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Miguel de CERVANTES
(1547-1616):
Life and Portrait
Miguel de Cervantes, was born in Alcalá de
Henares in 1547, he was the son of a surgeon.
Despite this Cervantes always said he
was a nobleman.
Nothing is written of his early life
until four poems were published in Madrid by his teacher, the humanist López de
Hoyos.
Despite this literary beginning
Cervantes then chose to live in Rome for several months.
In 1571 Cervantes became involved
in the war and fought at the battle of Lepanto, where he was wounded in his left hand by a harquebus shot.
In 1572 Cervantes took part in Juan
of Austria's campaigns in Navarino, Corfu, and Tunis.
Returning to Spain by sea, Cervantes
was captures Algerian corsairs. After five years
spent as a slave in Algiers, and four unsuccessful escape attempts,Cervantes
was ransomed by the Trinitarians and returned to his family in Madrid.
In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar,
twenty-two years younger than he, Cervantes published a pastoral novel,
La Galatea, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost except for
El trato de argel and El cerco de Numancia, were playing on the stages
of Madrid.
Two years later he left for Andalusia, which he traversed for
ten years, first as a purveyor for the Invincible Armada and later as a
tax collector. As a result of money problems with the government,
Cervantes was thrown into jail in Seville in 1597; but in 1605 he was in
Valladolid, then seat of the government, just when the immediate success
of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signalled his
return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrid just after
the return there of the monarch Philip III.
During the last nine years
of his life, in spite of deaths in the family and personal setbacks,
Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer. He published the Novelas ejemplares in 1613, the Viaje del Parnaso in 1614, and in 1615,
the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote,
a year after the mysterious Avellaneda had published his apocryphal
sequel to the novel. At the same time, Cervantes continued working on
Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, which he completed three days
before his death on April 22, 1616, and which appeared posthumously in
January 1617. The biography written by the author of this note (Jean Canavaggio, Cervantčs, revised and amplified edition, Paris: Fayard, 1997) differs from its predecessors in its pretentions. Unlike other works, it does not attempt to plumb the depths of the irrational in order to decipher the symbolism that Cervantes's fiction presumably contains. Rather than "explain" Cervantes, a man who disappeared almost four centuries ago and whose creation has taken on a life of its own, this biography aspires to "tell his story" better. We must first establish with all the necessary rigor what is actually known of Cervantes's actions and experiences, and we must exclude the legends, such as his having studied at the Jesuit school in Seville or his having composed the Quixote while in prison. Then Cervantes, who was an obscure participant in a heroic adventure, a lucid observer of a time of doubt and crisis, and a very personal interpreter of Spain at a crucial moment in its history, must be placed in his own milieu and his own time, better known now because of the work of recent historians. We must do our best to find that man. As we trace this life which has become a destiny that we attempt to render comprehensible, the book offers us a likely profile of a figure who is not the same individual that his friends and family knew, nor the "rare genius" whose profile Cervantes himself created, nor the figure which, since his death, has arisen from a series of myths which some day ought to be looked into. In other words, we are looking for the missing profile which we assign to the secret narrator hidden behind his masks, this absent one who is always present, whose voice is his alone and, through the magic of his writing, is always recognizable even among a thousand others. http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/biography/ new_english_cerv_bio.html |
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Casa de Cervantes Valladolid |
