The world of classical music has seen some notable borrowings, takings, and downright thefts over the years. For example, Bach’s concerto for four harpsichords, BMV 1065, was a transcription of a concerto for four violins by Antonio Vivaldi. The Vivaldi piece was part of a set of twelve concertos that the composer published around 1710 as his Opus 3. At the time, Bach had been developing the idea of using a harpsichord in concert with a full orchestra. When a friend returned from a trip abroad carrying a copy of Vivaldi’s Opus 3, Bach must have seen the possibilities inherent in Vivaldi’s compositions as soon as he opened the book. He transcribed five of the concertos soon after receiving the scores, but waited until 1730 or so to try his hand at converting the piece featuring four violins (Opus 3, No. 10) to a concerto for four harpsichords.
Did Bach at any point write to Vivaldi to ask for permission to transcribe his work? Bach’s transcriptions of these works stretched over a period of more than 15 years, ending no later than 1731. Vivaldi was alive and in good health throughout that time. (He lived to 1741.) I have seen no report of correspondence between the two. Admittedly, copyright law did not come into force in Germany until a generation after Bach’s death. Musical borrowings were common enough at the time. Still, law and custom aside, Bach, an honest man, might have asked permission. It doesn’t appear that he did. In the event, by the end of the 19th century, the source for BMV 1065 had been forgotten so that it came as a revelation, nearly two centuries after the works were written, that Vivaldi was the first inventor of Bach’s only concerto for four keyboards.
Beethoven did a bit of borrowing of his own. A music publisher and minor composer named Anton Diabelli wrote a simple little tune with the idea that he would ask all of the leading composers in the German-speaking world to write a variation on it. The compilation figured to be a nice little earner to sell into the market for music to be performed in the home.
If you were to measure the theme on a “simple” meter, the needle would be at the edge of the red zone marked “insipid”. Beethoven decided not to participate in the joint composition. Instead, he prepared his own entry, “33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli”, Op. 120, said by Alfred Brendel to be the single greatest piece ever written for piano. That evaluation sidesteps the entire Bach keyboard opus, since that music was not written for the piano, although that is the instrument on which it is most frequently performed today. How Maestro Brendel places this piece above half a dozen Beethoven piano sonatas, or profundities from Schubert and brilliancies by Liszt, without naming others, I do not know.
Anyway, when Beethoven was done, he offered the finished work to Mr. Diabelli for publication, so this was a borrowing rather than an appropriation, but I wonder if at any point Beethoven asked permission to divert Diabelli’s innocent little jingle into the grand work that it became and away from the project for which it was originally planned.
There is a sinister accusation involving the composition of La Bohème in the 1890s, or rather the composition of two operas by that name at nearly the same time. Giacomo Puccini was having lunch with his friend Ruggero Leoncavallo. They were two of Italy’s rising operatic composers, possible heirs to the legacy of Giuseppe Verdi. Each of them had a hit opera behind him. Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893) is still performed to this day, as is Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892). In fact, Leoncavallo had worked for a time on the libretto for Manon. They were close friends and collaborators.
As lunch progressed, conversation turned to “What are you working on?” Leoncavallo mentioned that he was working on the staging of the novel “Scenes from the Bohemian Life”. He planned to title his opera “La Bohème”. Puccini later said that his response was something like “What a coincidence! I’m working on an opera based on the same book.”
That’s not the way Leoncavallo remembered the conversation. Forever after, he claimed that Puccini stole the idea. Puccini’s publisher produced proof that his man had been working on the opera for months before that fateful luncheon. It didn’t matter.
Puccini’s attitude was “we will both compose and the public will decide”. Puccini’s opera is among the most beloved in the repertoire. Leoncavallo’s is a museum piece. Indeed, Leoncavallo proved to be a one-hit wonder. Pagliacci is the only opera he composed that is performed with any regularity today.
I will end with a case of outright unambiguous theft. In the piano’s infancy, Europe boasted two magnificent exponents of the new instrument as it emerged from the shadow of its predecessors. These were Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).
When the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came to the throne in 1780, things looked up for the music business in his realm. His mother, Maria Theresa, did not like to waste money on useless hangers-on, so she spent little time, energy, or money on music. Her son was a music lover. He arranged a head-to-head contest between the two maestros. They competed for prize money; winner take all. The emperor and some of his family judged the competition.
