La huella del Quijote en poetas de lengua portuguesa del siglo XX: Miguel Torga y José Saramago
abstract
Miguel Torga and José Saramago are two of the most important Portuguese writers of the past century, and both wrote poems inspired by Don Quijote, the world-renowned masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes. I propose to analyze these poems for their similarites and dissimilarities so as to understand the reception of Cervantes’s novel by these two poets. Some of the concepts of ‘Reception’ and ‘Reader-response’ theories presented by Hans R. Jauss and Wolfgang Iser will be used to explain how the poets assimilated the novel and changed Cervantes’s characters in order to adapt them to their own 20th century reality. Torga transformed Sancho Panza into a peasant hero able to move a crowd against the dictators that dominated Portugal and Spain. For his part, Saramago analyzed Cervantes’s characters in his poems, despised Dulcinea because of her absence, considered don Quijote a paranoid man and valued Sancho for his abilities and strength.
Keywords: Quijote • Portuguese poetry • Reception theory • Miguel de Cervantes • José Saramago • Miguel Torga • Twentieth century • Iberism
permalink: http://doi.org/10.14277/6969-163-8/RiB-5-93