Chekhov's Mistress
Ubiquitous Don Quixote
Now that the Knight Errant has become a Knight Visitant in my daily life through the Cervantes novel, he keeps popping up coincidentally in other blogs I check regularly (see bookninja for today’s posting of a reference to a marathon reading of Don Quixote in Madrid as written up in a newspaper in India) or in the way my mind introduces him to other things I read.
My tired brain needed "an acceptable diversion", the term used as I recall in The Elegant Variation in reference to Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel, which I picked up (library) to read after the past five days that involved car maintenance, long long-distance calls to friend leaving soon for Turkey, a gift of moviegoing for another (local) friend’s birthday (Comme une image/Look at me — brilliant), music performances (Sine Nomine; Gergiev and The Kirov Orchestra; Opera Atelier’s Dido and Aeneas), a gala poetry reading by six excellent poets, and the DVD Frida, plus family "stuff", the usual et cetera, and somehow the purchase of "x" (= the unknown and too timorous to state) number of new books — and I just couldn’t handle the marvel-filled world of the Knight because I’d get "lost in La Mancha" myself.
Happily absorbing the Perez-Reverte and sequential cups of tea, I found myself occupied with a mystery involving a Knight (long dead) and a chess game in a painting being restored. (There are other references to Perez-Reverte + Don Quixote, but as part of another P-R novel, The Fencing Master.) Naturally The Ingenious Knight comes to mind, and thoughts of possible chess-related references in Don Quixote. Of course, there is eveything in DQ, and Google spews out not only sites selling chess sets with the pieces based on Don Quixote characters (the King being a Don Quixote figure, and the Knight being a cross-legged Rocinante) — wasted on me the non-player — but also Ormsby’s translation of DQ. When we get to Part II, Chapter XII, there will be a passage concerning the game of chess.
This is great motivation to proceed (only 400 pages until I get there) so yes, I peeked at the passage. In Grossman’s translation, it’s on p. 527, where DQ and Sancho are discussing appearances and illusions, and theatre as a mirror of life, and it was too irrestible to sustain from reading that bit, though I will not go into detail as I’m certain we’ll be discussing it later. Suffice to say that Sancho compares the roles that people play in life to the worth of the pieces in a chess game: "as long as the game lasts, each piece has its particular rank and position, but when the game’s over they’re mixed and jumbled and thrown together in a bag, just the way life is tossed into the grave."
Then I recall the scenes in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, with the Knight playing chess with Death, and begin to wonder: was Bergman also inspired by Quixote?
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: April 25, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
