Miguel de Cervantes Laid to Rest 400 Years After His Death

Posted on June 15, 2015

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra , who wrote Don Quixote de la Mancha, was finally given a formal funeral and burial by the Spanish government 400 years after his death. The new tomb is impressive. Unfortunately it contains a major typo in the engraving.

For years, experts searched for the remains of Cervantes, Spain's greatest writer, to no avail. The BBC reports that archaeologists found his remains in March. They were excavating in the crypt of the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid when they found a casket with Cervantes' initials on it. Inside were bones which and clothing dated to the 17th century. Based on the evidence, including the fact that it was known that Cervantes died in April, 1616 and was buried somewhere in the convent, experts decreed the bones were his, along with someone else's remains.

Cervantes tombstone typo mars historic burial ceremony http://t.co/KVte4S92oj pic.twitter.com/aRSZx7vVY5

— Telegraph News (@TelegraphNews) June 12, 2015

The remains were buried formally in a new tomb in the same convent where the remains were found. The funeral and ceremony was lovely and went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, there was a huge typo in the marble monument commemorating Cervates' life and work.

According to The Telegraph there is a quote from one of Cervante's novels and the name of the novel is misspelled. The quote is from Cervantes' last novel, Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (The Works of Persiles and Sigismunda). The word Sigismunda is misspelled as Sigesmunda.

As soon as Mayor Ana Botella unveiled the tombstone, the embarrassing typo became clear. The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) was responsible for providing the quotes for the tombstone. A spokesman for the RAE admitted that it provided the text for the quote, but denied that it had made the mistake. He said, "The text that the RAE sent was correct but someone, perhaps the engraver, has made a mistake inserting an 'e' where it should be an 'i'. Names shouldn’t be changed; you wouldn't put Guilliam instead of William Shakespeare." He said he hoped it would be an easy correction to make.

So whose job it was to proofread the engraving before it was installed? It seems quite sloppy for no one to have proofread the engraving before it was installed. There must have been a number of Cervantes scholars who would have been happy to step in to make sure all was in order before the tomb was unveiled to the international press.