Images of Garcilaso: His Verse and His Figure in Modern Spanish Poetry from the 1920s to the Postwar Period

IMAGES OF GARCILASO: HIS VERSE AND HIS FIGURE IN MODERN SPANISH POETRY FROM THE 1920s TO THE POSTWAR PERIOD Andrew P. Debicki The University of Kansas F rom the 1920s on, extending into the period after the Civil War, Spanish poets were very conscious of Garcilaso de la Vega, not only of his verse, but also of his life and his figure. The different and shifting ways in which they envisioned this poet, soldier, and courtier, and in which they reflected his work in theirs, both confirm his continuing appeal and his influence on modern Spanish poetry and offer fascinating insights into the different poetics and cultural moments of this time. The early 1920s marked a great flowering of Spanish verse. Major works of the “Generation of 1927” were written at that time: the first books of Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Pedro Salinas; the first version of Guillén’s Cántico, Cernuda’s Perfil del aire. As has frequently been noted, these poets as well as their colleagues Dámaso Alonso and Gerardo Diego were profoundly knowledgeable of, and profoundly affected by, Spanish poetry of the Renaissance and Golden Age. Both their scholarly orientation and their poetics of the text as embodiment of universal experiences led them to connect back to the writers of that era. Initially it was Luis de Góngora who most attracted their attention and their fealty, influencing their work in both direct and indirect ways. He represented for them the values of a pure art that transcended ordinary reality, and motivated a series of critical studies and a well-known celebration of his anniversary in 1927 (Dehennin; Alonso, “Una generación”). Yet Garcilaso was not totally absent from this generation’s work and poetics, and he would become more central for it some ten years later, when the aesthetic climate shifted. The first direct reference we find is in a short poem—a copla— from Rafael Alberti’s Marinero en tierra (1924), which begins as follows: Si Garcilaso volviera, yo sería su escudero; que buen caballero era. Mi traje de marinero CALÍOPE Vol. 10, No. 1 (2004): pages 89-103 90 Andrew P. Debicki D D D D D se trocaría en guerrera ante el brillar de su acero; que buen caballero era. (Alberti 69) Focusing on the figure of Garcilaso as courtly soldier rather than on his poetry, this text forms part of a series of imaginative evocations, in popular-style verse, that characterize the whole book. But it also introduces a view of the Renaissance poet which will reappear, paradoxically, in works composed twenty years later. The poet of the group most affected by Garcilaso’s work was Luis Cernuda; as Victor García de la Concha has noted (47-48), Cernuda published an homage to Garcilaso in the magazine Carmen in December 1927, and, in a volume of memoirs, referred to him as the poet he most liked. García de la Concha also indicates that Cernuda’s “Égloga,” published in Égloga, elegía, oda (1927-28) was modelled on Garcilaso’s Égloga segunda. Reading over the two works, one indeed notes how Cernuda develops, in a long series of classical-sounding heptasyllabic and hendecasyllabic lines, a vision of an idyllic landscape, a timeless “locus amoenus” with adjectives as well as images of softly flowing water, that creates effects similar to those traced by Salicio in lines 3994 of Garcilaso’s poem. I quote but a few lines: Entre las rosas yace El agua tan serena, Gozando de sí misma en su hermosura; Ningún reflejo nace Tras de la onda plena, Fría, cruel, inmóvil de tersura. (. . .) Sobre el agua benigna, Melancólico espejo De congeladas, pálidas espumas, El crepúsculo asigna Un sombrío reflejo En donde anega sus inertes plumas. (Cernuda 29-31) Asimilar tone and effect can be seen in several other texts of this book, as well as Un río, un amor (1929) and later poems, confirming the affinity between the two writers. It should not surprise us: Cernuda’s nostalgic quest for deeper meanings in the face of a hostile environment would naturally draw him to...