Boscán y Garcilaso: Su amistad y el Renacimiento en España by Elias L. Rivers, and: Talking and Text: Essays on the Literature of Golden Age Spain by Elias L. Rivers (review)

BOOK REVIEWS CALÍOPE Vol. 18, No. 2, 2013: pages 245-252 Rivers, Elias L. Boscán y Garcilaso: Su amistad y el Renacimiento en España. Seville: Sibilina, 2010. 78 pp. PB. ISBN: 978-84-9270509 -2. Rivers, Elias L. Talking and Text: Essays on the Literature of Golden Age Spain. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. 230 pp. HB. ISBN: 987-1-58871-150-2. Elias Rivers’s contribution to the study of Golden Age literature can hardly be overstated. The field owes a great deal to his editions of Renaissance and baroque lyric poetry, including the bilingual Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), Garcilaso de la Vega’s Obras completas (Madrid: Castalia, 1974), and Poesía lírica del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980). All three continue to define the way we teach and study the subject. Boscán y Garcilaso: Su amistad y el Renacimiento en España plays to the same strengths demonstrated in those anthologies. Rivers combines a remarkable ability for synthesis with his trademark foresight of canons to come. His vast yet lightly-worn erudition is apparent in the critical introduction, pithy endnotes, and in the precise selection of prose and poetry that resulted from the Boscán-Garcilaso friendship. Remarkably is that this is the first, and only, anthology to bring to the fore the exceptional personal relationship that gave birth to Spain’s so-called nueva poesía in the Renaissance. Boscán y Garcilaso is comprised of an introductory essay as well as an appendix that draws together key works of prose and poetry by these two foundational figures of Italianate verse in the Spanish vernacular. Rivers’s introduction interweaves biographical reference and literary event. On the biographical side, we read of the shadow of doubt cast over Garcilaso by his filial and amatory ties to partisans REVIEWS 246 of the Comunero Revolt, the chance encounter between Boscán and Baldassare Castiglione, and the Neapolitan exile during which Garcilaso produced his crowning poetic achievements. On the literary side, Rivers reviews Boscán and Garcilaso’s handling of the traditional copla, their embrace of hendecasyllabic lines, and the modernization of Spanish prose in their collaborative prefaces and Spanish translation of Castiglione’s work. Throughout, Rivers weighs the poets carefully as both products of their surroundings and prescient visionaries. Without belittling their literary talent, he insists that the reciprocity (“compentración afectiva”) of their literary friendship was the catalyst (“lo que hizo posible”) for Spain’s belated awakening to the literary Renaissance in the vernacular (31). The Boscán-Garcilaso friendship is the structuring principle that unites the appendix of prose and poetry. The prose section contains the prefaces by Boscán and Garcilaso to the former’s translation of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (El cortesano [1534]), as well as a preface by Boscán and prologue by his widow to Las obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilaso de la Vega, repartidas en quatro libros (1543). Boscán and Garcilaso’s prefaces to El cortesano are testament to the playfulness, confidence, and studied sprezzatura by which the two modernized Castilian prose. As Ignacio Navarrete stressed in Orphans of Petrarch (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994), the prefaces reflect a process of creative appropriation, not punctilious translation, of the Italian original. Rivers’s co-authored English translation and introduction with Anne J. Cruz of the prefaces to Las obras de Boscan y algunas de Garcilaso (“Three Literary Manifestos of Early Modern Spain.” PMLA 126:1 [2011]: 233-242) also tells us that Garcilaso’s preface contains a thinly veiled subtext: the reification of the Spanish courtier, a new social type who must eschew “violence” and “social aggression” (234). Thus the political and the literary are not wholly separable categories. As a project of competition and cultural openness on the European stage, El cortesano was also a dismissal of Castile’s political and cultural nativism—both existential threats to Spain’s new poetry and its imperial consolidation. Boscán and Garcilaso’s experimentation with Italianate verse forms was a gradual process of cultural adaptation that began with the publication of El cortesano. Garcilaso...