Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry, 1400–1700

In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers. With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the three main languages—Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish—and lyrical styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential details of the poets’ lives, and a general introduction by the volume editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography containing the most important editions and translations from all three of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool for both specialists and students in comparative literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226011479

Book preview

PART I

Janus

Quem tamen esse deum te dicam, Iane biformis?¹⁹ Ovid, Fasti 1.89

Ermegol de Beziers, January: Janus, Le breviare d’amour. Provençal codex, fol. 57v. France, thirteenth century. Biblioteca Real, Escorial, Madrid. Photograph: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, New York.

ÍÑIGO LÓPEZ DE MENDOZA, MARQUÉS DE SANTILLANA

(1398–1458)

One of the leading political and military figures in the court of Juan II of Castile (1405–54), Íñigo López de Mendoza y de la Vega, the first marquis of Santillana (most commonly referred to by scholars as simply el marqués de Santillana), was born at Carrión de los Condes, Castile, to a high-ranking noble family with close ties to the arts in Castile. His grandfather Pedro González de Mendoza and his father, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (admiral of the Castilian fleet), were also accomplished poets. His uncle was Pero López de Ayala, a celebrated poet and historian who served as chancellor of Castile during the last quarter of the fourteenth century.

The Marqués de Santillana’s father died when he was still very young, and as a result he was forced to spend part of his childhood living in his grandmother’s household, where he received a rigorous education at the hands of his grandmother and important intellectuals of the day, such as Pero Sánchez del Castillo (a member of the royal council), Alfonso Fernández de Valladolid, and his great-uncle Gutierre Álvarez de Toledo, who in 1443 would become archbishop of Toledo. As a young man, the Marqués de Santillana also spent a good deal of time in the court of the Aragonese king Alfons V el Magnànim, and it was here that he was exposed to the work of Catalan and Provençal poets (such as Ausiàs March, whom he admired greatly), the Latin and medieval Italian literary tradition (such as Virgil and Dante Alighieri), and the work of Iberian poets such as Enrique de Villena, who composed verses in Castilian and Catalan.

A self-conscious admirer of Italian literary figures such as Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francesco Petrarch, as well as earlier Galician-Portuguese lyric, the Marqués de Santillana is perhaps best known for his serranillas, poems that tell of amorous encounters between knights and rustic mountain girls. During the final two decades of his life, he also composed several sonnets, which are considered to be the first written in Castilian. These follow the style and form of the Italian dolce stil nuovo (which by the fifteenth century was no longer so new), and they speak predominantly of unrequited love. He also composed several narrative allegorical pieces in verse called decires, of which the Triunphete de Amor (Triumph of love), El infierno de los enamorados (The lovers’ hell), the allegorical Comedieta de Ponça (Short play on Ponza), and the Bías contra Fortuna (Bias against fortune) stand out. His Proemio e carta al condestable don Pedro de Portugal (1449; Preface and letter to the constable Don Pedro of Portugal) is generally considered to be the earliest work of Castilian literary