Sometimes I wonder if we don’t all come out of Don Quixote’s cock-eyed helmet, that headgear the hidalgo took for the legendary golden helmet of Mambrino but Sancho Panza recognized as nothing more than a barber’s brass basin. Between them the crazed and self anointed knight errant and his grubby sidekick encompass virtually every possibility given to human nature, from the noble delusions of uncompromising idealism to the petty calculations we engage in simply to make it from one day to the next to get a bit ahead. If the Knight of the Woeful Countenance embodies the impossible longings we have to surpass ourselves, Sancho Panza serves as a coarse but shrewd intercessor for our most basic interests: to have enough to eat and a place to sleep, to find love and comfort in family and friends, and, in the end, somehow, to save our sorry skins.

Neither Don Quixote nor Sancho Panza can stand alone; nor is it quite correct to say that together, in their implausible synergy, they comprise the sum total of human experience. Each of the two is distinct and irreducible; it is rather their interchange, running the gamut from master and servant to father and son to brothers-in-arms to the unlikeliest of friends, which still makes every page of Cervantes’s novel scintillate four centuries after it first appeared.

In the episode of Mambrino’s helmet, Don Quixote, still smarting from his latest humiliation, sees “a man riding toward them and wearing on his head something that glistened as if it were made of gold.” The Don sees everything under the sun with emblematic eyes and so he asks Sancho, “Do you not see that knight coming toward us, mounted on a dappled gray and wearing on his head a helmet of gold?” Sancho, by contrast, sees everything in the world with arithmetical eyes, and so he answers, “What I see and can make out is just a man riding a donkey that’s gray like mine, and wearing something shiny on his head.”

Sancho is right in the literal sense; the apparition proves to be a barber who is wearing his brass basin on his head to protect his new hat from stains. But this doesn’t prevent Don Quixote from charging the terrified barber with lance at the ready and capturing “Mambrino’s helmet,” which Sancho at once appraises at its market value of eight reales. Yet while Sancho is irrefutably right, he is also profoundly wrong. For Don Quixote, scraggly, gaunt and withered as he is, lives in the child’s realm of the imagination, and there a sauce pan or a tin lid or a barber’s brass basin can be, and is, a fabulous golden helmet.

The Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal once wrote in his “Book of Friends,” “Everything believed – and nothing else – exists.” I used to puzzle over this aphorism until I reread “Don Quixote.” The humor of the novel, as well as its terrible sadness, arises from the constant disparity of perception between the knight and his squire, and the cruel disparity between those colliding perceptions and the world itself – which always undoes, but never defeats, them.

I’ve quoted above from the lovely new translation by Edith Grossman (Ecco, 940 pages, $29.95). Ms. Grossman’s skill is such that she has created a new version of this much-translated work that is both meticulously accurate and fluently colloquial. She has also provided footnotes to elucidate not only factual or historical matters but shifts of tone and diction in the original Spanish. For example, in one episode the two are suddenly assailed by a terrific crashing sound in the middle of a dark forest that “would have put terror in any heart other than Don Quixote’s,” but which in the light of dawn turns out merely to come from six mechanical fulling hammers.

Our hidalgo, mortified, reproaches Sancho for his gibes, saying, “Do you think that if these were not fulling hammers but a dangerous adventure, I would not have displayed the courage needed to undertake and conclude it? Am I obliged, perchance, being, as I am, a knight, to recognize and differentiate sounds, and know which are fulling hammers and which are not?” Here Ms. Grossman notes that Don Quixote has shifted to a more formal Spanish “to indicate extreme displeasure,” and we are grateful as readers to be brought thus into the subtleties of the original text.

“Don Quixote” has been translated, re-created, imitated, plagiarized, bowdlerized, plundered, and ransacked since its first part appeared, to great success, in 1605. Cervantes was in his mid-50s by that time; his earlier life had been adventurous – he’d fought at the Battle of Lepanto, been taken prisoner and enslaved for five years in Algeria – but hardly distinguished. He even spent two years in a Seville prison for “incompetence as a tax-collector,” as John Rutherford, another Cervantes translator, has noted. My own favorite version of “Quixote” is Tobias Smollett’s, first published in 1755, for its pungent and rollicking prose. But no one would call that an accurate translation.

I first read Cervantes in Samuel Putnam’s superb rendition, then in the more scholarly (but stiff) 19th-century translation by John Ormsby (a distant kinsman) that still forms the basis of the Norton Critical Edition. There is also a superb translation by John Rutherford (Penguin Classics, 1,022 pages, $10), which I considered the best until Ms. Grossman’s appeared. Rutherford took a different tack, by attempting to reproduce the effect of the original rather than employing footnotes, and his is often more direct: When Don Quixote delivers a hilarious and rather surrealistic speech in defense of pimps, for example, Ms. Grossman resorts to the word “go-between” – more nuanced, but not as effective. Rutherford (and Smollett) stick with “pimp,” and the word works better.

So various and inexhaustible is the world of “Don Quixote” that a variety of translations are not only necessary but desirable. Cervantes’s work is, for me at least, the greatest and perhaps the ultimate novel of friendship. If the translator is in effect a kind of friend, of the reader as well as of the author – now striving, like Don Quixote himself, for the impossible; now bringing us back, like Sancho Panza, to our common earth – then we need as many versions, and as many such friends, as we can get.

eormsby@nysun.com