Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervants, Chapter 1, Paragraph 5
The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in ac orner eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion. This deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most perfect construction.
TIM-ELVIS' OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THIS PARAGRAPH:
I don't know about you, but I think this is my favorite paragraph so far. The first three were too long. The last one was too short. But I think this one is just right. Now let's figure out what Cervantes is writing about.
Sentence 1: The first thing Quesadilla does to get ready to be a knight is dig out his great grandfather's old armor that has been lying around in a corner covered with mildew and rusting.
Sentence 2: He cleans the armor up as best he can, especially considering this is before SOS pads had been invented (apparently the 40-something housekeeper doesn't work on armor). He is kind of bummed because the helmet is one of those Conquistidor jobs that is basically a metal cap without a visor.
Sentence 3: So Quesadilla fashions a visor out of the 17th century version of cardboard and puts it over the helmet.
Sentence 4: To make sure the makeshift visor will stand up in battle, Quesadilla takes his sword and whacks it a couple of times. Of course it falls apart with the first cut. It's cardboard. Duh.
Sentence 5 and the last sentence in Paragraph 5: Quesadilla is pretty nervous about how easy the helmet caved when it was struck, so he reinforces the carboard with iron bars. It looks pretty strong so he decides he won't put it through anymore lab tests.
So there you have Paragraph 5. Tomorrow we'll tackle Paragraph 6 in which Quesadilla gets on his high horse (so to speak).
6 Quixotics:
HA! He knows this new improved helmet will fall apart as well if he tries any more of his experiments. I find this particularly funny. I'm getting a Pee Wee Herman feel to this... "I meant to do that".
Yes I think there is a certain amount of denial in our hero's character. And Pee Wee Herman is an interesting point of reference here. I'm sure no one else has drawn that correlation between Pee Wee Herman and Don Quixote before. We are blazing new trails in literature now!
I don't even bother to read the original text, just your take on it. Maybe when you are done with this you could take on some other hard to read old books. Chaucer, Shakespear, Tolstoy, you know the type. Just a thought.
That's something to keep in mind in a couple of years, when we are through with Don Quixote. But I reiterate, I'm not posting Moby Dick. No one can make Melville understandable.
That's nonsense, I recall Gunter posted a perfectly respectable translation of a paragraph from Moby Dick. I don't see why you couldn't just run the whole thing through babelfish. I'm sure it would be more entertaining than the original.
Don't give Gunter any more ideas.
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