Is Don Quixote Worth Reading? Yes, and Which Translation to Pick: Grossman, Ormsby or Rutherford

Most people who bounce off Don Quixote bounce off it in a bookshop, not on page one. There are a dozen English versions in print, four centuries of them, and the spines do not tell you which one is going to be funny. So the practical questions come first: which translation, how long, one book or two, and is the thing actually a comedy.

Short version. Buy Edith Grossman if you want the modern default, John Rutherford if you want the funniest English, and download John Ormsby free if you want to start tonight. The rest of this piece is the reasoning, and a first-time reader’s route through a book that is two books. If you would rather walk into it than read about it, the playable Don Quixote opens on the scene where his friends go through his library deciding what to burn.

📚 Four centuries of English Don Quixotes

The first English translation, by Thomas Shelton, appeared in 1612, seven years after the Spanish Part One and three years before Cervantes finished Part Two. Since then the book has been re-Englished roughly once a generation, and the versions disagree with each other about what kind of book it is. That is the useful thing to know before you buy one.

The one to avoid is easy to name, because the man who replaced it named it. Peter Motteux’s version, first published in 1700 and reissued in 1712, circulated for two hundred years and turned the novel into a joke book. Ormsby, translating in 1885, devoted several paragraphs of his introduction to it.

“To attempt to improve the humour of ‘Don Quixote’ by an infusion of cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux’s operators did, is not merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an absolute falsification of the spirit of the book…”

Motteux editions still turn up in cheap paperbacks and free ebook bundles because the copyright expired centuries ago. If a very cheap edition does not name its translator, that is usually what it is. Ormsby is equally free and much better, which is why Project Gutenberg is a better free source than a marketplace listing.

The Scrutiny of the Library is a doorway in the playable Don Quixote: the curate and the barber are in the house, the books are going out of the window, and you decide which ones get saved. Role-play Don Quixote →

🗓️ One novel, published ten years apart

Cervantes published Part One in 1605 and Part Two in 1615. Every modern edition prints them together as one book, and they read as one book, but the gap is the single most interesting structural fact about the novel. In those ten years Part One became famous, and Part Two is written by a man who knows it. His characters know it too. In Part Two the people Don Quixote meets have read about him.

Part of what happened in the gap was a stranger writing a fake Part Two first, in 1614, which Cervantes then answered inside his own. That story has its own essay on this hub. For a first reader the practical consequence is simple: do not treat Part Two as a sequel you can skip. It is the better half.

📏 How long it actually is

Counted from the Gutenberg text of Ormsby’s English, with chapter headings and plate captions stripped out, the novel runs to about 400,000 words across 126 chapters: 52 in Part One and 74 in Part Two. That is long by any measure. It is also 126 separate short pieces, most of them under three thousand words, which makes it a much easier book to read in twenty-minute stretches than its brick-like paperback suggests.

The prose itself is not difficult. Here is the first sentence, in Ormsby, unaltered.

“In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.”

🎭 It is a comedy that turns sad, not a sad book

People arrive at Don Quixote expecting a noble old dreamer and a wistful tone, mostly because of a 1965 musical whose most famous lines are not in the novel at all. Those lines get their own essay here. What is actually on the page for most of its length is slapstick, and fairly brutal slapstick at that. Sancho gets tossed in a blanket. A herd of six hundred pigs runs over both of them while they sleep. Don Quixote attacks a puppet theatre and destroys the cast.

The sadness is real, but it is concentrated, and it arrives late. The last few chapters change the temperature of the whole book, and the argument about what they mean belongs to the essay on Sancho, which is where the ending is discussed properly. A first-time reader should know only this much: the funny book is the real book, and the grief at the end lands because you spent a very long time laughing first.

🧭 How to actually get through it

Cervantes worried about this himself, and left instructions in the text. At the opening of Part Two, chapter 44, the narrator reports a complaint from Cide Hamete, the fictional Moorish historian credited with the story: he had padded Part One with self-contained novellas, and he had noticed that readers skipped them.

“He also thought, he says, that many, engrossed by the interest attaching to the exploits of Don Quixote, would take none in the novels, and pass them over hastily or impatiently…”

So he cut them. Part Two contains no interpolated novels at all. That is the author, in 1615, giving you permission to skim the long inset tale called The Ill-advised Curiosity in Part One, chapters 33 to 35, on a first pass. Come back for it later if you want. Nothing in the main story depends on it.

• ✅Read Part One first, obviously, but read Part Two. Everyone who loves this book loves the second half more.
• ✅Skim the inset novella in chapters 33 to 35 if it stalls you. Cervantes expected you to.
• ✅Take the chapter headings as jokes. They are written by the narrator and they lie, on purpose.
• ✅Twenty minutes a night works. The chapters are short and almost every one is a self-contained scene.

✅ So which one should you pick

If you buy one book, buy Grossman. It is the version most editions, courses and reading groups now assume, and Bloom’s introduction is a real essay rather than a jacket note. If you want the version that makes people laugh out loud on public transport, buy Rutherford. If you want to start in the next two minutes and pay nothing, take Ormsby from Project Gutenberg, which is the text every quotation on this hub comes from, chapter numbers and all.

One warning that applies to all of them. The curate in Part One, chapter 6 praises a rival romance for a reason that sounds oddly modern: in it, he says, knights “eat and sleep, and die in their beds, and make their wills before dying.” Cervantes was already thinking about realism as a technique in 1605. Whichever translation you pick, that is the joke you are reading for, and a version that flattens the comedy into whimsy is not saving you any time.