The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet

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.

Women across early modern Europe suffered repressive and restrictive patriarchal measures that denied them education and a voice. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Counter-Reformation Iberia. Yet there is increasing awareness of a wealth of cultural activity by women, produced in spite of long-cherished masculine notions of biological determinism, masculine control, and feminine shame. Women proved that given the opportunity and the education they were equal in reason and intelligence to their male counterparts. Subtle Subversions is the first full-length, contextual, and analytical study of the sonnets of five seventeenth-century women in Spain and Portugal: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, Sor María de Santa Isabel, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, and Sor Violante del Cielo. Using the sonnets as a basis for inquiry, Gwyn Fox adds significantly to scholarship on women's interpersonal relationships through nuanced and revealing analyses of family and friendship as seen through the sonnets. She deciphers issues of subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, and power structures and engages with patronage as a major issue in women's writing. As a difficult form of poetry requiring wit, artistry and education, sonnets provided the ideal framework to display intellectual skills and education, but they also allowed the women to create a subtext of criticism of contemporary systems of control. Although their criticisms had to be subtle, since these systems still offered them much in terms of social advancement and privilege, these women and their works revise our understanding of women's lives in Baroque Spain and Portugal. English translations accompany the Spanish quotations throughout the book. Gwyn Fox is honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where she teaches Spanish language and literature. Fox is currently translating Los baños de Argel, a previously untranslated play by Miguel de Cervantes. "Fox demonstrates that the fixed form of the sonnet simultaneously allowed women to showcase their intellectual talents and critique predominant masculine norms in an understated fashion. . . . Recommended." -- P.W. Manning, Choice "In this beautifully written study of five early modern Iberian poets, Gwyn Fox offers a revisionary history of women's poetics as well as a challenge to conventional Renaissance hermeneutics. . . . Fox delves deeply into each theme, not only contextualizing, but also historicizing her analysis by comparing these women's writings with a broad range of examples. Indeed a bonus of this book is that it does not limit itself to the five women specified above or solely to their sonnets. Fox speaks knowledgeably about other women writers, such as Maria de Zayas and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, to name the most well known, and mentions lesser-known figures such as Inarda de Arteaga. . . . [Fox's] close readings of individual poems are themselves subtle and nuanced. . . . She offers original insights into the poems' social purpose. . . . It is a welcome and much-needed addition to early modern Spanish scholarship." -- Anne J. Cruz, Renaissance Quarterly "Fox's contribution adds to prior rediscoveries and assessments of the poetry of five Iberian women of the Baroque about whose lives, in some cases, very little is known. . . . The critical analysis offered in Subtle Subversions present new insights into the interpersonal relationships of women as well as their engagement with structures of social power, affirming that their sonnets were meant to display these authors' intellect, wit, and education. . . . With her skillful readings of their sonnets, Fox offers a fuller picture of these women's poetic production and contributes to an overall understanding of upperclass women's lives in Spain and Portugal." -- Dana Bultman, Caliope

In this volume, Kathleen Jeffs draws on first-hand experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room for the 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama. Building on the RSC season, the volume offers methodologies for translation and communication that can feed the creative processes of actors and directors, while maintaining an ethos of fidelity with regards to the original texts. It argues that collaboration between academics and theatre practitioners was instrumental in the success of the season and that the work carried out has repercussions for critical debate of Comedia. The volume posits a model for future productions of the Comedia in English, one that recognizes the need for the languages of the scholar and the theatre artist to be made mutually intelligible by the use of collaborative strategies, mediated by a consultant or dramaturg proficient in both tongues. This model applies more generally to theatrical collaborations involving a translator, writer and director, and will be useful for translation and performance processes in any language.

With poems selected and translated by one of the preeminent translators of our day, this bilingual collection of 112 sonnets by six Spanish-language masters of the form ranges in time from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries and includes the works of poets from Spanish America as well as poets native to Spain. Willis Barnstone's selection of sonnets and the extensive historical and biographical background he supplies serve as a compelling survey of Spanish-language poetry that should be of interest both to lovers of poetry in general and to scholars of Spanish-language literature in particular. Following an introductory examination of the arrival of the sonnet in Spain and of that nation's poetry up to Francisco de Quevedo, Barnstone takes up his six masters in chronological turn, preceding each with an essay that not only presents the sonneteer under discussion but also continues the carefully delineated history of Spanish-language poetry. Consistently engaging and informative and never dull or pedantic, these essays stand alone as appreciations--in the finest sense of that word--of some of the greatest poets ever to write. It is, however, Barnstone's subtle, musical, clear, and concise translations that form the heart of this collection. As Barnstone himself says, "In many ways all my life has been some kind of preparation for this volume."

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain experienced a literary Renaissance akin to that in England, with great poets, dramatists and novelists establishing new forms and blazing new trails: Garcilaso de la Vega, Góngora, Quevedo amongst the poets, Lope de Vega & Calderón de la Barca amongst the dramatists (although both were also poets), Cervantes - of course - amongst the prose writers. The Renaissance in England was also a time when translations of contemporary European literature became more common, beginning with contemporary Italian works, and the importation of the Petrarchan sonnet, and then Montemayor's Spanish version of arcadian pastoral. While Spanish literature was not the main focus of English translators during this period - no doubt affected by the strained political relations bnetween the two countries - it did attract some particularly fine writers to try their hand. This selection is driven by what is available, but it also manages to cover some of the greatest Spanish writers of the Renaissance and the Siglo de Oro: Juan Boscán, Garcilaso de la Vega, Jorge de Montemayor, Miguel Cervantes (some poems from 'Don Quixote'), Bartolomé & his brother Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, Luís de Góngora, Francsico de Quevedo, Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza and Juan Péerez de Montalbán. The translators are Herbert Aston, Philip Ayres, William Drummond of Hawthornden, Sir Richard Fanshawe, Thomas Shelton, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Stanley and Bartholomew Yong. The translations are never less than effective and, especially in the case of Fanshawe's Góngora, often show rare genius at work.

Although the very notion of writing for the eyes was not new to the Spanish Golden Age, its ubiquitous presence during this period calls for rethinking of the traditional separation between the visual and the verbal in studies of Iberian culture." "This collection of essays seeks to open up this complex interdisciplinary field of study by including essays on many aspects of visual writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain."--Jacket.

Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular readership. His comprehensive analysis of the miscelánea corrects long-standing misconceptions, starting from its poorly-understood terminology, and erects divisions between it and other related genres. His work illuminates the relationship between the Golden Age Spanish miscellany and those of the classical world and humanist milieu, and illustrates how the vernacular tradition moved away from these forebears. Bradbury examines in particular the later inclusion of explicitly fictional components, such as poetic compositions and short prose fiction, alongside the vulgarisation of erudite or inaccessible prose material, which was the primary function of the earlier Spanish miscellanies. He tackles the flexibility of the miscelánea as a genre by assessing the conceptual, thematic and formal aspects of such works, and exploring the interaction of these features. As a result, a genre model emerges, through which Golden Age works with fragmentary and non-continuous contents can better be interpreted and classified.