The sonnets written during the Spanish Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are among the finest poems written in the Spanish language. This book presents over one hundred of the best and most representative sonnets of that period, together with translations into English sonnets and detailed critical commentaries. Garcilaso de la Vega, Góngora and Quevedo receive particular attention, but other poets such as Aldana, Lope de Vega and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are also well represented. A substantial introduction provides accounts of the sonnet genre, of the historical and literary background, and of the problems faced by the translator of sonnets. The aim of this volume is to provide semantically accurate translations that bring the original sonnets to life in modern English as true sonnets: not just aids to the comprehension of the originals but also lively and enjoyable poems in their own right.
The sonnets written during the Spanish Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are among the finest poems written in the Spanish language. This book presents over one hundred of the best and most representative sonnets of that period, together with translations into English sonnets and detailed critical commentaries. Garcilaso de la Vega, Góngora and Quevedo receive particular attention, but other poets such as Aldana, Lope de Vega and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are also well represented. A substantial introduction provides accounts of the sonnet genre, of the historical and literary background, and of the problems faced by the translator of sonnets. The aim of this volume is to provide semantically accurate translations that bring the original sonnets to life in modern English as true sonnets: not just aids to the comprehension of the originals but also lively and enjoyable poems in their own right.
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The sonnets written during the Spanish Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are among the finest poems written in the Spanish language. This book presents over one hundred of the best and most representative sonnets of that period, together with translations into English sonnets and detailed critical commentaries. Garcilaso de la Vega, Góngora and Quevedo receive particular attention, but other poets such as Aldana, Lope de Vega and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are also well represented. A substantial introduction provides accounts of the sonnet genre, of the historical and literary background, and of the problems faced by the translator of sonnets. The aim of this volume is to provide semantically accurate translations that bring the original sonnets to life in modern English as true sonnets: not just aids to the comprehension of the originals but also lively and enjoyable poems in their own right.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783168989 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 07/20/2016 |
| Series: | Iberian and Latin American Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 535 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet
By John Rutherford
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2016 John RutherfordAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-898-9
CHAPTER 1
Íñigo López de Mendoza, the Marquis of Santillana (1398–1458)
Íñigo López de Mendoza was born into an aristocratic and literary family, and his marriage in 1412 brought him great wealth and power. He lived much of his life at royal courts, where he involved himself in politics and became friendly with many literary men and intellectuals. He had wide cultural interests: he was a generous patron of poets, he formed a great private library, and he is the author both of what is generally considered the first Spanish work of literary criticism and of one of the earliest collections of proverbs compiled since classical times. He participated in several military campaigns and, after fighting for John II of Castile at the First Battle of Olmedo (1445), he was made first Marquis of Santillana. On the death of his wife in 1455, he retired to his palace in Guadalajara, where he spent the rest of his life devoted to his studies and his writing.
He wrote much good poetry, all of it within traditional Hispanic moulds except the forty-two 'sonetos fechos al itálico modo' (sonnets in the Italian manner) that he composed during the last twenty years of his life. A good linguist, he was aware of developments in contemporary French and Italian poetry, and he knew Petrarch's work well. His introduction into the Spanish language of the Italian sonnet was an admirable adventure; but it was not successful, because Spanish ears were not yet ready for Petrarchan rhythms. Santillana had great admiration for Dante, so it could be that he was not much interested in Petrarch's metrical innovations, which were to prove decisive. The lines of Santillana's sonnets have the requisite eleven syllables, yet they are, like much medieval Spanish poetry and pre-Petrarchan Italian poetry, governed more by syllable-count than by stress-distribution; so their rhythms are sometimes duple and sometimes triple. It is unsettling to be marching, then waltzing, then marching again.
IX
En este noueno soneto el actor muestra commo en vn dia de grand fiesta vio a la señora suya en cabello dise ser los cabellos suyos muy rruuios e de la color de la tupaça que es vna piedra que ha la color commo de oro ally do dise filos de arabia muestra asymismo que eran tales commo filos de oro pues en arabia nasçe el oro dise asymismo que los premia un verdor plasiente e flores de jazmines quiso desir que la crespina suya era de seda verde e perlas
Non es el rayo de febo luziente
nin los filos de arabia mas fermosos
que los vuestros cabellos luminosos
nin gemma de topaza tan fulgente
eran ligados de vn verdor plaziente
e flores de jazmin que los hornaua
e su perfecta belleza mostraua
qual biua flamma o estrella d'oriente
Loo mi lengua maguer que sea indina
aquel buen punto que primero vi
la vuestra ymagen e forma diuina
tal commo perla e claro rubi
e vuestra vista tarsica e benigna
a cuyo esguarde e merçed me di
IX
In this ninth sonnet the author shows how, on a day of great celebration, he saw his lady bareheaded. He says that her tresses are very blond and the colour of topaz, which is a stone with a golden colour. Where he says 'Arabia's veins' he likewise shows that that they were like veins of gold, since gold comes from Arabia. He also says that they are adorned with a pleasant green and with jasmine flowers: he meant that her hair-net was made of green silk and pearls.
