At one point, when I was in my early twenties and very depressed, I talked a lot to a friend, an American man who had spent many years in Madrid. In one of our conversations he told me of a phrase used in Spain to console someone: "Te acompaño en tu pesar"—"I accompany you in your sorrow." One "accompanied" by listening sympathetically, by responding, by not turning away. As I reread Cervantes's munificent fiction, the phrase kept coming back to me. At the deepest level Don Quixote is about accompanying someone and being accompanied in turn. Cervantes is a superb, seducing, insouciant companion: one reaches the novel's final word—the courteous "Vale" to the reader, set down almost four hundred years ago—with an abrupt pang of loss. Don Quixote is a joke, of course: nine hundred pages of galumphing around, getting splattered, toppled, and (finally) deeply mortified by one's own folly. But enter its talkative spaces and you may find yourself, like the hero and Sancho, the opposite of sad and alone.

Another (glorious) take on the new American translation of Don Quixote.