In a future-looking symposium on the book “Don
Quixote,” scholars from across the Atlantic and around the
country are gathering at UCLA to celebrate the anniversary of
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s timeless classic.
Today through Saturday, the UCLA Department of Spanish and
Portuguese will present a public symposium titled “”˜Don
Quijote’ Across Four Centuries.”
“It is hard to imagine that there will be a bigger
celebration anywhere outside of Spain,” said Meg Sullivan, a
university spokeswoman.
Throughout the decades of authoritarian rule in Latin American
countries, and during Franco’s rule of Spain until 1975,
waves of Latino liberal scholars sought exile in the United States,
Sullivan said, explaining the large Latino academic community of
the United States and especially Los Angeles.
Carroll Johnson, a prominent Cervantes scholar at UCLA and
organizer of the conference, said “young scholars will be
doing new things” at the symposium.
The three-day conference will have a lecture about the parallels
between Cervantes and the movie “The Matrix.”
Lectures relating Quixote to postmodern film and
“spanglish” have connected this historical subject to
current issues, leading Johnson to call this symposium “the
wave of the future.”
The book was an “immediate success in 1605. People thought
it was very funny,” Johnson said.
“Eighteenth-century rationalism brought a different
audience. In the 19th century, the different intellectual climate
viewed Don Quixote as misunderstood genius in a hostile
society.
“What you think of the book is a function of who you
are,” Johnson said.
Claudia Mesa, with several other UCLA graduate students in
Spanish, is organizing a marathon reading of the first book, to be
held from April 13 to 14.
“People say that when they read it, it changes their
lives,” she said.
About 66 readers will read for 20 minutes each in a variety of
languages, including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, English
and Romanian.
“He is a major international icon,” said Enrique
Rodriguez-Cepeda, a UCLA Spanish professor and collector of Quixote
memorabilia, whose private collection of Quixote memorabilia is
currently on display.
Cepeda has spent 35 years building his collection, which
includes unusual “˜Don Quixote’ editions, comic books
and vintage tiles.
“It does suck you in after a while,” he said.
This exhibit is on Powell’s second-floor rotunda and runs
through April 30.
On display in the lobby of the Charles E. Young Research Library
is the university’s collection of rare editions of “Don
Quixote.” This larger exhibit will continue through the month
of June.
It is hard to overstate the significance of Cervantes’
“Don Quixote” over the centuries since its two-part
publication, the first in 1605 and the second in 1614.
“”˜Don Quixote’ is the beginning of the first
modern novel,” said John Dagenais, chair of the department of
Spanish and Portuguese, in a press release.
“Major U.S. and Latin American authors learned to write by
reading “˜Don Quixote,'” Dagenais said.