Re-reading Don Quixote in 2009

In 2007, when I commented on Edith Grossman's superb translation of Don Quixote, I suggested readers ignore the utterly pointless introduction by Harold Bloom:

If you are reading Edith Grossman's translation, I recommend skipping the first 20 to 30 pages of unnecessary discussion of DQ from the literary perspective, comparing Cervantes to Shakespeare and the like. Just go straight to the story and get stuck in.

Well, I am now reading Don Quixote for the fourth time (ah, the joys of having a short memory!) and have taken my advice to heart and ripped out these pages:


Here are a couple of quotes from Bloom's pages:

- W.H. Auden found in Don Quixote a portrait of the Christian saint as opposed to Hamlet, who "lacks faith in God and in himself." Though Auden sounds perversely ironic, he was quite serious and, I think, wrong-headed. Against Auden I set Miguel de Unamuno, my favourite critic of Don Quixote. For Unamuno, Alonso Quixano is the Christian saint, while Don Quixote is the originator of the actual religion, Quixotisim.

- Don Quixote and Sancho Panza both exalt the will, though the Knight transcendentalizes it, and Sancho, the first postpragmatic, wants to keep within limits.

It takes quite a bit of motivation to pick up Don Quixote, which is some 940 pages in length not including Harold Bloom's analysis, and reading passages like those above can suck it right out of you. Such a long-winded, pompous and academic introduction that presupposes a great deal of literary knowledge on the part of the reader is completely unjust as it makes the book exceedingly difficult to enter in to. Indeed, I wonder how many how people have returned this book to the shelf after getting caught up in Bloom's dense and unnecessary verbiage, which is in stark contrast to Cervantes own style. Whose idea was it to include this ruinous commentary by Bloom, I wonder? It just doesn't belong, especially when we are provided with a translator's note by Grossman and a prologue by Cervantes himself.