Since my senior year of high school, I have studied Don Quixote every single academic year. I have read multiple versions (in both English and Spanish), seen the ballet, listened to Spanish songs, watched movies, read poems, and seen many images that are based off the Spanish classic novel.

When I heard that I was, once again, going to study Don Quixote, and although I enjoy the story immensely, I was a little annoyed simply because I didn’t think we would study any new images. I’d seen the Picasso, I’d seen the Dali, I’d even seen some contemporary images of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the windmills. However, as I often am, I was pleasantly surprised by the images used in the English translation we read for class today.

The above image followed the novel’s sixth chapter. I was struck by the Alice in Wonderland – like quality of the woodcuts featured in this particular translation. The interpretations to not match the images that filter through my imagination while I read, at all. And I liked that! It made me think about Don Quixote in a different way. I’ve always pictured Don Quixote as an old man shuffling around in the world – a character in a rather normal setting. But these images seem to suggest that it is not just Don Quixote that is the strange one. The priest and the barber in the above image look like disturbing dolls (nothing like sane human beings). The room in which the two stand do not have any sense of concrete space. Life-size scissors stand life-like in the corner (most likely there as an illusion to the fact that these men are cutting Don Quixote off from his most treasured possessions, and in turn, cutting him off from his fantasy world of chivalry). To me, this image shows that our actions, even those that seem logical, isn’t too others with a different option. While these men think it is best to destroy the books that Don Quixote loves, to Don Quixote and maybe to the readers too, destroying the books looks like an insane and insensitive action.