Not even Phoebus's splendorous ray
nor Arabia's finest veins can compare,
nor can the brightest topaz's display,
with the great beauty of your lucent hair.
A pleasant green was holding it in place
and jasmine flowers, its embellishment,
were setting off its perfect, lovely grace
like living flame or Star of Orient.
My tongue, although unworthy, offered praise
of that glad moment when I could first see
your divine image and your countenance,
like pearls and rubies of great clarity,
and your benevolent, tartarine gaze
enthralling me to your munificence.
Commentary
IX
The poet addresses his lady: the octave describes her hair, and the sestet gives his response, expressing the medieval courtly-love concept of the relationship of a man with his lady as that of a serf with his feudal superior. The praise of feminine beauty is Petrarchan in its synecdochic concentration on the blond hair, even more splendid than gold, sunbeams or precious stones. The first quatrain describes the hair, and the second sets off its beauty by framing its gold in the green and white of the hair -net. Whoever composed the title, claiming to possess intimate knowledge of the circumstances of composition, gives a detailed explanation of the imagery, having little faith in the reader's interpretative abilities. The only image not explained is the one that needs explanation, társica, which suggests that the composer of the title did not understand it. Exoticism intensifies this depiction of female beauty: Phoebus is the sun; Arabia's veins are gold mines; the Star of Orient led the Three Kings to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem; and társica (probably Santillana's coinage) refers to a luxurious silk cloth of a rich indigo colour, imported from Tartary in Asia, and known as pannus tarsicus.
These first Spanish sonnets written by Santillana contain many lines with a stress on the seventh syllable, in this case lines 1, 7, 8, 11 and 12. They have the insistent triple time of the Spanish arte mayor poetry of the fifteenth century, which clashes with the duple time of the Petrarchan hendecasyllable, used in the other lines. Santillana had the Spanish rhythms so firmly installed in his mind that he could not free himself from them. What is more, lines 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 14 have a word-division that is also a syllable-division after the fifth syllable (reinforced by hiatus in lines 8, 12 and 14), which divides each of them into two hemistichs each with two stressed syllables and a strong tendency towards the rhythm of the amphibrach, in other words arte mayor lines. Only five lines of this sonnet (2, 3, 4, 6 and 13) are, then, unaffected by arte mayor rhythms. The translation includes some lines (1, 2, 11 and 13) with triple time, to demonstrate the jarring effect that this alien rhythm produces. There is another technical deficiency in Santillana's sonnet: it does not keep to the ABBAABBA rhyme scheme in the octave. The masculine rhymes in lines 10, 12 and 14 (see also Garcilaso de la Vega's Sonnets XXVII and XXXII, pages 56 and 62), avoided by later Spanish poets, should not, perhaps, be considered a defect, since Italian poets had used this truncated line, verso tronco, although only occasionally and for special effect.
CHAPTER 2Juan Boscán Almugáver (c.1490–1542)
Juan Boscán was born into a family of wealthy Barcelona merchants, but his principal literary language was Spanish, so his name is normally given in this language. He lived most of his life in court circles, where he met Garcilaso de la Vega. Their friendship was decisive for the development of Spanish poetry, because the two men encouraged each other in their conviction that it was in urgent need of an injection of Italian forms and ideas. In 1526 Boscán, who had written much poetry in the octosyllabic fifteenth-century cancionero manner, started the sixteenth -century Spanish poetic revolution with his use of Italian models; and, unlike Santillana, he mastered the duple time of the Petrarchan hendecasyllable. His many sonnets have other attractive features, such as their direct, unpretentious language, but his tendency towards diffuseness and clumsy diction reduces their appeal. Garcilaso persuaded Boscán to translate an Italian prose text that was of the greatest importance for the dissemination of Neoplatonic ideas, Baldassare Castiglione's Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528: the translation was published in 1534), and Boscán was the first Spanish poet to champion happy Neoplatonic love against miserable courtly love, in fourteen sonnets. He was preparing his own poetry for publication when he died, and the task was completed by his widow in 1543.
II, cxiv Soneto
Otro tiempo lloré, y agora canto:
canto de amor mis bienes sosegados;
de amor lloré mis males tan penados,
que por necesidad era mi llanto.
