Chess in Don Quixote

Redated from last August

I am reading Don Quixote. It is a beautiful, hilarious, brilliant masterpiece. If you haven't read it, drop everything and start now. The new translation by Edith Grossman is excellent. It is a quite readable book, and Grossman does a good job explaining historical allusions in the footnotes. It makes the perfect vacation or bedtime reading.

Since the Knights Errant are following in Don Quixote's footsteps, I thought it only fitting to include the one and only mention of the game of chess in the novel. It comes from Part II, Chapter XII. Its wit and charm are representative of the work as a whole:

[Don Quixote said to Sancho Panza], "Come, tell me, hast thou not seen a play acted in which kings, emperors, pontiffs, knights, ladies, and diverse other personages were introduced? One plays the villain, another the knave, this one the merchant, that the soldier, one the sharp-witted fool, another the foolish lover; and when the play is over, and they have put off the dresses they wore in it, all the actors become equal."

"Yes, I have seen that," said Sancho.

"Well then," said Don Quixote, "the same thing happens in the comedy and life of this world, where some play emperors, others popes, and, in short, all the characters that can be brought into a play; but when it is over, that is to say when life ends, death strips them all of the garments that distinguish one from the other, and all are equal in the grave."

"A fine comparison!" said Sancho; "though not so new but that I have heard it many and many a time, as well as that other one of the game of chess; how, so long as the game lasts, each piece has its own particular role, and when the game is finished they are all mixed, jumbled up and shaken together, and stowed away in the bag, which is much like ending life in the grave."

"Thou art growing less doltish and more shrewd every day, Sancho," said Don Quixote.

"Ay," said Sancho; "it must be that some of your worship's shrewdness sticks to me; land that, of itself, is barren and dry, will come to yield good fruit if you dung it and till it; what I mean is that your worship's conversation has been the dung that has fallen on the barren soil of my dry wit, and the time I have been in your service and society has been the tillage; and with the help of this I hope to yield fruit in abundance that will not fall away or slide from those paths of good breeding that your worship has made in my parched understanding."