Mit Shakespeare und Cervantes ins Exil: Thomas Mann liest “Don Quijote” und “Love’s Labour’s Lost”

Abstract: Thomas Mann praised Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare as great heroes of world literature und honoured them in his work. Instead of a planned political statement against the National Socialists, he combined a partly fictional diary of his first cruise to America with essayistic comments on Cervantes’ Don Quijote. The retelling of the episode of the Morisco Ricote and the use of the term “eradication” (Ausmerzung) – not found in the highly praised translation by Tieck – allows us to think at the Holocaust of the Jews. Thus, Voyage with Don Quijote can be read as an early protest against the inhuman policies of the National Socialists in Germany.

In the novel Doctor Faustus we find Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost in the form of an opera composed by Adrian Leverkühn, Thomas Mann’s creative, but demonically inspired hero. The novel does not only represent here the tragic fate of the German nation, but it also reads Shakespeare’s work from a gender perspective, exploiting a “proto-history of feminist Shakespeare reception” (Elsaghe; Bronfen) and offering a clarification for Mann’s statement that “the Shakespeare-play lies at the “core”.” (Mann, 2002, 428)

Keywords: Thomas Mann, Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Cervantes, Don Quijote, Jews, National Socialism, Faust.

Shakespeare, Cervantès et les romans hispano-américains du pouvoir

Résumé: Nous proposons d’examiner la réception des grands chefs d’oeuvre européens de l’époque baroque que sont le théâtre de Shakespeare et le Quichotte de Cervantès dans les romans hispano-américains du dictateur. En effet, Yo el Supremo d’Augusto Roa Bastos, El otoño del patriarca de Gabriel García Márquez, El recurso del método d’Alejo Carpentier, nourrissent une filiation singulière avec ces oeuvres européennes, filiation relativement méconnue de la critique. Quel est le sens de cet intertexte ? Que nous dit-il du pouvoir et en quoi nous livre-t-il une profonde réflexion philosophique sur la folie de l’omnipotence ? Dans quelle mesure cette confrontation des imaginaires, par-delà les siècles et les continents, influence-t-elle la lecture de ces romans hispano-américains contemporains ?

Mots clés: baroque, Shakespeare, Cervantès, Quichotte, romans hispano-américains, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier.

De don Quijote y Sancho, y de su encuentro con un caballero granadino, y de la búsqueda de identidad de todos estos personajes

Abstract: If Avellaneda had not published the apocryphal second part of Don Quijote de la Mancha, Cervantes, in all likelihood, would not have written the authentic one or this one would have been radically different. In the introduction to the Second Part, which records the third expedition of Don Quixote, the author is railing against a false author who has published a false sequel to the First Part of Don Quixote. It is precisely this false book and its consequent play of mirrors, in which true and false characters will move, that gives the second part of the immortal work its actual meaning.

Keywords: Cervantes, Don Quijote, Avellaneda, apocryphal Quijote, true/false characters.

The interpolated story of Cardenio and Dorotea on the English stage

Abstract: Interpolated in the first part of Don Quixote, the episode narrating the interrelated love stories of Cardenio, Luscinda, Don Fernando and Dorotea has been the subject of various stage adaptations throughout the centuries. This paper provides an analysis of two rewritings of the story performed on British lands in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Thomas D’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote I (1694) and Double Falsehood (1728), presumably adapted by Lewis Theobald from a Shakespeare / Fletcher collaboration. The analysis of the texts is aimed at determining how these playwrights harness the subversive potential of Cervantes’s original.

Keywords: Don Quixote, Thomas D’Urfey, The Comical History of Don Quixote, Lewis Theobald, Double Falsehood, Cardenio, Dorotea.

Los personajes cervantinos como lectores: breve historia social y cultural de la lectura como práctica

Abstract: This essay aims to provide a definition of the characters/readers of the Cervantine novel through the analysis of the material aspects of books’ circulation and through the study of the editorial products in Cervantes’ time. In order to understand the social structure and the interpretive strategies of the readers in Golden Age Spain, we have to start from the description of the cultural network related to the invention of the mobile press. This technological revolution and its uncountable consequences are indeed the very starting point of Cervantes’ novel, and its influence concerns not only the practical aspects of reading, but also the mental structures involved in the interpretive act. The theoretical and methodological premises of this work are the following: the role of the reader in the signification process of a text or a message and the historical and contingent nature of the interpretive act.

Keywords: Cervantes, reading practices, press, interpretive strategies, historicity.

„Macbeth” în traducerea unui estetician român

Abstract: The article deals with one of the Romanian versions of the play Macbeth, published in the first half of the 20th century, in the translation of Mihail Dragomirescu, literary theorist and critic. Although he was indebted to the theoretical foundation of the Junimea society, the translator stands out in the Romanian history and criticism for his original theoretical system of integrated aesthetics that rejected any type of determinism in the analysis of literary works. In spite of applying the same theoretical frame to literary works in translation, Dragomirescu’s version of Macbeth clearly shows a considerable breach between his theoretical assumptions and the translated text as a product.

Keywords: Macbeth, Romanian translation, Dragomirescu, integrated aesthetics.

Primele manifestări privind interesul scriitorilor români pentru Cervantes

Abstract: This paper is not a sui generis project of identifying the Cervantine echoes in the history of Romanian literary phenomenon as such an  investigation would overlap the boundaries of an article. Our goals consist in browsing the early signs of the Romanian writers’ interest in Cervantes and in offering data about the period in which the Spanish writer came to be known in the Romanian culture. It appears that one may present the interest of the Romanian literates for the Cervantine work from at least three different perspectives: 1. presenting influences of Don Quixote in Romanian literature; 2. making an inventory of the novel’s translations, of the abundance and competition of Don Quixote’s lyrics, and 3. making another inventory, that of the articles and critical studies on Cervantes. With no analytical intentions and no aim to draw some firm conclusions, our endeavor has two precise purposes: 1. proving that Cervantes was an early presence in the history of Romanian literature and 2. creating an inventory of data that could incite further investigation.

Keywords: Don Quijote, Cervantes, hispanism, Spanish literature, Romanian literature.