After hearing the contestants, the judges decided to call the contest a draw. Supposedly, the judges decided on this result as a matter of diplomacy even though they agreed in private that Mozart was the better pianist. How anyone can be sure about an off-the-record conversation long after the fact is anyone’s guess.
Clementi accepted the outcome with grace. He had great admiration for Mozart as a musician.
Much later, the pianist Ludwig Berger recalled him [Clementi] saying: “Until then I had never heard anyone play with such spirit and grace. I was particularly overwhelmed by an adagio and by several of his extempore variations for which the Emperor had chosen the theme, and which we were to devise alternately.”
Mozart on the other hand was not a good sport. He had no doubt that he was the true winner. He criticized Clementi’s performance and made a derogatory comment about Italians.
January 12, 1782, Mozart reported to his father: “Clementi plays well, as far as execution with the right hand goes. His greatest strength lies in his passages in 3rds. Apart from that, he has not a kreuzer’s worth of taste or feeling – in short he is a mere mechanicus.” In a subsequent letter, he wrote: “Clementi is a charlatan, like all Italians. He marks a piece presto but plays only allegro.”
The first piece of serious music that I ever got to know was Mozart’s 40th Symphony, K. 550 in g minor. He has always been my favorite composer, the one whose music I would take to that desert island if I could take but one. Still, even his most fervent admirers have to admit that he could be an ass, and was on this occasion. In Mozart’s defense, he really needed the money. He had no steady income. Clementi was supported by a wealthy patron in England.
If revenge is a dish best served cold, Mozart waited ten years for his chance. He remembered one of the pieces that Clementi performed at the 1781 competition, his Sonata in Bb, Opus 24, No. 2. You can see and hear it performed by Zenan Kwan here (and I would say that after you get past the first two minutes of the piece, the main reason to continue watching and listening is to witness Ms. Kwan’s artistry, skill, and musicianship):
It’s easy to see why Clementi chose this piece for the competition. It displays brilliant passage-work and requires the hands to play independently at times. In its opening bars it demonstrated Clementi’s ability to extract rapid-fire repeated notes from the instrument. This is an effect that is permitted by the action of a piano as the key lifts and drops a hammer. The plucking action of a harpsichord is not well suited to playing rapidly repeating notes.
This is pleasant music requiring a high level of technique, but it is not especially deep. That opening theme shows off the piano and the artist, but doesn’t go anywhere and is not developed with any particular skill.
Mozart tucked that opening theme away in his active and copious mind and pulled it out ten years later when he found a use for it. The overture to The Magic Flute, K. 620, opens with a solemn introduction. After some 90 seconds, it leads to the theme that will dominate the remainder of the overture. This is lifted directly from the opening bars of Clementi’s sonata: eight repeated notes and a turn followed by eight more repeated notes and so on. The theme is taken up by one section of the orchestra after the other in fugue-like fashion until the entire orchestra gives us the tune in unison. From its first appearance the theme infuses and saturates nearly every moment of the overture except for a brief respite when the mysterious chords that opened the piece intervene for a few seconds. After that, the repeated notes theme is reintroduced in a minor key and is further developed right to the coda.
Sir Neville Marriner and an unnamed orchestra (evidently not the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, his everyday band) provide a fast-paced virtuoso performance here:
Watching this performance, you get the sense that Sir Neville knew how to run a happy ship.
In later years, those who didn’t know assumed that Clementi had lifted the theme from Mozart. When the score was republished, Clementi took to appending a note confirming that he wrote it ten years before Mozart used it.
There is no question that Clementi was the wronged party. Neither is there any question that the jaunty little theme he wrote would have done nothing but gather dust over the years had it not been repurposed by the monumental talent who stole it.
If Mozart was exacting revenge for receiving only a half point in 1781 instead of a win, the pleasure did not last long. The Magic Flute premiered on September 30, 1791. Mozart fell ill in late November and died on December 5 of that year at the age of 35. Because he was neither moneyed nor titled, he was buried in a “common” grave, along with countless others who like him did not qualify for a permanently marked final resting place. Clementi lived to 1832, dying in England, his adopted country, at the age of 80. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a rare honor.
Las Meninas (the Ladies-in-Waiting) is a fascinating painting by Diego Velázquez, finished in 1656. The scene is a large room in the royal palace in Madrid. Some eight individuals are figured. Five of them are looking directly at the viewer.
