I’m sure most of you have read, or at least heard of the fictional story called Don Quixote, written by the best-known Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes in 1605 (1st Part) and 1615 (2nd Part). Alonso Quixano is a fifty-year-old gentleman from the La Mancha region of central Spain. He obsessively reads books about chivalrous knights from the not too distant Middle Ages. He reads so much that he decides to take up his spear and sword to defend the defenseless and destroy the wicked, creating chaotic plots.
The protagonist Alonso Quixano calls himself Don Quixote. The novel is a parody of the brave knights of the old legends. The novel’s irony is embodied in the full title of the two-part novel.-The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha.
To understand the title is to see Cervantes’ comical manipulation of words. Witty it means intelligent. Don Quixote is not an intelligent man. His decisions are made based on irrational thinking. When he sees a windmill, he thinks he sees a giant and rushes to fight him. When he sees two groups of sheep, he thinks he sees an army of men ready to fight. Again, he finds himself in the fight and tries to subdue all the “men”.
Gentleman is a man of low nobility, or a son of something (son of something). In addition, the knights were considered hidalgos. Alonso Quixano is not a rich man who belongs to a family of nobles, even nobles of low birth. But he thinks he’s a knight and tries to do chivalrous acts, only to end up looking like a heroic fool.
Don it is an address that this man gives himself. A don is a Spanish gentleman that means mister Prayed mister. Quixano gives himself the title of “Don” in front of “Quixote”.
Name Quixote is based on the protagonist’s real last name, Quixano, which he gives himself to sound more like a famous gentleman like lord lancelot. In Spanish, this English hero is called, Lanzarote-Lanzarote. the suffix -put off has another purpose when attached to the end of a word, which means great Prayed clumsy.
“Quixote” comes from the Catalan word cuixot which means armor that protects the thigh. then your name Don Quixote translate to Sir Big Thigh Armor. However, the protagonist is physically the complete opposite; The body of him is thin and emaciated.
The word “Quixote” has changed in the last four hundred years. Originally, the “x” filled in the name because the original pronunciation sounded like “sh”. So “Quixote” sounded like “Kee-sho-tay.” Today, the sound is “Kee-ho-tay”. So, “Quijote” is spelled “Quijote” in the Spanish-speaking world. The English version kept the “x”. So, part of the title says: “Don Quixote.”
Don Quixote is from La Mancha, a large area located in the southeast of Spain that is the most arid, desolate and infertile land in the country. It is believed that Cervantes chose Don Quixote to be native to this area because it is the most inappropriate place for a romantic and chivalrous hero to seek adventure. In Spanish, stain means “stain” or “stain” but stain it actually derives from the Arabic word meaning “dry” or “arid”.
So when we translate the title, we get something like: The intelligent low-born nobleman, Lord Big Thigh Armor of the most desolate part of Spain. The title is oddly engaging, weird, and certainly funny. It is ironic since Alonso Quixano is not intelligent, noble or anyone who deserves to earn a title like “sir” or “sir”. Additionally, Quixano has an extremely thin body that wears no armor for a stout knight. He is from La Mancha, the most infertile wasteland in Spain.
We know the best-known literary work of Miguel de Cervantes as “Don Quixote (Quijote)”, or as the Spanish natives call it “El Quixote”. We can decipher the novel’s humorous irony from its full title. Once you read the first and best-known fictional novel in the world, you realize all the humor and irony that is present in its extensive plots generated by Don Quixote’s strange and active imagination.