Francisco De Quevedo Poems Of Love And Strife Death And Life

Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), one of the greatest poets of the Spanish Golden Age, was the master of the baroque style known as “conceptismo,” a complex form of expression fueled by elaborate conceits and constant wordplay as well as ethical and philosophical concerns. Although scattered translations of his works have appeared in English, there is currently no comprehensive collection available that samples each of the genres in which Quevedo excelled—metaphysical and moral poetry, grave elegies and moving epitaphs, amorous sonnets and melancholic psalms, playful romances and profane burlesques. In this book, Christopher Johnson gathers together a generous selection of forty-six poems—in bilingual Spanish-English format on facing pages—that highlights the range of Quevedo’s technical expertise and themes. Johnson’s ingenious solutions to rendering the difficult seventeenth-century Spanish into poetic English will be invaluable to students and scholars of European history, literature, and translation, as well as poetry lovers wishing to reacquaint themselves with an old master.

This study of the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo combines a stylistic analysis with a philosophical interpretation in the broad sense.

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.

Poems to Lisi is presented here as an undergraduate student text with parallel-text English verse translations. This edition of Quevedo's Poems to Lisi is a successor to the same editor's original text in Exeter Hispanic Texts, which only contained the Spanish text of the poems (published in 1988). Rather than reprint that edition, the editor has chosen to make the text more widely available by setting his own English verse translations alongside the Spanish originals. It is intended to provide undergraduates in Hispanic Studies with an accessible edition of a key work of the Spanish Golden Age. The translations are close enough to the originals to be of value to those who have an adequate knowledge of Spanish, while the rendering of the poems into English verse (mainly blank verse sonnets) will enable those lacking such a knowledge to read them as poems in their own right.