One of those staring at us is a child, perhaps five years old, the daughter of the king and queen of Spain. Another is a man in the background of the painting. He has stopped to turn as he is leaving the scene, exiting through a door in the back wall. Something has caught his attention. The open door admits additional light to the dark room.
The most interesting person examining us is the painter himself. He stands before a large easel. We see part of the back of the easel – the full width is outside the frame – but we don’t see the work in progress. He is holding his brush and palette while examining his subject to decide where to apply the next artful dab of oil.
Why are these people staring at us? What have we done to garner their attention? Further examination reveals that their gaze is directed not at us but at two individuals we overlooked — the king and queen themselves. These two are standing outside the frame, their presence revealed by a reflection in a mirror hanging on a wall a few feet behind the artist.
The effect is dizzying. We are looking at a group of people who are themselves looking at the subjects of a painting being created inside the picture. The pair being painted stand outside the frame, but have been brought into view through their reflection in the mirror behind the artist who is painting himself in the act of painting them while we look on.
This stunning display is first cousin to the even more complicated feats performed by Miguel de Cervantes over the course of the 1,000 pages of Don Quixote, the first part of which – a mere 500 pages long — was published in 1605, half a century before Velázquez finished Las Meninas.
Don Quixote is a novel where books and stories are as much a part of the tale as the characters. It was a library, or the effect of reading the books in it, that put in motion the three most famous road trips in fiction. The good Don is presented to us in the very first chapter as someone who “spent his times of leisure – which meant most of the year – reading books of chivalry with so much devotion and enthusiasm that he forgot almost completely about the hunt and even about the administration of his estate . . ..”
He sold arable land to buy books on chivalry. And, according to Cervantes, he was so moved by them that he spent all his time trying to understand them. He spent “his nights reading from dusk to dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.”
We are to believe that the main character in a book of 1,000 pages went mad from too much reading. Should the reader who takes on a book of this length worry about the toll that is about to be exacted on his or her sanity? Or is it possible that our narrator exaggerates?
A narrator who delights in maneuvering himself and his characters into and out of the frame of his story presents Don Quixote’s madness as a fact. We are told from the outset that virtually everyone who comes into contact with the knight understands that he is mad. And indeed, in Chapter 2, the good gentleman’s strange conduct begins to confirm the narrator’s thesis. Don Quixote gathers an old lance and shield that are lying about his house together with a suit of armor that belonged to an ancestor. The armor is missing some items. Don Quixote uses materials on hand to fabricate improvised replacement parts. Early one morning, he saddles his horse, puts on his makeshift kit, and rides out as a knight errant looking for adventures. He is on the road before anyone else in his household is awake.
That first sortie ends the next day when a farmer comes across a man lying in the road, wearing a suit of armor. The farmer recognizes Don Quixote and delivers him home. The Don’s niece and housekeeper put him to bed and consult two of his friends, a priest and a barber. They deduce that the Don’s library is the source of his obsession. Together, they review his books, burning those that are deemed unsuitable and walling up those that escape the flames. The priest offers learned commentary on many titles as they pass through his hands on their way to one fate or the other. In an early hint at some of the mirror-tricks yet to come, Cervantes was the author of a book that the priest praises. The priest acknowledges that Cervantes, a man who has had a difficult life, is a friend of long standing.
Still, the sole authority for the proposition that Don Quixote is mad is the book’s narrator. How reliable is this person? We soon learn that the narrator is retailing third-hand information.
In Chapter 8, Don Quixote sets out on his second quest. He learned from his first effort that he needs the assistance of a squire. Knights errant in books always have squires. It was a mistake to begin without one. From now on, he will have the company of his neighbor, the farmer Sancho Panza.
Their first adventure together is the famous charge against the windmills, which occupies only a page at the start of Chapter 8. Although offered as an illustration of the knight’s madness, the windmill incident is an example of Don Quixote’s mental agility. Sancho warns his boss to stay away from the windmills, but where Sancho sees windmills, Don Quixote sees giants who must be slain.
Don Quixote’s encounter with the moving arm of a windmill breaks his lance and leaves him and his horse lying on the ground once again. As Sancho helps put knight and horse back together, he reminds the boss of his warning not to charge the windmills. What just happened is proof, Sancho argues, of the wisdom of his caution.
