MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547–1616) was writing Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda; historia septentrional until the very end of his life. By most accounts it is his most challenging work. From its appearance in 1617 until around the turn of the twenty-first century, it has been so obscured by the popularity and acclaim of the two parts of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) that virtually no one in the general English reading public has opened the pages of his posthumous novel. So many scholarly advances have been made in the last three decades that a new translation seems both fully justified and long overdue. While building on the new generation of Persiles scholars such as Diana de Armas, Mary Gaylord, Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Mercedes Alcalá Galán, and Michael Armstrong-Roche, Ana María Laguna has said that “Persiles is rightly deemed today as one, if not the most ambitious experiment in its author’s aesthetic program.” I agree. Furthermore, by way of comparison, it is apt, I believe, to place Cervantes and his novel in the company of James Joyce’s Ulysses, given that 2022 is the centennial year of the first publication of Joyce’s challenging masterpiece. In his Special Centenary Edition 1922–2022, Robert Gogan says that James Joyce “had put so many enigmas and puzzles into it that it would keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what he meant.” Although Persiles is not “Joycean,” Cervantes’s last novel has kept readers and scholars alike nearly equally puzzled for the last four centuries.

There is no question that Don Quixote deserves its reputation as one of a handful of classic masterpieces that have appeared in the history of world literature. Furthermore, scholarly consensus holds that, with this novel alone, Cervantes revolutionized long prose fiction in such a way that he created the modern novel.