“Thou hast seen nothing yet.”

March 18, 2015 6:50 AM

Remains in Madrid Are Believed to Be Those of Cervantes [New York Times]

Spanish investigators said they had reason to believe that bones found at the Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians were those of the “Don Quixote” author.

posted by Fizz (24 comments total)

Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians

Oh come on, that can't be a real thing. The world of humorous fiction is bleeding into ours again.

Damnit, Cervantes, it's every time with you, isn't it?
posted by leotrotsky at 7:10 AM on March 18, 2015 [15 favorites]

Neat. I didn't know about this. Makes sense he'd want his bones buried in a discalced Trinitarian convent. That was the religious order that ransomed those same bones long before, when he was kidnapped after just having finished recuperating from his injuries in the Battle of Lepanto. One of my favorite poems is about that event and ends with a cool image of Cervantes:

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade...
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

posted by resurrexit at 7:10 AM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Looks like some lazy hack couldn't be bothered to translate descalzo. That word discalced is rendered as "barefoot" by the UK media.
posted by epo at 7:12 AM on March 18, 2015

Discalced religious orders are ones that don't wear shoes or (in some cases) which wear only sandals. I think discalced is the standard word used when discussing these orders in English.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:13 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians

Oh come on, that can't be a real thing. The world of humorous fiction is bleeding into ours again.

They must have very brittle bones without any calcium. That and really bad cases of Helvetica.
posted by StoicRomance at 7:14 AM on March 18, 2015

It is the title of some religious orders. So, yes, they can use rare words in naming themselves.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:14 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Calca refers to the heel, which is why inculcate means to grind in with the heel, or at least someone told me that.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:16 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Are we sure they aren't Pierre Menard's?
posted by thelonius at 7:28 AM on March 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

They must have very brittle bones without any calcium. That and really bad cases of Helvetica.

No, that's not correct, but it's an easy mistake to make for someone unfamiliar with the structure and hierarchy of Catholic religious orders. The Catholic clergy who suffer from the severest cases of Helvetica are Canons Regular, specifically the Swiss Congregation of Canons Regular of Saint Maurice of Agaune (lat. Congregatio Helvetica o Sancto Mauritio Agaunensis), whereas the Trinitarians are a Mendicant order.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:30 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The whereabouts of Cervantes’s tomb had been a mystery since the Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians was rebuilt in the late 17th century. The remains were finally found below the ground of the crypt of the church, at a depth of about 50 inches in a box that contained bones from 10 adults and five children, according to Fernando de Prato, a historian who led the search for Cervantes.

Mr. de Prato said that the forensic team still faced “a lot of work” to separate the bones, perhaps try to reconstruct the bodies, and perform DNA testing....

During the excavations, the investigators found decayed wood from a coffin with the letters M and C marked out in tacks. (Cervantes’s full name was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.) The discovery of the coffin was announced in January, but it turned out to contain the remains of a child rather than those of the writer, Mr. de Prato said.

So we have a box with remains of fifteen different people, there has been no DNA testing, we already got one false positive announcement, but this time, yeah, it's totally him.

The discovery of the possible remains comes as Spain and the literary world celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the second volume of “Don Quixote” (the first one was published in 1605).

The authorities in Madrid are hoping to build a monument within the church to commemorate the writer, with the goal of completing that work by April of next year, the 400th anniversary of his death.

What a wild coincidence.
posted by Etrigan at 7:49 AM on March 18, 2015

The investigators cautioned, however, that it may be impossible to guarantee that the bones are those of the writer. Almudena García-Rubio, an archaeologist, said that there was “no confirmed genetic identification,” although DNA tests were being performed.

^This. We're being somewhat skeptic here in Spain.

Cervantes had no children (except possibly a daughter with an actress), and his closest relative with a known interment place was a sister whose bones are in an ossuary with the rest of the nuns of her convent, so they can't do any DNA matching.
posted by sukeban at 7:54 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The newspaper El País has a good roundup in English, too.
posted by sukeban at 7:57 AM on March 18, 2015

I hadn't even heard he was ill.
posted by Abiezer at 8:23 AM on March 18, 2015 [12 favorites]

I wonder if they found Mike West, too.
You know, from the song: "...and this is Mike West, who follows that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far."
posted by Floydd at 8:31 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sophita WINS!
posted by poe at 8:53 AM on March 18, 2015

Timely. I just listened to the Radiolab "La Mancha Screwjob" episode (the gist of which was: "Who knew Cervantes and pro wrestling had so much in common?"), and now this. I really want to read Don Quixote now.
posted by offalark at 9:10 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Catholic clergy who suffer from the severest cases of Helvetica are Canons Regular

Something something baptismal font.

Something something bold assertion.

Something something that's why they all suffer from pica!
posted by yoink at 9:12 AM on March 18, 2015

I really want to read Don Quixote now.

Oh do! It is unbelievably wonderful.
posted by yoink at 9:13 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

the main thing is that Part I has all the famous scenes, but is an order of magnitude worse than Part II, which was written ten years later and is meta as hell, since everyone in Part II has read Part I and there's a fake Quixote wandering around a different part of the Spanish countryside
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:18 AM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Part I has all the famous scenes, but is an order of magnitude worse than Part II

I think it would have been more accurate to put that as "as wonderful as Part I is, Part II is an order of magnitude better!"
posted by yoink at 10:29 AM on March 18, 2015

People like different things. I don't like Part I of Don Quixote, which I think is only intermittently as good as Part II. Don Quixote's exaggerated suffering is too often the whole joke in Part I. Part II is kinder to him and more subtle. Also, the book is in the canon, so I don't think I need to go out of my way to sell it to people who haven't read it.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:37 AM on March 18, 2015

Part II is definitely better than Part I, but I think the greater part of Part II's greatness is because Part I is the way it is and allows II to comment on I in the way it does. (If that tortured sentence makes any sense at all...)

Also going to chime in with my usual recommendation for the Edith Grossman translation for those who want to give reading it a shot--it's great. And I'd probably recommend that if you're a native English speaker even if you know Spanish... the Quixote is difficult to read in the original Spanish even for native speakers; it's sort of like reading Shakespeare as a native English speaker: grammar and syntax are mostly the same, but vocabulary and stylistic conventions have changed significantly. The RAE 400th anniversary edition that I have has its own early modern Spanish-modern Spanish glossary.
posted by Kosh at 11:29 AM on March 18, 2015

El Quijote is usually sold with modernized ortography (the original edition looks like this) even if you need lots of footnotes to understand it. And you really do.

In case you wanted to take a look at Spanish language editions, The Centro Virtual Cervantes doesn't bother with downloadable files (you have to go to Project Gutenberg for that), but this online edition at least has popup explanatory footnotes.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte has just published a "modernized"/ "simplified" edition for school use, too, but I don't even want to know about it.
posted by sukeban at 1:13 PM on March 18, 2015

(Note: I was scarred very early by a horrible cartoon adaptation —beware the earworm— and school reading materials themed about some of the worst passages of the book. I am not impartial.)
posted by sukeban at 1:30 PM on March 18, 2015