Creo que mis expectativas eran muy altas. Estamos ante las notas de Vladimir Nabokov al dar su curso sobre el Quijote. Hay varios puntos a considerar.
1. Considero que hay que leerlo después de haber leído el quijote o ya avanzado el libro.
2. De la segunda mitad en adelante encontramos un resumen por capítulo.
3. Nos enfrentamos a comentarios referentes a la traducción del Quijote en inglés y de cómo afecta la lectura. Interesante para nosotros traductores. Tal vez no tanto para el lector más enfocado a la historia.
4. No creo que sea un gran libro de soporte para leer El Quijote. Con tener una edición anotada basta.
5. Se mencionan fragmentos o mapas que no se incluyen en el libro.

Don Quixote, bizde yerleşik adıyla Don Kişot, roman türünün atası kabul edilen eser ve birçoklarınca, “şimdiye kadar yazılmış en büyük roman” kabul ediliyor. Miguel de Cervantes Saavera’nın eseri, 1605 ve 1615 yıllarında iki cilt olarak basılmış. Bilindiği gibi, okuduğu şövalye romanlarının etkisiyle aklını kaybeden ve kendine De Mancha’lı Don Quixote adını layık görerek yollarak düşen yaşlı bir adamın hikâyesi. Çok bölümlü ve bölümleri birbirinden epey farklılık gösteren, çok farklı edebi teknikleri içinde barındıran bir metin. Türkçe çevirisiyle tam adı “La Mancha'lı Yaratıcı Asilzade Don Quijote” olan eserin bilinen ve saygın çevirisi, Roza Hakmen’e ait ve Yapı Kredi Yayınları tarafından yayımlandı.

Don Quixote son derece önemli bir roman olmakla birlikte, şimdiye dek ülkemizde bu eser üzerine yapılmış önemli çalışmalar pek yayınlanmadı. Bu eksiklik, geçen yıl Vladimir Nabokov’un “Don Quixote Dersleri”nin İletişim Yayınları yayınlanmasıyla bir nebze giderildi. Nabokov’un Harvard Üniversitesi’nde misafir okutman olarak bulunduğu dönemde tuttuğu bu notlar hem çok özgün, hem de çok kapsamlı ve önemli.

Dersler 294 sayfa. Bu hacmin ilk 164 sayfasında, Cervantes’in eseri eleştirel analize tabi tutuluyor; kalan kısımda ise romanın 74 bölümü ayrı ayrı özetlenip açıklanıyor. Genel okura tat verecek nitelikteki birinci bölümdeki analizler ve yargılar, hem ince, hem de keskin. İkinci bölüm ise Nabokov’un hayranlık uyandırıcı çalışkanlığının gövde gösterisi adeta; ama daha çok, Don Quijote üzerine edebi ya da akademik bir çalışma yapanların işine yarayacak nitelikte.

Esasen, Nabokov’un La Mancha’lı Yaratıcı Asilzade Don Quijote hakkındaki fikirleri, romanın hayranlarını pek mutlu etmeyecek. Nabokov, Don Quijote’nin şimdiye kadar yazılmış en muhteşem roman olduğu kanısını “saçmalık” olarak nitelendiriyor. Romanı ağır şekilde eleştiriyor. Bu eleştiriler yer yer, Nabokov’un meşhur Dostoyevski yergilerini dahi gölgede bırakacak denli sert.  
Don Quijote'nin başarısının, romanın kendine özgü değerinden ziyade dış merkezli yayınımından, yani basılmasından hemen sonra birçok dile çevrilmesinden kaynaklandığı inancında.

Cervantes hayranları bu yorumları haksız ve ölçüsüz bulabilir. Ama kitapta Nabokov’un edebi dedektifliğinin, kabına sığmaz zekâsının, eşsiz okurluğunun ve ince mizahının tadını çıkarmak lazım. Nabokov belki her şeyden fazla olmak üzere, olgulara farklı algı düzeylerinde yaklaşmanın olanaklı olduğunu ve gerçeğin ele avuca sığmazlığını hissettiriyor. Don Quijote’ye ayırdığı mesai, kitapla ilgili tüm olumsuz yorumlarına karşın, Cervantes’in belki de en iyi okurunun Nabokov olduğunu gösteriyor.

Önce Roza Hakmen çevirisiyle Don Quixote’nin ve ardından Emrah Serdan çevirisiyle “Don Quixote Dersleri”nin okunmasını tavsiye ederim.

A good accompaniment to Don Quixote, marred only by Nabokov's less-than-complete love for the novel. It is six lectures he gave at Harvard that ranges from more conventional discussion to more novel presentations, like a scorecard that goes through the 40 "battles" in the book, classifies them into different types, and calls each one a win or a loss. Turns out the final score was 20-20.

