WALCYR CARRASCO’S DON QUIXOTE: AN ADAPTATION FOR NEW READERS

Abstract

This article examines the rewriting strategies employed by Walcyr Carrasco in his adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha for children and young adult readers, with the aim of understanding how the narrative and linguistic features of the source text are reconfigured for developing readers. Drawing on bibliographical research and a comparative analytical approach, the study is grounded in the works of Hutcheon, Lajolo and Zilberman, and Cosson, while also engaging with the guidelines of Brazil’s National Common Curricular Base (BNCC). The analysis focuses on representative episodes in the characterization of Don Quixote and considers such procedures as narrative condensation, the selection of events, linguistic reformulation, and the reorganization of information. The findings show that Carrasco preserves characters, conflicts, and situations that are essential to the recognition of the Cervantine universe, while reducing narrative expansions, bringing events into closer sequence, and employing shorter, more direct syntactic structures. These strategies alter both the pace and the organization of the narrative. The study concludes that the adaptation constitutes a distinct textual work shaped by both continuity and transformation and may serve as a form of mediation between literary tradition and developing readers, without replacing the experience of reading the source text.