Resumo

LANGE, Susanne. El hidalgo coraza en el país de las manchas: La partida de Don Quijote hacia la lengua alemana. Acta poét [online]. 2004, vol.25, n.1, pp.85-101. ISSN 2448-735X.

Which are the implications that lie beneath the task of translating, today, a novel like the Quijote to the German language? Among many others, the need to fight against a heavy legacy of quijotesque -but not necessarily cervantine- expressions and images, which German readers have received throughout more than three centuries of German translations of Cervantes'work. In this essay some of these translations (made from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries) are reviewed. Faced to the question of which should be the guidelines to be followed by the German translator of the Quijote in the 21^st century, the author suggests, among other things, that he should completely give in to the perpetual cervantine playfulness with language, without letting himself being carried away by fixed conceptions about the characters, nor by the literary conventions that have been formed around this novel, some of which are here mentioned. And, last, some strategies and approaches are here suggested to cope with: Cervantes' "mistakes", the extravagance of proverbs and sayings in his work and, finally, the decision of which language to choose for the 21^st century German Quijote.