However, Don Quixote has the philosopher’s gift. Sancho’s belief that he sees windmills can be explained. The world is more complicated than a naïve realist such as Sancho is able to comprehend. The giants appear to be windmills due to the workings of an evil enchanter who uses his powers to combat the virtuous knight. Sancho thinks he sees windmills, but he sees giants made to appear as windmills. This technique, explaining contrary evidence as mere phantasms in a world whose complexity others fail to grasp, is invaluable. Without it, much of politics, religion, philosophy, social science, and economics would be impossible. Don Quixote makes frequent and elegant use of this device.
As Chapter 8 ends, the windmills are a memory. The Don is on a different adventure, which leads to a fight between himself and a Basque. As they exchange blows, the narrative breaks off. Cervantes reveals the astounding fact that until this point in the narrative he had been working from a written text, one that ended without recounting the outcome of the fight. Eight chapters in, we learn that the narrator does not have personal knowledge of the events he relates to us. In this story about stories, he is working from someone else’s text. (The translator Edith Grossman points out that this device was often used in chivalric romances.)
The true source of the tale is now revealed. It is as if the mirror in Velázquez’ studio has been mounted on the wall, waiting to receive the image that will be made to appear as a reflection when the subjects have arrived.
Cervantes tells us that the true history of Don Quixote was written by an Arab named Cide Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes tracks Benengeli’s manuscript to Toledo. There he finds a Spanish-speaking Moor and stands over him for weeks as the translator renders Benengeli’s Arabic text into Spanish.
How reliable a historian was Benengeli? Is he likely to be a fair biographer of the life of an aging member of the Spanish gentry, an obscure self-proclaimed knight who lives in an even more obscure corner of the land reclaimed from the Moors only decades before the Arab historian took up his pen? Cervantes argues that Benengeli, an Arab and therefore the sworn enemy of all Spaniards, must be inclined to disrespect Don Quixote. Therefore, he can be trusted when he praises Don Quixote.
Reflections, still too vague to be resolved, begin to appear in the mirror. At this same point in the creation of Las Meninas, Velázquez has taken up his brush and palette and is preparing to paint himself painting the pair who stand outside the frame.
And what about the translator? There is no one to vouch for his accuracy. Does he have an unspoken agenda? In a later chapter where we learn something of Sancho Panza’s domestic life, the translator attaches a note telling us that he finds the events in this chapter to be unbelievable but is rendering the text faithfully despite his misgivings. But in how many other passages did he allow his good sense of the probable to override the commitment to textual fidelity that should be part of every translator’s creed?
The First Part is merely a warm-up for the complications that will be piled on in the Second Part. When Cervantes finished what is now the First Part in 1605, he may have thought that he was done with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. He was pulled back into the Quixote game when a gentleman using the pen-name Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda wrote and published a spurious sequel to the novel.
Cervantes was so outraged by the publication of Avellaneda’s false Second Part that he wrote the true Second Part, published in 1615, ten years after the First Part, about a year after the appearance of the fake sequel. The true Second Part opens a month after the First Part ended. Don Quixote is home, recovering from his second quest when Sancho visits to tell him that they are celebrities. A book of their adventures has been published. Now, all of Spain can talk of nothing but the marvelous adventures of the knight and his squire.
The unlettered Sancho is able to provide details about the book’s popular reception only because one of their town’s most eminent citizens, one Sansón Carrasco, having earned a bachelor’s degree at university in Salamanca, has just returned home with news of the book’s reception.
Don Quixote is pleased to hear this report. Sancho brings Bachelor Carrasco to Don Quixote’s house. Sansón tells Don Quixote that the book is not free from criticism. Some readers do not approve of the way Don Quixote is beaten and injured during the course of the First Part. Many are unhappy with the insertion of extensive material about characters and stories that appear to be unconnected to the famous pair. Vladimir Nabokov made the same criticism 75 years ago — this reader does not disagree – but Cervantes got there first with one of his mirror-tricks.
