Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Kafka’s epigram reverses the usual reading of Cervantes: Don Quixote is typically “undone” by his own fantasies, yet Kafka suggests the real misfortune is Sancho Panza—i.e., the tether to practicality, companionship, and the world’s common sense. The line can be read as a comment on how imagination is not inherently tragic; what makes it painful is its collision with the corrective voice that interprets, manages, or domesticates it. Sancho becomes the agent of reality, translation, and compromise—turning visionary freedom into a social, negotiated enterprise. In Kafka’s terms, the tragedy may lie less in dreaming than in being accompanied (or supervised) by the ordinary.