Harold Bloom describes Edith Grossman in his introduction to Don Quixote as the "Glen Gould of translators". It was nice to learn that Glen Gould is a pianist well-known for his very precise, very detailed treatment of classical composers, particularly Bach. The analogy is therefore made clearer.

Having a very precise translator certainly helps with a book which is one of the first(if not the first) works of meta-fiction(that is, where the narrative is constantly exposed as fiction and discussed as such), which might also be described as tangent texts, being as tangents make up a great deal of the content; in fact the tangents can sometimes tell more of the story than the story proper. The Manuscript Found at Saragossa and Tristram Shandy are other examples.

These are often thought of as literary approaches that one would find in Post-modernism, which privleages irony above all else. And yet we find them in Don Quixote, but with an interesting dimension: Don Quixote has no irony in him, but there is irony in how Cervantes regards him.

The incident on pg. 518, with Sancho attempting to mislead Don Quixote into beliving that Dulcinea del Toboso is a coarse peasant girl(being unable to find the real Dulcinea, since she doesn't exist) is a case in point. Eric Auerbach wrote an essay about this episode entitled The Enchanted Dulcinea. A point he stresses as being of great importance is that Sancho Panza picks up and uses the rhetoric of chivilary from Don Quixote; the modes and language of storytelling obviously is being passed on and learned.