Two and a half years later, J. C. Audetat returned to his commissioner an outstanding draft of what was regarded by many to be the first and finest novel ever written, Don Quixote, but in a new translation that brought the “easy humor,”1 “heart-stopping clarity,”2 “proto-Falstaffian mischief,”3 “class,”4 “intended—but never calculated—immediacy,”5 “O.G. Euro-Hispano flava,”6 and “rhythms of speech and thought that we recognize less from literature than from life itself”7 to readers for “the first time in one or—gasp, could it be possible?!—perhaps even many generations.”8
“For I would have you know, Sancho, if you do not know it already, that there are just two qualities that inspire love more than any others, and these are great beauty and good repute, and these two qualities are to be found in abundance in Dulcinea, because no woman can equal her in beauty, and few can approach her in good repute. And to put it in a nutshell, I imagine that everything I say is precisely as I say it is, and I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be.”
— DON QUIXOTE, PART 1, CHAPTER XXV, MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, TRANS. JOHN RUTHERFORD
“For I would have you know, Sancho—if you do not know it already—that there are two qualities that inspire love above all: great beauty and a good name. And as it so happens, both beauty and reputation reach the pinnacle of all possibility in Dulcinea. Few can approach her name, and none can equal her beauty. And I know that everything I say is true, because I see her in my imagination exactly as I wish her to be—and when anything is seen as completely and precisely as I see her, Sancho, then what else can it be called but the truth?”
— DON QUIXOTE, PART 1, CHAPTER XXV, MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, TRANS. J. C. AUDETAT
J. C. Audetat’s translation of Don Quixote electrified the English-speaking world with the restored size and specificity of the novel’s comedy, its love, its hopefulness and foolishness and hopefulness all over again. The words were clear again, the ideas were big again, and the cover was cool. It was for sale at bookstores on college campuses and at clothing stores next to college campuses and sold extraordinarily well in all of them.
The new translation of Don Quixote wasn’t read by readers, but by everyone. For the first time since Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century, it became not-strange for a friend or a neighbor to snort out loud with an involuntary laugh over an image from Don Quixote or for someone to say on a second date, “You know how in Don Quixote when …?” out of an attempt to connect, not an attempt to impress.
Some even said the translation was “like poetry.”
In the wake of Don Quixote’s unexpected and outsize success, J. C. Audetat moved to Paris—or, as he renamed it in his mind, almost-Paris—to live the life of an almost-famous almost-poet.
He found that if he stuck to the right neighborhoods, drank a glass of something hot or cold, and squinted a bit, the Paris in his eyes would look pretty much the way he had always imagined Paris was meant to look. Which was no small thing.
He took a small apartment and spent the days in cafés, idly turning minor thoughts back and forth in his mind and waiting to be interrupted.
In the moments between the interruptions, Audetat wrote poetry. When he finished something, he submitted it to literary magazines and journals, and by and large they published it, and by and large, those who reviewed poetry praised it.
And that was it.
Maybe that was all being a great poet meant, in his time.
Or maybe he simply wasn’t a great poet.
Each thought calmed and agitated him in equal measure.
Audetat let the afternoons slip away from his table at the Café de Flore while he passed the time with the rarefied nonwriting he had waited for the chance to do his entire life.
He asked to receive his mail at the cafe—a spectacularly inconvenient option he had chosen purely for show that brilliantly burnished the almost-Paris image of both Audetat and the café. Most of the packages contained dusty hardcovers that seemed to have been FedExed directly from medieval Spain, Post-it’ed in man-made colors with shyly formal suggestions that “perhaps this might spark your brilliant imagination with regards to a Quixote follow-up.”
The only value of these unopenably dull manuscripts was as a conversation starter.
Hey, what’s that?
This?
Then Audetat got his chance to explain who he was and what he had done so far. He sharpened his monologue by the day as he explained again and again why it was so funny that none of these supposedly sophisticated people could understand something that clearly came naturally to his audience right here at the Café de Flore: that Don Quixote stood as apart from the rest of its era as the Mona Lisa did from its own now irrelevant contemporaries in that long hallway of the Louvre. There was a spark of the current running through each of those works—so to speak, of course, expanded Audetat; the two works, in fact, had far more in common with each other than with their contemporaries.