Agora empieza amor un nuevo canto,
llevando así sus puntos concertados
que todos, de estar ya muy acordados,
van a dar en un son sabroso y santo.
Razón juntó lo honesto y deleitable,
y de estos dos nació lo provechoso,
mostrando bien de do engendrado fue.
¡Oh concierto de amor grande y gozoso!
Sino que de contento no tendré
qué cante, ni qué escriba, ni qué hable.
II, cxiv Sonnet
In other times I wept, but now I sing:
I sing of love the happy peace I know;
of love I wept my wretched suffering,
for it was sure to lead to tearful woe.
Now love begins a song that's new and fresh,
with all its instruments in harmony
so that, with sounds that sweetly intermesh,
they join in lovely, holy melody.
For reason joined propriety with cheer,
and so these two united to beget
this benefit that makes its lineage clear.
Concert of love, joyful and great! And yet
I'll be so happy there won't be a thing
about which I can talk or write or sing.
II, cxxix Soneto
Garcilaso, que al bien siempre aspiraste
y siempre con tal fuerza le seguiste,
que a pocos pasos que tras él corriste,
en todo enteramente le alcanzaste,
dime: ¿por qué tras ti no me llevaste
cuando de esta mortal tierra partiste?
¿Por qué, al subir a lo alto que subiste,
acá en esta bajeza me dejaste?
Bien pienso yo que, si poder tuvieras
de mudar algo lo que está ordenado,
en tal caso de mí no te olvidaras:
que o quisieras honrarme con tu lado
o a lo menos de mí te despidieras;
o, si esto no, después por mí tornaras.
II, cxxix Sonnet
O Garcilaso, who aspired to good
always, and sought with such resolve to gain it
that, after brief pursuit, you always would
succeed, and very perfectly attain it,
tell me: why did you not take me with you
when from this mortal earth you slipped away?
And why, when up unto those heights you flew,
leave me down here in wretchedness to stay?
I'm certain that if you could modify
something that is established by decree,
you'd have remembered one whom you forgot,
for you'd have graced me with your company
or, at the very least, have said goodbye,
or you'd have come back here for me, if not.
Commentaries
II, cxiv
This is one of Boscán's Neoplatonic sonnets, describing the sudden, joyous change that the discovery of this philosophy can bring about in a person. It is summarised in the simple antithesis in the first line, which is explained and expanded in the rest of the first quatrain: this concept of love gives happiness and peace, while the one it has replaced gave misery and turmoil. Line 5, with its five stresses, has a strong heroic rhythm, appropriate for affirmative content. It introduces a musical metaphor, echoing both Petrarch's Canzone CXXXI, line 1 ('Io canterei d'Amor sí novamente') and Psalm 149, line 1 ('Sing unto the Lord a new song'). Harmony is central to Neoplatonic philosophy. The musical metaphor is developed in the second quatrain, but not far: there is much feeble redundancy and repetition in lines 6, 7 and 8. The last words before the volta introduce new ideas, developed in the last words of the next line: this love is not sensual, it combines virtue – even holiness – with happiness! Reason, also of central importance in Neoplatonic philosophy, is introduced at the volta, and the next line stresses that this kind of love is thoroughly positive. Concierto at the beginning of the second tercet unites in its ambiguity the themes of music and concord. The last two lines present an appealing, surprising, perceptive afterthought, the bad news after the good: the joys of Neoplatonic love are much less promising as literary material than the miseries of courtly love!
II, cxxix
Boscán laments the death of his dear friend Garcilaso de la Vega, whom he apostrophises. As in other sonnets of his, there is excessive dependence on facile rhymes on verb endings; and the rhythm of line 6 is shaky, the two juxtaposed stressed syllables at the centre contrasting awkwardly with the five preceding unstressed ones. Boscán's problem is not so much with form, though, as with content. Sonnets need to be intense, yet here there is much redundancy that looks like line-filling: 'en todo enteramente', 'al subir a lo alto que subiste', 'algo', 'en tal caso', 'si esto no'. Like Garcilaso, Boscán uses everyday language in his poetry, but unlike Garcilaso he lacks the ability to infuse it with poetic expressiveness, apart from occasional moments when it springs to life, as in Sonnet II, cxiv (page 24). A final anticlimax can be very effective, but this one is more like unintended bathos.
