Herrera’s Odes

HERRERA'S ODES Elias L.Rivers State University of New York at Stony Brook Poetry is quintessential literature, it is inseparable from its original language, and hence perhaps it tends to be neglected by readers of translations and of modem prose. No one questions the importance of Cervantes and Spanish prose fiction, of Lope de Vega and the Spanish theater, but how many scholars outside our field are familiar with the poetry of Garcilaso, Ercilla, and Fray Luis, of Gongora, Lope de Vega, and Quevedo? Yet, during the Golden Age, poetry, whether epic or lyric, was taken more seriously than other more modem literary genres. A century ago American Hispanism after Ticknor led the way into Spanish lyric poetry with scholarly editions of Juan Boscan and of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza , both done by William I. Knapp, and of Garcilaso de la Vega, done by Hayward Keniston. And then, in Spain, the Generation of 1927, following Ruben Dario, rediscovered Gongora and Golden Age poetry as a living tradition; this culminated in 1950with Damaso Alonso's Poesfa espaiiola, which is still the best introduction to the poetry of Garcilaso, Fray Luis, and San Juan, of Lope, Gongora, and Quevedo. And at Lubbock, Texas, Eunice Joiner Gates, a great American Hispanist who in 1933had published her dissertation on TheMetaphors ofLuisdeGongora, edited her 1960collection of Documentosgongorinos , which is a monument to the rediscovery of Spanish Baroque poetry and of how it was read in the seventeenth century. We are all aware that, among European nations, Spain has unique assets in Renaissance and Baroque poetry. Spain did not lose its rich popular, oral tradition-the cancionesde amigo,the romancero-nor did it ever lose its sophisticated fifteenth-century courtly tradition ..Along with the poetry of Ausias March, both in Catalan and in Castilian translations, the Cancionero general(first published in 1511) was revised and re-read throughout the sixCAL [OPE Vol.I, Nos. 1-2 (1995): pages 46-57 ~ HERRERA'S ODES~ 47 teenth century. And then, of..c.ourse,with the publication of Boscan and Garcilaso, thirty-three years later, Spain appropriated the Petrarchan tradition of canzoniand sonnets, as well as the neo-Latin and Classical tradition of elegies, epistles and satires, of odes, eclogues, and mythological fables, of epic poems, and eventually of silvas.These different traditions lived together and influenced one another in Spain throughout the Siglo de Oro, as Rafael Lapesa has brilliantly demonstrated in his 1962 essay entitled "Poesfa de can-, cionero y po'esfaitalianizante." My own speciality is classical genres, such as the verse epistle, for example, which has been studied in at least two American doc-. toral dissertations: one completed in 1974by Carol Kayn LeVine at Johns Hopkins and th~ other by Andrea Jean Lower in 1990at Santa Barbara. Here I am going to focus on another classical genre, the ode, which has been studied in a recent Spanish doctoral dissertation , completed in 1992 by Soledad Perez-Abadin at Santiago de Compostela. I will present the special case of Fernando de Herrera's odes, a case that involves certain problems of generic definition; he himself refused to distinguish his odes from his Petrarchan canzoni. The canonical history of the modem ode in general, that is tlie Renaissance.and Baroque ode in Italy, France, and England, is a, book published in 1960by Carol Maddison with the title of Apollo and theNine;unfortunately, she omits the ode in Spain and in Germany , ignoring Menendez y Pelayo's monumental Horacioen Espanaand Damciso Alonso's important appendix "Sobre los origenes de la lira." In spite of these serious omissions, her book is useful in providing us with a general European context within which to insert the Spanish ode; with her knowledge of the classical languages , as well as of Italian, French, and English, she reads and analyzes many poems that would not otherwise be readily accessible. Carol Maddison begins with a solid traditional introduction to the ancient odes written by Pindar, Anacreon, and Horace. The word "ode" in Greek meant simply song, that is, a stanzaic poem formally designed to be set to music;,the linking of these three particular poets and their traditions is based as much on a nominal...