Duck's Assignment, plus Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh

This morning El Gran Plotniquo will help out with a Spanish assignment. It sounds really funny to say that, because Plotnik thought he'd finished up helping his kids with Spanish years ago. But this ain't for his kids.

La Ducknika de las Webs is taking an advanced conversational Spanish class at CCSF, and the subject matter is the Golden Age of Spain, and the texts are so difficult that Plottie would never understand them himself if Duck weren't looking up every other word in the dictionary. She has to give a five minute speech tomorrow morning on the art of El Greco. Plotnik cannot tell you how happy he is that it's her and not him.

But Ducknik loves it. She is the kind of student Plotnik never was, intent, diligent and detail-oriented, which means she gets a lot more out of classes than he did.

Plotnik studied Cervantes' 'Don Quijote' for two entire semesters in college, under the great Castillian master of what many people regard as the greatest novel ever written. He had to read the text in the old Spanish, which still had a lot of Latin in it, and if he needed to figure out what it all meant he had to refer to the new Spanish next to it. It was really slow going, sort of like walking in the mud from El Toboso to La Mancha, only without the adventures.

The fascinating thing about Don Quijote is that everything is a hidden metaphor -- Cervantes lived in an age of such strict Inquisition censorship that if he had written what was on his mind he would have been put to death on the spot. So, in addition to being as beautifully written in Spanish as Shakespeare is in English, all the meanings are upside down. Only because the old Knight, the deluded Man of La Mancha, seems to be completely out of his mind, is he allowed to talk about the society he wishes had not disappeared -- one of honesty, nobility and honor.

Oh, and all that great music too, though maybe that doesn't count since composer Mitch Leigh and lyricist Joe Darion didn't add the songs until 1965, only 360 years after the book came out.