October 26, 2005 Mary M. Gaylord to Discuss "El Quixote" By Cervantes on Nov. 17

Literary scholar Mary M. Gaylord will deliver a lecture at the Library of Congress titled “The Americas on the Horizon of ‘El Quixote’” at 6 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 17, in Dining Room A on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. The lecture is free and open to the public; no tickets are required.

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Spanish Golden Age classic “El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha” (1605), by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, the Library’s Hispanic Division and John W. Kluge Center and the Spanish Department of George Washington University organized the lecture, with the sponsorship of the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain.

“Don Quixote” ranks as the most published and translated book after the Bible. Thomas Shelton in 1612-20 translated the book into English under the title “The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote de la Mancha.”

Gaylord is the Sosland Family Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, specializing in medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature, Latin American colonial literature and Cervantes. She published “Decir y hacer en Don Quijote” (“To Say and to Do in Don Quijote”) in the scholarly journal Insula (2005), “Cervantes’ Other Fiction” in the “Cambridge Companion to Cervantes” (2002) and “San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de Leon” (1996).

Established in 1939, the Hispanic Division is the Library’s center for the study of the cultures and societies of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. Latinos, as well as areas where Spanish and Portuguese influences have been significant. For further information about the division, visit www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize scholarly discussion, distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.