Of first and second authors: reading Don Quixote in the context of collaborative translation practices

Abstract

One of the features of Cervantes' Quixote that has attracted most scholarly attention is its complex structure of fictional authors. The multiplicity of writing stages we are asked to imagine (the first writing of the Arab first author, the translation of the morisco, and the polished Castilian version of the second author) is a major source of humor in the story, and it tends to be signaled by critics as a mark of Cervantes's modernity. My chapter proposes, however, that in order to better understand the importance of this multiplicity, we need to look not only at the narrative form Cervantes is inaugurating but also at the rich tradition of past translation practices on which he is drawing, and, in particular, at the work of medieval and early modern collaborative translators. For, it is only when we take into account the degree to which the Cervantes is making fun of the multiplicity involved in collaborative translation that the fictional structure of authors that the work presents becomes clear. What is more, when we consider that Cervantes is actually mocking collaborative translation, we can even propose that what he is contributing to the genre of the novel is not a diversity of perspectives--or a subversive multiplicity of layers, or an interrogation of univocality--but, on the contrary, a new form of discourse that can encompass and control this diversity in order to offer a fully unified position from which to write and interpret a text.