Sancho raises a good question. Throughout the novel, Sancho and Don Quixote encounter many unusual and interesting people, many of whom have a complicated story to tell. You can’t swing a cat in this part of Spain without hitting an articulate and long-winded raconteur who has been patiently waiting for an audience. However, between episodes where the pair hears these tales and other segments where Don Quixote does battle, the two main characters spend their time traveling and conversing. Their dialogs are one of the book’s principal charms. Sancho notes that these conversations took place in private, with no historian in sight. How, then, did Cide Hamete Benengeli manage to reproduce these conversations accurately, word for word, to put them in his book? It’s an excellent question, one that might be asked of any third-person narrator. How do you know all of these private details? Don Quixote suggests that it is the work of enchanters. No other answer to the question – which is of course asked in a private conversation and duly reported — is offered by historian, translator, or narrator.
No matter. Invigorated by these reports of his fame, Don Quixote decides to begin a third quest to complete the unfinished work of the previous two.
At the end of the First Part, the pair had been on their way to Zaragoza. They get back on the road. As they travel, they encounter people who already know of the knight and his squire because they have read the First Part. The book has itself become an element in its own story, just as the figures in Las Meninas make eye contact with the out-of-frame subjects being painted inside the frame.
Further complications ensue when the famous pair encounter the spurious Second Part. They are in a tavern when they hear other patrons discussing the novel. However, it is clear to Don Quixote that the book his fellow guests are discussing is a fraud.
How does he know this? The guests refer to Señora Panza by an incorrect name. Throughout the book Don Quixote frequently corrects mispronunciations and malapropisms by other characters. He is a man who is punctilious about the details of the many stories presented to him over the course of the novel. When he hears such an obvious gaffe as a mistake over the name of the wife of the second-most important character in the novel, Don Quixote becomes enraged.
Yet, this rage over a mistake about the name of Señora Panza is Cervantes having another little joke. Scholars have noted that in the First Part, Cervantes used several incorrect names to refer to Mrs. Panza. Whether these errors are the inadvertent result of hasty composition or artifacts carefully deposited in the tale so as to be available if needed later, who knows?
Speaking of items deposited with forethought, some scholars speculate that the author of the spurious Don Quixote is none other than Miguel de Cervantes himself. The true identity of Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda has never been discovered. Is it possible that the spurious Second Part is yet another mirror in the ever-expanding self-reflecting universe that Cervantes has created for the entertainment of his readers? (Nabokov offers without comment the interesting information that Cervantes had a great-grandmother whose family name was Avellaneda.)
So, we have a work written in Spanish by Miguel de Cervantes, which he pretends is a translation of a history written in Arabic by a man in fact created by the author and translated into Spanish by yet another individual whose character, skill, and reliability are themselves the creation of Señor Cervantes and subject to his whims.
To complicate matters further, at one point, at least, the historian slips and has to be rescued by the translator. In the Second Part, Chapter 27, Cervantes tells us that:
Cide Hamete, the chronicler of this great history, begins this chapter with the words I swear as a Catholic Christian…, to which his translator says that Cide Hamete swearing as a Catholic Christian when he was a Moor, which he undoubtedly was, meant only that just as the Catholic Christian, when he swears, swears or should swear the truth, and tell the truth in everything he says, so too he was telling the truth, as if he were swearing as a Catholic Christian, when he wrote about Don Quixote . . ..
Is it Don Quixote who has gone mad from too much reading?
As the two characters who issue from this invented collaboration wander through the Spanish countryside, their images are captured in the mirrors that Cervantes provides for his and our entertainment. Those images include a patchwork of episodes that are connected by nothing more than the fact that the knight and his squire participate in them. These quilting squares include dialogs between the famous pair; adventures and misadventures where the knight does battle, giving and receiving injuries; long-winded intervals where the pair hear the detailed and fantastic stories of those they encounter; other intervals where they are subjected to elaborate hoaxes; Don Quixote’s learned discourses on several subjects; and even a detour where a character reads out loud an entire novel, a story with no recognizable connection to the episodes that precede or follow it.
Cervantes would not be able to present this massively decorated wreath of episodes had the knight and squire remained in the local habitation in which the fictional historian placed them at the beginning of the tale. Just as Las Meninas doesn’t work if the king and queen are shown standing in the studio to pose for their portrait, Don Quixote won’t work if the knight and squire stay home waiting for the strange people, places and events they will encounter to come to them. The knight and squire must go on the road.
Don Quixote’s supposed madness is an efficient device to get the pair moving so that the string of episodes detailing their adventures can be presented to the reader. But Don Quixote’s character overwhelms the simple plot device that his author has crafted.
