The Exemplary Novels (Annotated)

In 1613, three years before he died, Cervantes gathered twelve stories and published them with a claim no Spanish writer had made before him: that he was the first to write novellas in his own language, and that these were invented rather than borrowed. He was sixty-five. He had been a soldier at Lepanto, a captive in Algiers for five years, a tax collector and a prisoner. Very little of that life went to waste in these pages.

The twelve go everywhere. A girl raised among gypsies who dances in the streets of Madrid. Two runaway boys who discover that the thieves of Seville are organised into a guild, with dues and a chaplain. A scholar convinced his body is made of glass who, from inside that terror, begins telling everyone the truth. A jealous old man who marries a girl he keeps in a house without windows. And, at the end, two dogs at the gate of a hospital in Valladolid who find one night that they can speak, and spend it telling each other what they have watched their masters do.

They were called exemplary because Cervantes said a reader could draw a profitable lesson from each. The lessons turn out to be harder to locate than the promise suggests, and that may be the point. What survives four centuries later is not the moral but the attention — a writer looking at ordinary people with a curiosity nobody had aimed at them before.

This anamatilde edition follows Walter K. Kelly's translation of 1855, the version through which the Victorian reader met these stories, reproduced complete and with its period spelling left as he wrote it. Around it we have built what a reader today needs in order to follow Cervantes into a world that no longer explains itself.