Abstract

Don Quixote is a rich source of metaphoric statements, a true wealth of wisdom that brings the reader to the Spanish Golden Age, reminding us the meaning of long-lost customs or alluding to some historic circumstances. Many of them persist today among us, turned into proverbial sayings, loaded with that ancestral wisdom so praised by Erasmists that Cervantes himself expressed in his writings as adages voiced by Sancho. Some semantic fields where these metaphoric sentences and some comparative expressions could be classified into will be herein discussed: gastronomy, animals, temporal and geographical references, euphemistic and burlesque metaphors. The aim, in summary, is to make some brief explorations in a selection of metaphors and comparisons in Don Quixote, not to merely group and categorize them, but to reason on them and to document them as far as possible, searching for their origins and meanings as well as the role they play in the text: describing characters, comparing them with animals, highlighting the humor of a situation, deflating a discourse, or visualizing and concretizing images.