Nabokov might be right that the novel would have been even better if Don Quixote's final combat was with the false Don Quixote from the false Part Two that wasn't written by Cervantes. Oh well.

Según una leyenda literaria, cuyo asidero en la realidad desconozco, Nabokov se vio obligado a dar unas clases de pregrado sobre Don Quijote a estudiantes de la Universidad de Harvard y Cornell. Los apuntes de estas clases conforman, en gran medida, la publicación reseñada.

El interés del libro radica en la curiosidad que uno siente por saber qué opina del Quijote un autor como Nabokov, que pareciera, como autor, compartir ciertas afinidades con Cervantes, entre las que destacan un sentido satírico y un amor por los juegos de palabra. Al final, uno se siente profundamente insatisfecho, pues se encuentra con un profesor más bien seco al que no parece atraerle mucho la novela que expone; domina la sensación de un escrito realizado por obligación más que por gusto, y ocasionalmente parece estar más interesado en criticar por criticar, o criticar para épater la bourgeoisie --¿sus estudiantes?

La mejor parte del libro es cuando deja de lado su rol de profesor de literatura y propone su propia versión del final del Quijote, cediendo por un momento, al impulso de jugar con el Quijote que ha tocado a tantos autores y novelistas, desde que Alonso Fernández Avellaneda escribió la falsa segunda parte de El Quijote en 1615 hasta nuestros días, pasando por Grahame Green ("Monsignor Quixote"), Jorge Luis Borges ("Pierre Menard, el autor del Quijote"), Iván Goncharov ("Oblomov") y muchas de las destacadas figuras literarias que colaboraron en la dispareja antología "La Cervantiada".

La sensación de aridez intelectual aparece en varias observaciones sobre Nabokov como profesor. En Wikipedia se dice que Nabokov consideraba que "...readers should not merely empathise with characters but that a 'higher' aesthetic enjoyment should be attained, partly by paying great attention to details of style and structure. He detested what he saw as 'general ideas' in novels, and so when teaching Ulysses, for example, he would insist students keep an eye on where the characters were in Dublin (with the aid of a map) rather than teaching the complex Irish history that many critics see as being essential to an understanding of the novel.". En un ensayo titulado
"Nabokov, or Nostalgia", Danilo Kiš escribió que la concepción del según Nabokov es "magnífica, compleja y estéril". Según la misma entrada de Wikipedia sobre Nabobov, el poeta ruso Yevgeny Yevtushenko llegó a decir que, en la prosa de Nabokov, escuchaba "el traqueteo de instrumentos quirúrgicos".

En resumen, si está interesado en crítica literaria sobre el ingenioso hidalgo, hay trabajos muchos más interesantes y agudos. Si le interesa la reacción de Nabokov al Quijote, échele un vistazo a estas clases, pero hágase un favor, ármese de tolerancia y sáltese el resumen de los capítulos de la obra.

Don Quixote

This the worse piece of literary criticism I have ever read. It is 80% summary and 19% complaining about how bad the book, and 1% of the time he says what a genius Cervantes is.

El Quijote es de mis novelas favoritas. Y no concuerdo con esos comentarios que dicen que a Nobokov le falta objetividad, que le tenía envidia a Cervantes, que no lo entendió, etc.

Hay que tener mucha objetividad para identificar los deslices de una novela como el Quijote y librarse de la pasión que la novela puede causar a quien lo lea, incluido Nabokov. En muchas partes enaltece lo bellamente que están escritos ciertos capítulos y pasajes y nos recuerda que Cervantes más que escritor era un artista y que eso fue lo que salvó una novela que realmente carece de estructura narrativa. Nabokov lo entendió muy bien no solo a Cervantes, sino al mismo Alonso Quijano.

Si existe algún tipo de crítica negativa es hacia la sociedad de la época, que vio en el Quijote una obra humorística y humanista. Las torturas físicas y psicológicas hacia el Quijote y Sancho son realmente desalmadas, pero era parte del humor de una época y cultura y eso sí le critico a Nabokov el no poner a la obra en su contexto histórico de la época. Pero sí, efectivamente hay mucho daño en esta novela hacia sus protagonistas.

Tal vez la crítica mas fuerte hacia esa sociedad es la hipocresía religiosa. Es decir, vez como torturan a una persona durante meses y con acciones que recuerdan a las que tuvo que sufrir un cierto personaje religioso. Nabokov se pregunta, porque te da risa lo que le pasa al Quijote y Sancho pero te das de latigazos por lo que le pasó al otro personaje. El dolor es diferente si eres humano o dios?

