Poetry, Reading, and the Trilingual Question in Early Modern Spain

POETRY, READING, AND THE TRILINGUAL QUESTION IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN Eleazar Gutwirth Tel-Aviv University I n Madrid, in 1603, there appeared, at the press of Luis Sánchez, a Libro de las honras que hizo el Colegio de la Compañía de Jesús de Madrid de la Emperatriz doña María de Austria fundadora del dicho Colegio, que se celebraron a 21 de abril de 1603. This book expressed the Jesuits’ grief for the death of their benefactor, Maria of Austria; sister of Felipe II; widow of the Emperor Maximilian of Austria; daughter of Emperor Charles V; mother of Rudolph II. The Jesuits’ Colegio Imperial was established in this town in 1572, thanks to Maria de Austria’s generous donation. The book, apart from a description of the display done for the Empress’s last honors in the church at the Jesuits’School in Madrid, includes texts of prayer and funeral sermon in Latin in which the Empress’s virtues and generosity are praised. José Simón Díaz1 frames the book in a particular historical background. The Jesuit College aimed to be the most advanced school in Spain. The universities began a campaign against it. The Empress, who had helped found the college, had left most of her legacy to the college upon her death, in 1603. Simón Díaz, historian of the college, has also emphasized the relations between festivities and literature in early modern Habsburg Spain. This would mean that these questions touch on cultural studies of early modern Spain. Others have noted the emblems within the emblematic tradition of Europe and Spain.2 The general trend—it has been argued—was to present these Habsburg women as models of piety and religious devotion and erase any trace of their real political involvement (Sánchez). The hieroglyphics with the epigrams in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Spanish that were created and exhibited for her obsequies, are reproduced and described in the book. According to the description, the tumulus in the Jesuits’church was painted to represent white marble CALÍOPE Vol. 17, No. 1, 2011: pages 69-95 70 Eleazar Gutwirth with black veins, gold and bronze. It was higher than 20 feet and rested on four pedestals of two feet each. The pedestals contained inscriptions, here named epitaphs and not epigrams or poems. The order in which these compositions are presented is Hebrew, Greek, Latin and romance. The text in Hebrew constitutes the opening of the series of epitaphs and poems and may deserve some attention despite the neglect of these issues by early modernists, Hispanists, and Hebraists. The text is not easily classifiable. It is a book, but is in fact a representation of the ephemeral art and architecture constructed for the ceremonies to mark the passing of the Habsburg empress. What we see on the page–including the Hebrew text–is the product of the typography of Madrid, while the inscription in the two-foot pedestal was probably not. Today, the text is sometimes described as an epigram, sometimes as poems, although the text of the Libro de las honras refers to them as epitaphs. The other, non-Hebraic, inscriptions followed an established prosodic discipline. The epitaphs and poetic texts in Spanish, for example, opt for the octosyllabic tercet and the octosyllabic quatrain. The observers wonder, therefore, whether this Hebrew epitaph is poetry; whether the Hebrew really is the equivalent of Latin or Spanish, etc. This leads naturally to questioning the existence and extent of a humanist trilingualism in early modern Spain particularly in the field of poetry. It also leads to questioning the assumptions and practices of the critical approaches to such texts from early modern Spain. II Is there any continuity with medieval Hebrew poetry in these Hebrew texts? The basic theme, conceit or idea of the Hebrew epitaph is that death strikes even the highest in the land. It is a main theme of consolatio, the Greco-Roman genre of writings upon death or other misfortunes. Recent work on consolatio noted the novelty of Abravanel’s fifteenthcentury consolation (E. Gutwirth 2000) in the vernacular against both, the image and the realities of medieval Hispano-Jewish attitudes and writings...