For a man whose brains are said to have dried up, Don Quixote is able to hold his own throughout the mental challenges that Cervantes sets for him. The knight is able to speak eloquently and to argue rationally on every subject that comes before him. If Don Quixote is mad, how does he manage to spout a detailed analysis of the (mythical) Golden Age? Later, he argues with a priest (not the hometown fellow, a different one) over the reality of knights errant by citing chapter and verse from the books of chivalry he has read. Does the priest want to make the point that you cannot prove the reality of things unseen by citing passages in a book? (He does not.)
He warns a writer about the dishonesty of publishers. (Cervantes’s publisher had cheated him of the proceeds of the First Part.) He discusses the relative strengths of the pen and the sword. Throughout, he is a stickler for correct pronunciation and word usage.
He can cite Homer and Virgil and many other poets. He speaks authoritatively on many subjects. But the key point I will cite for the proposition that Don Quixote is in command of his faculties is the statement he makes in the First Part, Chapter 25.
Recall that when Don Quixote set out on his second quest, he acquired the services of a squire, a necessary component of a knight’s retinue. Before that, however, he had acquired something even more important. Every knight errant must have a fair maiden, beautiful, virtuous, chaste, and distant, who commands his heart and for whose sake he undertakes the dangers that define his existence.
To fill this role, Don Quixote nominates a local peasant girl named Aldonza Lorenzo to whom he gives the invented name Dulcinea del Toboso. (Toboso was the village where she lived.) There is no indication in the history that Don Quixote ever talked to her or that she had ever heard of him. Sancho knows her at first only by the name Dulcinea that Don Quixote has given to her. He assumes that she is a real princess. When in Chapter 25 he hears her true identity, he is able to tell Don Quixote that the lass fails to meet any of the criteria for a knight’s fair lady and that she falls particularly short of the mark in the chastity department.
Don Quixote is unfazed by this information. He replies:
[N]ot every poet who praises a lady, calling her by another name, really has one. Do you think the Amaryllises, Phyllises, Sylvias, Dianas, Galateas, Alidas, and all the rest that fill books, ballads, barbershops, and theaters are really ladies of flesh and blood who belong to those who celebrate them? No, of course not, for most are imagined in order to provide a subject for their verses, and so that people will think of them as lovers and as men who have the capacity to be lovers. And therefore it is enough for me to think and believe that my good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and virtuous; as for her lineage, it matters little, for no one is going to investigate it in order to give her a robe of office, and I can think she is the highest princess in the world. . .. And to conclude, I imagine that everything I say is true, no more and no less, and I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be in beauty and in distinction . . ..
(Emphasis supplied.)
The most sane and sober among us, even you and I, dear reader, will occasionally allow our wishes and sentiments to dictate our thoughts. When we fall into this trap, how many of us have the insight and dispassion to admit out loud what we are doing? Yet here we have a supposed madman, a fellow who charges windmills on horseback with a lance while clad in a suit of armor, stepping outside of himself with an ease that would stir the admiration of a psychoanalyst.
How to explain these divergent elements in his character? The answer depends on where you stand when you consider the question.
If you step outside the frame, Don Quixote’s madness is a convenient plot device. It gets him out on the road where the many facets of his personality can reflect the parade of often eccentric, sometimes grotesque characters and improbable events that he and Sancho Panza encounter.
If you decide to answer the question while standing inside the frame of the novel, then you might speculate that Cide Hamete Benengeli failed to achieve cultural competence. He evaluated the conduct of a Spanish gentleman using the standards that he would apply to his fellow Moors. Perhaps conduct that Cide Hamete would consider insane when observed in a countryman would be considered by a Spaniard to be merely eccentric when observed in a Spanish gentleman.
Or perhaps it is the translator who is a fault, if there is fault to be assigned. Is it possible that Arabic makes more subtle distinctions among mental conditions than does Spanish, or vice versa? The difficulty may be compared to the challenge that an Inuit and a native speaker of English would experience were they to try to exchange information about a snowfall. Could the same problem afflict the attempt by an Arabic speaker to convey Don Quixote’s mental condition to a Spanish speaker?
Each reader will draw his or her own conclusion. The best way to test one’s thinking on the subject is to go back to page one and read the book again.
The Passing Scene 
