Barcelona Letter: Four hundred years ago this month, Miguel de Cervantes's El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was first published in Madrid; a hurried, shoddy edition whose omitted passages caused the disappearance and reappearance of a very important donkey, amongst other inconsistencies.
It was a shaky start for a book voted the greatest of all time by the Nobel Institute in 2002.
Somewhere in the middle of those two historic moments in time, the "quite insane" knight-errant Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho "a little short of salt in the brain-pan" Panza, managed to influence absolutely everything in popular culture, from art (Salvador Dalí was particularly obsessed with recreating them), to movies (starring John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza respectively), to musicals (Man of La Mancha - it won five Tony Awards), to books (one of which, by feminist author Kathy Acker, recreates Don Quixote as a woman) to this writer's sublime introduction to the chivalrous mad man: pop singer Nik Kershaw's hit Don Quixote in 1984.
Even some of our weariest clichés were once new jewels in the knight-errant's mouth: through thick and thin; there is no love lost between us; hunger is the best sauce; the haves and the have-nots; think before you speak; all will come out in the washing; the pot calling the kettle black; I have other fish to fry; every man for himself; out of the frying pan into the fire; within a stone's throw of it; born with a silver spoon in his mouth; mad as a March hare.
If you have never read the delightful 1,000-page tome, perhaps this rich inheritance will give you an inkling why, in 2002, when 100 authors from all over the world were asked to choose "the best and most central work in world literature", Don Quixote came first, with 50 per cent more votes than any other book.
This was an astonishing, hands-down victory when you consider that the 99 other books on the list of possibilities included works by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. Authors who voted included John le Carre, John Irving, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer and Milan Kundera.
The latter makes no secret of his admiration for Don Quixote, describing its author as "the founder of the modern era ... The novelist need answer to no-one but Cervantes".
Vladimir Nabokov was equally generous with his praise, asserting that, "Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. [ He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [ his] sheer vitality ... He stands for everything."
Why all of this praise for a protagonist who drives himself so crazy reading romances of chivalry that he attacks windmills, sheep and many innocent bystanders in the quest to win the affections of his imaginary lady?
"The dialogues between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were of a kind that had never been seen before," explains Dr Grace Magnier, a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. "A myriad narrative voices and a myriad genres interplay for the first time ever in Don Quixote ... The book is like a peep show into the society and values of the time. And, of course, it is very funny. It wasn't just a parody of the books of romantic chivalry; Cervantes was having swipes at society too. He portrayed Don Quixote as a suffering genius - a cultured madman - and readers could identify with his high ideals, despite his madness."
Back at the turn of the 17th century in Spain, few could have predicted that Don Quixote would one day be considered the first modern novel. Least of all the author himself, who dreamed up the characters while languishing in a Seville jail. It was his third incarceration and was for discrepancies in his tax accounts.
But if Shakespeare can be forgiven for possibly having spent time behind bars (in Brussels, for "bawdiness in a tavern") so too can the man referred to as the Shakespeare of the Spanish-speaking world.
Don Quixote began as a parody of the romances of chivalry so popular in the 16th century that young women, in particular, were cautioned against reading them.
Just as such books were going out of fashion, Cervantes created the doddering old Don Quixote, who pored over them "until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad".
Thinking himself a knight-errant, he donned his home-made head armour and trotted off on a half-starved steed called Rocinante (rocín is the Spanish for nag) to fight the world's injustices in honour of his non-existent amour, Dulcinea.
His squire Sancho Panza, a thick and thick-set neighbour, was more interested in getting his meaty paws on the spoils of victory when he heaved himself onto his donkey to accompany his master on their adventures through the Spanish countryside.
By the way, the donkey's disappearing acts in the original edition came about when pages were accidentally left out by either the publishers or Cervantes himself; presumably neither owned up.
The illustration on the front cover of the 400-year-old original volume is as surreal as some of the adventures therein. A hooded falcon rests on the gloved hand of a man who is hidden from view. Twisted around the arm and the bird is the Latin inscription Post Tenebras Spero Lucem - after darkness I hope for light.
Although Don Quixote himself utters these words when he and Sancho Panza find themselves having to sleep out in the open one night, they may have also resonated with their author.
At the time of the book's publication, Cervantes, at 58 years of age, was considered an old man and had seen his fair share of darkness. Four years after losing the use of his left hand fighting the Turks during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers, where four times he tried - and failed - to escape.
His family, with the help of Trinitarian monks, finally paid the ransom of 500 ducats to free him, but in 1592 he found himself behind bars again, charged with fraud, and again in 1597, where the idea for Don Quixote first entered his head.
The book began as a cuenta or short story and grew into a novel, which became known as Part One. Part Two was published in 1614, just a few months before Cervantes died.
In Part Two, chapter three, his famous character summed up best the novel's loose structure: "I do now have to say," said Don Quixote, "that the author of my history was no sage but some ignorant prattler, who started writing it in a haphazard and unplanned way and let it turn out however it would, like Orbaneja, the famous artist of Ubeda, who, when asked what he was painting, replied: 'Whatever emerges.'"
How remarkable, then, that what emerged for Cervantes was the greatest book of all time.