Manuel Marín Navarro, artistic drawing teacher from Vélez-Málaga, had an idea. “A madness”, rather, as he himself says: rewriting the entire great work of Miguel de Cervantes using Gothic calligraphy. By hand, dedicating between 7 and 8 hours a day. It’s been six years, seven months and 26 days and he still hasn’t completed the 344,000 words that make up the, why not say it, best book in the history of universal literature.
Anyone would say of ‘The Quixote’ rots sanity. Wait, I emphasize it well, then Jesús G. Maestro gets angry: ‘The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha’. Miguel de Cervantes gave birth to a textually transmitted virus and, four centuries later, the pathogen is still free. Rewriting the 2.1 million characters in a Gothic font, letter by letter, ink on paper, is his great dream, the legacy of a life.
A retiree doing lettering with the pulse of a teenager on TikTok? The difference here lies in the commitment. His company borders on the wild: the final book is on its way to weighing 20 kilos and, if it goes on sale, the author values this monstrosity at one million euros. Shooting low.
That million euros is a calculation that obeys pure labor arithmetic. Marín Navarro added hours, days and years, after such a monastic confinement in front of the folio, he estimates a salary equivalent to that of a medieval copyist in the current market. Not in vain has he drawn two million one hundred thousand characters with a pen. Pens that he has made himself. It has filled one thousand three hundred and five giant-sized (A3) pages. His cellulose monster is called ‘El Quixote Axárquico’, an orthographic nod to the princes edition of 1605. A geographical tribute to his native Andalusian region.
The best book, the neatest edition. “I play music from the 17th century, I get into the character, I read the chapter first, I get the idea and then I start writing. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.” The devotion of this professor and writer for the work of Cervantes is indisputable. Of his personal library, which houses more than 4,000 volumes, three hundred of them are different editions of the hidalgo from La Mancha.
At home he keeps eccentric jewelry and pays fortunes at closed auctions. Its most expensive copy cost 6,000 euros. It treasures absurd physical oddities, like a miniature tome printed on a single sheet. That is, the reader needs a powerful magnifying glass in front of that tiny paper. But his recent Gothic manuscript breaks any balance. The dimensions of the work require a brutal binding, so the professor is looking for a brave craftsman. It will take the entire skin of a cow to cover the caps.
From prison to museum. And anyone who knows the biography of the writer from Alcalá de Henares well will know that he set foot on the cobbled streets of Vélez-Málaga. The roots go back a long way: he walked there in the hot summer of 1594, acting as a tax collector for King Philip II. He collected money and wheat for the coffers of an insolvent and corrupt empire. And the crown excommunicated the novelist twice for his zeal. What’s more, Cervantes collected debts from the all-powerful Church and it is said that the priests kicked him out of the atriums. A Sevillian bank went bankrupt with the royal collections deposited and that is how Cervantes ended up in a damp and gloomy cell in Seville.
And there the figure of the crazy gentleman was born, influenced by Italian literature. Andalusian tradition venerates this prison origin of the work. And of course, Marín Navarro has decided to return the geographical favor to his land, giving his manuscript to the city Museum. The old San Juan de Dios Hospital will host this literary mammoth as long as no one sells the original volume to private funds, nor prints cheap copies for clueless tourists. He reserves a personal and final facsimile: the mother manuscript will sleep under institutional lock forever.
Why gothic letters and not Comic Sans. It’s not because Marín Navarro is reviewing HIM or the work of Bauhaus and The Cure. On the contrary, the man from Malaga listens to lute and harpsichord madrigals locked in his study, assimilating tragedy and comedy in silence, using the best black Chinese ink, writing slowly. It takes a whole day to fill out a single page—the first page took a full week of trial and error. To avoid frustration with marks, ten handmade pens were made from reed and metal and it was imposed not to use modern white correctors, scraping the paper with a sharp blade if a mistake was made.
As for the use of Textura font, which imposes straight lines and sharp angles, it is simple: history. Johannes Gutenberg applied it in his first printed Bible and German monks perfected it in monasteries. It is not the natural calligraphy of the Spanish Golden Age but it is the one associated with arcane knowledge. The Gothic line provides a brutal dramatic weight and requires much greater physical rigor in the wrist. Navarro does not give up: infected with COVID-19, during confinement the fever kept him in bed. Giving classes with a webcam, he pondered whether to give up or what, but in the end he pulled through and returned to writing the hard way. Between dirty cottons and blows, he already accumulates typos for the interior endpapers of the book.
Illustrated by the best. Pictorial art always attacked the Cervantes novel with obsession. It was Gustave Doré who established the visual image in the 19th century—he traveled through Spain in 1861 and drew 370 detailed engravings. Many others wanted to repeat the play. Pablo Picasso sketched the starving silhouette in 1955, using the same black India ink. Salvador Dalí did the same with an American edition in 1946. And ignoring the works of Salvador Tusell, even the comedian Antonio Mingote contributed his playful look at the gentleman. Marín Navarro will use people he knows and who are close to the land.
But without retouching the text. Of course, without alterations. Purist philologists revere intact 17th-century syntax. Andrés Trapiello already perpetrated a controversial adaptation a decade ago, translating it into current Spanish without academic mercy and quite a few shouted editorial sacrilege from the rooftops. The press of José Luis Giménez-Frontín or the canonical press of Florencio Sevilla has a better press—there is a lack of editions edited by women, of course. And Professor Jesús G. Maestro himself already has another edition on his hands with an opening essay.
Apparently, as a post-war child, the adventures of La Mancha entered Manuel Marín Navarro’s eyes and gave him an illusion and an alphabet that he preserves today. The skinny fool and the fat squire have been inspiring him all his life and that is why he has chosen calligraphy, which in Greek means beauty of the pure line (“kallós” is beautiful and “graphein”, a verb to write or engrave).
He Quixote survives any attack, materialistic interpretation, obsessive calligraphers and angry academics. Devoting so many years of life to an already multiplied text lacks financial logic, but where the heart rules, the wallet does not rule. A million euros sounds like a bad joke, although it only serves to compensate and deter private buyers. The speculative art market punishes human patience and we are not talking about cryptocurrencies, but about a tangible birth like the monks, with artisanal crafts, gave birth to their incunabula. It is the price of useless and beautiful immortality.
Images | Photo by Salvador Ruiz / illustration for The History of Don Quixoteby Cervantes. Cassell & Company (1906), by Gustave Doré (France, 1863)
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