Dissertation: Beginning the Quixote

Don Quixote drawing by Picasso -- I guess probably the best illustration of the character, ever. Here we can see our hero, looking especially 瘦俏, along with his trusty horse 驽骍难得.

I just finished reading the first chapter of Don Quixote in Chinese, part of a reading I now intend to make into a chapter of my dissertation, tentatively called something like "Don Quixote in China." (Full on-the-fly reading notes will be located here.)

I think the point of telling this story is to appreciate how Yang Jiang learned something very powerful about herself during the course of her own translation of the Quixote during China's Cultural Revolution, and we can see from her later essays that the figure of the Quixote never goes away -- I wish I had already made a file containing all the references to "Quixote" that she makes, but I will certainly record them from now on. For me, this is excuse enough to tell the story of Yang Jiang's Quixote. But given that must offer up something else as well, something at stake in the larger Chinese literary scene, and something at stake politically and socially, I will also examine how the Quixote has become a much-loved figure in Chinese literature, a major source for learning about parody and the ancient irony of self-deprecation. This is of course an overly-large and ill-defined project. What else would I ever do?

Sigh.