“In a place on… Twitter”, Diego Buendía, a Catalan computer scientist, began on September 1, 2014 the publication of the two parts of Don Quixote, through the account @ elquijote1605, and plans to finish it on the occasion of the commemoration of the IV Centenary of the death of its author, Miguel de Cervantes , who died on April 22, 1616.
And in such an original way, the most universal work of Spanish literature has reached Twitter, where the famous and brave gentleman has already become a star. More than 10,400 followers (a number that is increasing ) attest to the success of the project , which has made the old tradition of serialized novels a new concept, by adapting it to the formats of the 21st century. Even foreign media, such as the French newspaper Le Figaro , have echoed this initiative.
Buendía calculated the tweets that would be necessary for the publication of the two Don Quixote books and eliminated the prologue by Cervantes and the sonnets in order to start with the famous “En un lugar de la Mancha…” , something that he now regrets. “I think it would have been better to respect them, but it is already an irreversible decision,” acknowledges the computer scientist on his website.
“With the adjustments I made, the text has 2,151,251 characters, ” continues Buendía, who carried out the division into tweets using an algorithm. The idea, he says, was to take about 180 characters at a time and eliminate entire words until the rest did not exceed 140 characters in a tweet. “The fact that a round number of tweets came out, 17,000, had a lot of weight in the decision to move forward with the project. Mathematicians know that one number does not have a different meaning from another, but the common man does feel the fascination of singular numbers ”, he acknowledges.
Tweet 8,095, sent on June 9, 2015, marked the end of the first book of Don Quixote and the beginning of the second. Now Buendía’s project is about to come to an end, although, who knows, he may be encouraged to emulate traditional publications and decide to embark on a reissue of the work.
In any case, this has not been the first foray of Cervantes’s work on social networks. Don Quixote on YouTube was a project that began in September 2010 and promoted the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE) and YouTube with the purpose of achieving a complete and global reading for the first time of this work by Manco de Lepanto on the web . A total of 4,308 Internet users, Spanish-speaking from all over the world, participated in the reading of the 52 chapters of the first part and the 74 of the second.
