Introduction

INTRODUCTION Ignacio Navarrete & Aurora Hermida-Ruiz A collection of essays dedicated to Garcilaso de la Vega inevitably calls to mind its widely known predecessors: Elias Rivers’s La poesía de Garcilaso: Ensayos críticos, and Victor García de la Concha’s Garcilaso: Actas de la IV Academia Literaria Renacentista. Both have been essential points of reference for Garcilaso critics and, to a degree, continue to be so today. Indeed, beyond their particular contributions to Garcilaso criticism, some of the articles included in these collections can be considered and admired as true philological “jewels.” Yet, although they were separated by more than a decade, both collections of essays can be said to belong to a time and a school of thought that seems impossible to replicate today. In this sense, if it is true that this monographic issue follows naturally and chronologically in their path, the same cannot be said with the same ease about their legacy or their tradition. Published in the last years of the Franco period, Elias Rivers’s selection of essays was an act of homage to those Garcilaso critics who, at different and often difficult historical moments of the twentieth century, proclaimed the absolute modernity and Europeanism of Garcilaso. The Rivers collection, in other words, gave the authority of history to a critical assessment of Garcilaso which was as appealing in 1974 as it had been abhorrent during the first decades of the dictatorship. Going as far back as 1912, Rivers began the selection with the cultural weight of Azorín in his most unequivocal evaluation of Garcilaso’s cultural identity: El primer rasgo que podremos notar en el poeta toledano es su europeísmo. Son pocos, rarísimos, los artistas españoles realmente europeos; encontramos —en los más eminentes— el “genio” de la raza, el reflejo del paisaje de España, una modalidad, en fin, especial y privativa de la tierra en que viven. Pero les falta, en cambio, un matiz, una determinada tonalidad que sólo se adquiere respirando el aire intelectual de fuera de España. (35) The same spirit could be found in the papers read at the “Cuarta Academia Literaria Renacentista,” a meeting in which many different voices proclaimed the European stature of Garcilaso and, by extension, the Spanish Renaissance, while Spain’s integration in the European CALÍOPE Vol. 10, No. 1 (2004): pages 9-18 10 Ignacio Navarrete & Aurora Hermida-Ruiz D D D D D Community was still a subject of debate and negotiation.1 Lázaro Carreter offers one of the most forceful cases in point: El Archipoeta, como Lope lo llamó, es algo más que ese episodio, casi administrativo, de cambiar formas y asuntos: es el fundador de nuestra lengua lírica, la cual, hoy mismo, está en la misma cadena cuyo primer eslabón es él; fue, igualmente, el creador de una sensibilidad, de un tono desde los cuales la poesía sigue siendo sentida, expresada y leída; y además –esto es lo que ahora nos interesa— el descubridor de lo que, en el primer tercio del quinientos era la modernidad europea, y su adaptador a la cultura española, en cuanto parte de la entonces dominante cultura mediterránea. (111) There is no unanimous cry, manifest or proclamation, but the link that connects Garcilaso with Spanish national identity is clear, sounding at times almost like a declaration of rights or a question of honor. Garcilaso amounts to nothing short of a founding father for the contemporary identity of Spain; an identity that, for Lázaro Carreter, is as undeniably modern and European as the Spanish Renaissance and, par excellence or antonomasia, as Garcilaso himself. The historian José Antonio Maravall opens the collection with a similar premise: Si hablamos de Renacimiento en España —y parece obvio, cada día más, que no puede dejar de hacerse— (y hasta queda claro que nos hallamos ante uno de los más definidos y primerizos modelos de Renacimiento, en medio de la diversificación del concepto a que hay que arriesgarse), una de las figuras que destacan entre tantas y nos es necesaria para perfilar la forma vital que buscamos...