Rosinante

Rosinante , or Rocinante , is the riding horse of Don Quichotte , in the novel Don Quichotte by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra . Rosinante is not only Don Quixote's horse, but also his alter ego . Like Don Quixote, Rosinante is awkward, past her prime and overwhelmed by her task.

Rosinante is described as lean and with numerous defects. While today i. A. Mares are called Rosinante, with Cervantes the horse is clearly a stallion: In the 15th chapter Rosinante penetrates a herd of Galician mares, which brings him, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza violent beatings from the drivers. Also (in translation by Ludwig Braunfels) is always of the talk Rocinante. In Spanish, rocín denotes both an unworthy horse ( nag or nag ) and a booby. There are similar words in French ( roussin; rosse ), Portuguese ( rocim; rocinar roughly (horse) snort ), Dutch ( ros ), German ( Ross ) and Italian ( ronzino ). The etymology is uncertain. ante means "before" in Spanish. Don Quixote wants to express that his horse was previously only a nag, but has now become the first of all horses.

"Now he went to see his gaule immediately, and although he had more stone galls on his hooves than a penny and more debris than Gonella's horse, the tanium pellis et ossa fuit, it seemed to him that neither Alexander's bucephalus." nor could the Babieca of the Cid equate himself with him. Four days passed by thinking about what name to give him; if - as he said to himself - it would not be right that the horse of such a famous knight, which is already so excellent in itself, should remain without a well-known name of its own. And so he tried to give him one that clearly shows what the horse was before, before he was a knight, and what he was now; for it is justified in reason that if his master takes on a different class, the horse also takes on a different name and receives one that is glorious and high-sounding, as befits the new order and profession to which he himself already confess. And so, after having thought up many names, then deleted and erased them, then brought others back in his head, rejected again and reassembled in his imagination and imagination, he finally came up with the name Rosinante, a higher one in his opinion and a resounding name, indicative of what he was when he was just a riding horse, before he came to the meaning he now had, namely to go first to all the horses in the world. "

- Miguel de Cervantes : Project Gutenberg-DE, translated by Ludwig Braunfels

gallery

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  Don Quixote and Rosinante, painting by Honoré Daumier (around 1868)

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  Statue in Madrid by Lorenzo Coullaut Valera (1930)

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  Sculpture in Havana by Sergio Martínez

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Howard Mancing, "Rocinante" in "The Cervantes Encyclopedia: L-Z", Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2004, page 618
2. ^ John T. Cull: The 'Knight of the Broken Lance' and his 'Trusty Steed': On Don Quixote and Rocinante . In: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America . 10, No. 2, 1990, pp. 37-53.