CHAPTER 3Garcilaso de la Vega (1503–1536)
Garcilaso de la Vega was born in Toledo into an aristocratic family. He became a soldier and travelled widely, especially in Italy, where he made friends with many writers and intellectuals. His life was short, for he was mortally wounded in a battle near Nice, and his poetic output was not extensive: one slim volume that has been hugely influential. Garcilaso is the founder of modern Spanish poetry. He was the first Spanish poet successfully to incorporate into his work the techniques, verse forms and themes of the great Italian Renaissance poets, above all Petrarch, bringing about the renovation that Spanish poetry needed at the end of the Middle Ages. But Garcilaso did not merely rewrite Petrarch in Spanish, because his was a restless mind always looking for interesting ways in which to make literature. Writers who influenced him were not so much sources, for this term implies passive reception, as stimuli provoking reactions both positive and negative. In his later poetry, under the influence of Bernardo Tasso (1493–1569), he moved away from Petrarch towards classical works.
Garcilaso started his poetic career writing octosyllables in the fifteenth-century style. But he soon turned to the Italianate hendecasyllable and heptasyllable, using these more flexible and versatile metres with great skill to write elegies, eclogues, epistles, odes and sonnets. In a few years he turned from a medieval poet into a Renaissance poet. His fame rests more on his longer poems, but his contribution to the success of the sonnet in Spain was decisive. Unhappy love is his most frequent subject, in the Petrarchan tradition. Critics have spent much time and energy trying to link his poems with supposed love affairs about which there is little evidence. Such links are speculative and irrelevant for an appreciation of the poems.
Garcilaso's verse was first published in book form seven years after his death by the widow of his close friend and fellow poet Juan Boscán. It is a four-volume publication, the first three being Boscán's poetry, the fourth Garcilaso's, and it was successful. Garcilaso's poetry demanded separate publication, however, and this first happened in 1574. But it was the edition published in 1580, with lengthy, erudite commentaries by the eminent critic and poet Fernando de Herrera, that established Garcilaso de la Vega as a modern classic.
All the thirty-eight sonnets written by Garcilaso are included here. Two others are ascribed to him, but they are so defective in basic technique that I cannot believe he wrote them. Sonnets XVI, XXIV, XXXIII and XXXV have titles. Boscán or his widow may have written them: not, presumably, Garcilaso himself, since two of them mention him in the third person. In the early editions there is no overall organisation of the poetry. Their ordering of the sonnets is generally followed, though.
Of modern criticism, the most useful books are Heiple's study, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), Rivers's Garcilaso de la Vega, Poems: A Critical Guide (London: Grant and Cutler, 1980) and the critical edition, Obra poética y textos en prosa, ed. Bienvenido Morros (Barcelona: Crítica, 1995). In the commentaries I have borrowed ideas from all of them, especially from Heiple.
I
Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado
y a ver los pasos por do me han traído,
hallo, según por do anduve perdido,
que a mayor mal pudiera haber llegado.
Mas cuando del camino estó olvidado,
a tanto mal no sé por dó he venido;
sé que me acabo, y más he yo sentido
ver acabar comigo mi cuidado.
Yo acabaré, que me entregué sin arte
a quien sabrá perderme y acabarme
si ella quisiere, y aun sabrá querello;
que pues mi voluntad puede matarme,
la suya, que no es tanto de mi parte,
pudiendo, ¿qué hará sino hacello?
I
When pausing to appraise my situation
and seeing where my steps have carried me,
I find that, after so much divagation,
this could have been a worse calamity.
Whenever, though, I happen to forget
that road, I can't explain my sad decline.
I know I'm dying; what I most regret
is that it dies with me, this love of mine.
And so I'll die. I yielded, simple soul,
to one who'll lead me to a wretched end
if she so wishes, and I think she will;
for if my will takes death to be its goal,
then hers, much less disposed to be my friend,
given the chance – what can it do but kill?
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Series Editors' Foreword,Preface,
Introduction,
Íñigo López de Mendoza, the Marquis of Santillana (1398–1458),
Juan Boscán Almugáver (c. 1490–1542),
Garcilaso de la Vega (1503–1536),
Fernando de Herrera (1534–1597),
Francisco de Aldana (1537–1578),
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616),
Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627),
Lope de Vega Carpio (1562–1635),
An anonymous author (late sixteenth century),
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645),
Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681),
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695),
Select Bibliography,
Index of first lines of Spanish sonnets,
What People are Saying About This
“This eminently readable collection confirms John Rutherford's status as arguably the finest translator of literary works from the Spanish Golden Age. The introduction provides an exemplary contextualisation for a selection of sonnets that are essential reading for anyone who claims an interest not only in Hispanic literature(s) but also in literature per se. A treasure-trove of delights, this collection constitutes a major milestone in and beyond Hispanic Studies.”