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Ten years ago, the Academies of the Spanish Language conceived of a Don Quixote for everyone. Now, it is being re-released—in a limited edition—to commemorate the 400thanniversary of Cervantes’s death.
- The work, published by Alfaguara, will be on sale in the United States at the end of December.
- The first edition of this work (2004) sold more than three million copies around the world.
- The text of this edition has been reviewed and annotated by Francisco Rico, member of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (RAE) and one of the top specialists in Cervantes’s work.
- Rounded out with critical studies by Mario Vargas Llosa, Francisco Ayala, Martín de Riquer, José Manuel Blecua, Guillermo Rojo, José Antonio Pascual, Margit Frenk, and Claudio Guillén.
2015 and 2016 bring with them two special Cervantes anniversaries. The celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Publication of the Second Part of Don Quixote in 2015 will be followed in 2016 by the Commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’s Death. As they did more than a decade ago, the Academies of the Spanish Language and Alfaguara unite for this celebration with a re-edition of the universal classic directed at the whole Spanish-speaking world.
This edition boasts a new prologue written specially for the occasion by Darío Villanueva, the director of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española(RAE) and president of the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE). It is complemented by a glossary made up of seven thousand words, expressions, phrases and proverbs, each explained according to its precise meaning in Cervantes’s text.
The first edition of this Quixote became a huge sales success, unprecedented for a classic work. More than three million copies, distributed in Spain and the Americas, made it the most widespread in history. The contextualizing notes about the work, prepared by Francisco Rico, contribute to its educational character and its orientation toward a diverse and non-specialized public. It also includes a series of complementary studies, written by some of the primary experts in Cervantes’s consummate book.
As such, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the modernity of Don Quixote in “A Novel for the 21st Century;” Francisco Ayala reflects upon the construction of the novel’s characters in “The Invention of the Quixote;” and Martín de Riquer analyzes the work in the biographical context of the author in “Cervantes and Quixote.” For their part, José Manuel Blecua (“Don Quixote in the History of the Spanish Language”), Guillermo Rojo (“Cervantes as a Linguistic Model”), José Antonio Pascual (“The Linguistic Registers of Don Quixote: The Ironic Distance from Reality”), Margit Frenk (“Orality, Writing, Reading”), and Claudio Guillén (“The Course of Cervantes’s novel: Perspectives and Dialogues”) deal with different aspects related to the Spanish language in Cervantes’s work.
Joining all this is the current director of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (RAE), Darío Villanueva, who wants to “take advantage of the golden opportunity that the release of this new edition offers […] to give an explanation—my explanation—of some of the reasons for the high recognition that Don Quixote has gained from the date of its publication until today, as well as its clear modernity,” before reminding us that Don Quixote was the work chosen in 2002 as the best novel of all time, even ahead of In Search of Lost Time by Proust and War and Peace by Tolstoy, in a survey conducted by the Swiss Writers’ Association of 100 authors from around the world.
The Collection
In 2004, coinciding with the celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Publication of the First Part of Don Quixote, the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (RAE) and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española began a project of editions of the great works of literature in Spanish. Conceived as a line of limited-circulation special commemorative editions of the great Spanish-language classics of all time, these works are published and distributed around the Spanish-speaking world by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial under its Alfaguara imprint.
To date, in addition to Don Quixote, the collection includes editions of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, The Most Transparent Region by Carlos Fuentes, General Anthology by Pablo Neruda; In Verse and Prose. Anthology by Gabriela Mistral, and The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa.
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