Noble Lineages

This agreeable collection of poems from the Spanish Renaissance, doubtless published for the Christmas market, is pitched toward two audiences. The first is the customary one of persons interested in general literature and classics and who seek up-to-date translations. At an earlier time much of this audience might have been unfamiliar with the magnificent poetic production of the Spanish siglos de oro, the first foreign literature to adapt Petrarchism to its own natural rhythms. But the shift in the United States in the past fifty years to the study of Spanish—and the neglect of French—has meant that a good part of the general audience that reads poetry now has some exposure to the language and, very often, to Spanish verse itself. The other audience this book should appeal to is the growing number of persons of Hispanic descent in the United States whose native language might be Spanish but whose language of education is English. This group often has only a limited understanding of high-style Spanish and commonly wishes better to comprehend some of the classic poems of its ancestral culture. For both audiences this anthology serves as a lovely gift for any occasion.

Assuring you, first of all, dear reader, of the high quality of the selections and of the translations of Professor Grossman’s work (you are perhaps familiar with her Don Quixote), I shall continue with some observations on her choice of poems, on their English rhythms, and on the flow of the language. I shall end with the obligatory remarks on misprints and with observations on some weak translations.

Although the literary Golden Ages of Spain may be properly considered to start with the mastery of Italianate meters by Garcilaso de la Vega around 1525, it may be pushed back in time to the accession of the Catholic monarchs (1474) or to the discovery of America, dates alternately considered to be the terminus ad quem of the Spanish middle ages. Professor Grossman has chosen, however, to select as her first poem “Verses written on the death of his father” by Jorge Manrique (1440–1479), a poet who died almost fifty years before the Italianate revolution. With this inclusion she departs from her avowed criterion for the definition of the period and for the selection of poems in this collection, since she says: “It is a pleasure for me to express my deepest gratitude to Elias L. Rivers, a great scholar and gentleman, who generously gave permission for me to use the Spanish texts included in his brilliant collection Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain.” Perhaps my puzzlement about Manrique’s inclusion (and lingering suspicion that some reader or editor insisted on inserting it) is uncalled for and petty, for the poem is one of the most successful ones in Castilian literature, and her translation is superior and more to the modern taste than the classic one done by H. W. Longfellow. The pie quebrado (broken foot) line is clearly a medieval one, little used in Renaissance/Golden Age lyric poetry which is virtually united in the use of the Italianate eleven- or seven-syllable lines or the “popular” native Spanish lines called romance (eight syllables) and romancillo (six syllables).

Although Edith Grossman states clearly in the introduction that the selection of the poems here is based on her personal favorites, the fact is that, either by her own decision or upon the insistence of others, she has based her anthology on poems selected by another scholar (Rivers); and that title The Golden Age is slightly deceptive, for the verses selected by Rivers, who is targeting a less general audience, are entirely lyric. Therefore in Grossman’s collection there are no selections from the large number of Renaissance epic poems, nor are there samples of some of the magnificent poetry from the Spanish classical theater of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and others. There are also no selections from the popular ballads (romances) that were collected, often rewritten, and...