Me gustaron los cursos de Nabokov, me dió otra mirada del Quijote, sobre todo en la técnica que usaba Cervantes para entrelazar historias y tener tantos metarelatos y hasta 5 dimensiones distintas de narradores (como muñecas rusas).

Fue placentero leer el resumen de los dos tomos a través de los ojos de Nabokov. Me hubiera gustado, eso sí, un poco más de teoría literarira y paralelismos con otras obras. Las pocas veces que lo hizo aprendí mucho.

I have some issues with Nabokov's quite superficial definition of cruelty in Don Quixote. I also think he conveniently skip, ignore, dismisses as nonsense, and houses over parts of Don Quixote that either don't fit with his world view or that seem irrelevant to him. As a result, he minimises the book's importance in the history of storytelling and ignores certain vital aspects of the book, like the relationship Between Don Quixote and Sacha Panza, and the relationship between them and the world they live and adventure in. The overall tone is quite arrogant, but at times it is justifyingly so.
That said, this is one of the most in depth, thorough and mostly comprehensive reading of Don Quixote I have come across. The research work and preparations alone are really impressive and inspiring. The discussion about enchantment is excellent, as is the detailing of the different convoluted narrators and narration devices. Including fun speculations about the 'False Quixote'. While I may dispute some of it, his account of Quixote's victories vs defeat. As is his summery of each chapter.
As a fan of Don Quixote, and someone with a deep interest in it, this was worth a read and it was a good one.

No interest in reading a mocking criticism of Don Quijote. From the foreword, the mood of the work is set clear: Nabovok hates Cervantes, thinks him a pretentious prick and wants to tear the book apart. Following up those statements, I could literally hear him sigh as he tried to make sense of Cervante's geography of Spain (who the fucks care anyway) and portrait a really unfair comparison with fellow contemporary William Shakespeare.

I think Nabokov is a superb storyteller and literary critic, however, his patent dislike and excessive snobbery forced me to look for a comprehensive study of Don Quijote elsewhere. Which is a pitty. The book is devised in a clever way, much of the commentary is actually on point and constructive, but there's the underlying feeling throughout the whole book of, on the one hand, a hatred for everything and everyone Cervantes created and the way he played out situations and characters. On the other hand, I think it's impossible to miss the respect he has for the novel and its legacy. That tension comes out every other paragraph and interrupts the reading experience. It's like dealing with a grumpy and immature child and I just can't be bothered.

Sorry (s)Noby.

Nabokov is a second-rate writer who glorified pedophilia, criticizing the great Cervantes and his novel, which is one of the masterpieces of world literature, eternally relevant.
Not knowing what to cling to in order to crap the novel, he began to call it “cruel”! And this is a man who enjoyed violence against the girl Lolita.

المحاضرات التي ألقاها الروائي والناقد فلاديمير نابوكوف في جامعة هارفارد الأمريكية عن رواية سرفانتس دون كيشوت . والمحاضرات تشمل تحليلا وعرضا ونقدا فريدا من نوعه للعمل الفني ، مثله مثل محاضرات المؤلف الأخرى عن بعض عيون الأدب العالمي والتي جُمعت في مجلدين آخرين . وقد طالعت بعض هذه المحاضرات ووجدت أسلوب نابوكوف في النقد الأدبي مثالا للنقد الموضوعي العميق الشامل ولذلك أوصي بقراءتها لكل من يريد دخول هذا الحقل الفني الذي نفتقد فيه الناقد الأدبي كما يجب أن يكون

This was a big disappointment. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't a sourpuss Nabokov being extremely arrogant and edgy in trying to belittle a battleship of a classic. Which needless to say is exactly what this was. In this collection of lecture papers slapped together by the editor, we find a guy who really doesn't like Don Quixote finding himself in the position of having to teach it at Harvard, and desperately looking around for ways to present it, grabbing at straws ("pegs," he calls them, from which to hang his narrative theory) that will give him a way to meet the university's requirements and at the same time show that he is a clever, witty, biting, penetrating, modern-minded critic. You can tell he revels in what he likes to think of as "tearing the book apart." Maybe because the critic who sees everything as a cliche has itself become a cliche, but I just don't find Nabokov as informative or amusing as he seems to want to be found. His little jibes at Americans, movie-goers, etc., just sound like the pretentious crap you'd hear from modern-day university freshmen. Not recommended for fans of Don Quixote, but maybe for people that are looking for a reason not to read it, this is what's called for.

in which our vladi starts off thinking The Quioxte is terrible, goes over it with a fine tooth comb (sometimes missing the forest for the trees) and comes out the other side with a begrudging admiration. ok yeah i strongly disagree with him, but that's kinda the point.