Semper Fi Cervantes

There are certain writers who transcend their times and their culture - writers who are enjoyed by readers everywhere: Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, de Montaigne.

It is easy to box them up into tight thumbnail sketches and then overlook the lives they actually led. I suppose it is the burden of fame that everyone thinks they know you.

I came across this little fact yesterday which I actually learned a few years ago and then forgot. The great Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), novelist, poet, and playwright, wrote one of the classics of Western literature and indeed world literature, Don Quixote. Cervantes, before becoming a world reknowned author, was a soldier - in fact, what we would today call a marine. In that capacity, he sailed in the western naval armada that fought and defeated the invading Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto. The victory of the Holy League temporarily halted the Turkish incursion into Europe. In the Battle of Lepanto, Cervantes was shot twice in the chest and once in his left arm, a wound so severe that it led to amputation.

It is so easy to think of authors as quiet people writing in rooms and to forget that many of the best of them were indeed men and women of the world first. The fragility of circumstance is also highlighted - here is one of the towering figures of world literature so nearly extinguished before pen was ever put to paper.

Independent Reader

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and retold by Martin Jenkins. Ilustrated by Chris Riddell Suggested

Young Adult

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and translated by Edith Grossman Suggested

Adult

Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley Suggested