University. She lives in New York City. This translation project was suggested to Grossman by Daniel Halpern of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, which published the trade edition with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Bloom writes: “I commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman’s translation that I believe has not been achieved before. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to her heightened quality of diction. Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes’s darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that followed in its sublime wake.” THE ARTISTWilliam T. Wiley was born October 21, 1937, in Bedford, Indiana. He was raised in Indiana, Texas, and Richland, Washington. He earned the B.F.A. at the California School of Fine Arts in 1960 and the M.F.A. in 1962. He taught in the art department of the University of California at Davis, where Bruce Nauman was one of his students. His first one-man museum show was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Later in that decade he collaborated with the minimalist composer Steve Reich. Wiley had works in the Venice Biennial (1980) and the Whitney Biennial (1983). Other important exhibitions were held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1981), M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco (1996), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2005). The Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C., hosted a major retrospective of his works in painting, drawing, sculpture, and prints in 2009, traveling to the Berkeley Art Museum in 2010. The artist and his wife Mary Hull Webster live in Woodacre, California. DEDICATIONArion Press is pleased to dedicate this edition of Don Quixote to the memory of former subscriber Jacqueline Stanhope Hoefer, in recognition of her devotion to literature and the printed book. A patron of the arts in San Francisco from the 1970s until her death at age 83 in 2006, Jacqueline Hoefer was a poet and professor of literature, who received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Washington University. With her husband Peter Hoefer, who was a sculptor as well as a businessman, she participated in the culture of North Beach in the 1960s and befriended Ruth Asawa and many other artists and writers. Throughout her life, she published poetry and writings on the arts, including a book on South West artists under the New Deal. Given her well-known generosity to art museums, music organizations, and progressive social causes, her devotion to literature might pass unremarked. It is thus the purpose of this dedication to honor Jacqueline Hoefer’s contribution to books and the written word. FORMAT The Arion Don Quixote is printed by letterpress on an all-cotton fiber sheet made to our specifications for this project by Mead Specialty Papers, supplied by Legion Paper. The type is Centaur, designed by Bruce Rogers, composed and cast by Mackenzie & Harris. The size of the text type is large, 16 point, cast on a 14-point body, leaded two points, so that the effect is solid 16 point, producing a desirable weave to the page. The initial letters were drawn by Mallette Dean in 1963 for the Grabhorn Press, a set of capitals intended for use with Centaur type. The illustrations are printed from polymer plates made from negatives scratched by the artist, using an etching needle. The prints are in sepia, the type in black, and the initials in red-brown inks. The format is 10-3/8 by 7 inches, 576 pages for Book I, 632 pages for Book II. The binding is three-piece goatskin with dark brown for the spine, with gold titling and tan for the sides, and with a DQ monogram designed by Wiley, in gold, on the front cover. The sections are sewn by hand with hand-sewn headbands at top and bottom. The books are presented in slipcases, with tan cloth around the top, spine, and bottom, dark brown paper sides, and spine label. The books are numbered and signed by the artist. Book I is the eighty-sixth publication and Book II the eighty-ninth publication of the Arion Press.

Price: 5999 USD

Location: Beverly Hills, California

End Time: 2025-01-11T16:17:13.000Z

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