Skip to main content

The river nymphs and the dolorous and humid Echo ('Las ninfas de los ríos, la dolorosa y húmida Eco')

Index: Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.

Fishburn and Hughes: "A quotation from Don Quixote, part 1, ch.26. The Knight of the Doleful Countenance, having decided to imitate the style of Amadis of Gaul (the hero of an early romance of chivalry), engraves lamentations on the bark of a tree and calls on the mythical creatures of the woods and 'the river nymphs and the dolorous and humid Echo' for consolation. Rodríguez Martín in his notes to the Clásicos Castellanos edition offers the following explanation for the epithets 'dolorous and humid'. The nymph Echo, daughter of Air and Earth, is condemned by Juno to silence except for repeating the last two syllables of anything said to her. She is called dolorous and humid because, having been rejected by Narcissus for her disabilities, she retires to the caverns and glens, where she is consumed by grief." (195)