The Imagined Library Books that were never written

Don Quixote  ·  Chronicle

The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha

also known as Historia de don Quijote de la Mancha

Cide Hamete Benengeli

Can I actually read this? Yes. Someone printed it. You can buy a copy. Published in our world

An Arabic history of a knight, found in the Alcana of Toledo, translated by a Morisco for a few raisins and wheat, from which — so the frame insists — Don Quixote was put into Spanish.

Menard wanted to write this book without copying it. He was arriving at a translation of a translation of a book that was never in Arabic.

Cervantes, in 1605, needed a way to continue a story he had pretended to lose. The solution is bibliographic and slightly insulting: the true history was always over there, in a language a Christian knight would not read, written by a historian whose religion the knight was invented to fight. A Morisco does the work for snacks. From then on the narrator is an editor, Cide Hamete is the author, and the jokes about Arabs being liars are the novel looking at its own frame and refusing to wink quite enough.

That is why it is the parent of the Red Book and of Morgenstern and of Pampa Kampana’s pot. The published object claims to be a rendering of an unavailable original. You can buy the rendering tonight, in any language you like. You cannot buy Cide Hamete. He is the condition of the joke, and the joke is the novel.

Pierre Menard, in this library, is the only man who took Cide Hamete more seriously than Cervantes did.

On the readability rating. Yes — of the Spanish, which is to say of the translation. The Arabic notebooks stay in the Alcana, with the raisins.

In-world history

Cervantes's narrator breaks off in mid-combat at the end of chapter 8, laments the lost rest of the story, and then, in the Alcana, finds notebooks in Arabic. A Morisco reads the title: History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian. Translation proceeds. In Part II, Cide Hamete is praised, doubted, and used to fend off the fake Quixote of Avellaneda. The Arabic original remains in Toledo, which is to say it remains in the sentence.

Why it matters

The founding found-manuscript of the European novel. Everything later in this catalogue that claims to be a translation, an abridgement, or a discovered pot is paying rent to Cide Hamete.

Appearances

  • Don Quixote (1605) — Miguel de Cervantes Part I, 1605; from chapter 9 the narrator is translating an Arabic manuscript bought in Toledo. Part II, 1615, continues the conceit and answers Avellaneda's false sequel

Editions in our world

  • Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (Juan de la Cuesta, 1605 and 1615) Presented as a translation of Cide Hamete. There is no Arabic manuscript. The real book is the one that taught Europe how to pretend a novel had been found.

Connected volumes

Catalogue record

Category
Chronicle
World
Don Quixote
Imagined by
Miguel de Cervantes
Language
Arabic, in the original; the published text is a translation into Spanish
First appearance
El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1605), chapter 9
Readability
Published in our world
Books That Escaped Into Reality Books Within Books Lost Manuscripts

Sources

  • Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1605), Part I, chapter 9; Segunda parte (1615).

Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06