Garcilaso

The poet of Toledo, Garcilaso de la Vega, is closely related to the circle of Neapolitan poets of the early sixteenth century. The article includes a preliminary introduction about the Spanish author – his life, works and cultural context – and then focuses on a comparative analysis of five sonnets in relation to some texts of Tebaldeo, Sannazaro, Tansillo, Aquilano, Cariteo, Bernardo Tasso, of the first model Petrarch, of his Spanish friend Juan Boscán, and other poets. The study shows the figure of an author who proves to not give in to an easy imitation, banal and obvious, but instead suggests a personal style without ever leaving the Neapolitan cultural domain.

Garcilaso de Ia Vega's The Royal Commentaries (1609) has enjoyed an everwider appeal since the early seventeenth century. Such rising popularity has taken place despite fundamental changes in readers' criteria of evaluation and appreciation of this work. Up to the late nineteenth century, Garcilaso's account had been taken as the most accomplished historical depiction of the Inca, but the discovery of new written and archeological sources and the emergence of modern historiography source criticism led historians and anthropologists to challenge its truthfulness. As a result, Garcilaso's history lost credibility. At the same time, the narrative was hailed as possessing the rhetorical and literary masteries of a classic text and the ideological underpinnings of nationalism, which earned it a foundational place in the pantheon of national and regional literary canons.

This study claims for Garcilaso de la Vega the authorship of a Latin epigram that 20th century literary criticism has attributed it to one of his sons, who probably never wrote a poem and never met Hernando de Acuña. After offering an edition and critical commentary of the epigram, and a translation with the words used by Garcilaso himself in his Spanish poems, Hayward Keniston's reasons to that attribution are discussed and rejected. We then followed the steps of Garcilaso and Hernando de Acuña in order to know the different ocassions where this epigram might have been composed, especially from mid-September 1536, a week before Garcilaso's accident in Le Muy, and the following week, before his death in Nice three and a half weeks later. During the last month of life of Garcilaso, he could have met Acuña at the end of the campaign of Provence under orders of the Marquis del Vasto, general of the army who was very fond of Garcilaso and of Hernando de Acuna. We also analyze Garcilaso's influence on the life and poetry of Acuña since 1537. The literary sources of the epigram are the same as those of the Garcilaso's Spanish poems: Sannazaro, Virgil, Horace and other classical authors. There is a close relationship between the epigram and Garcilaso's extant poems in technique, literary motifs, structure, lanscape and mythological characters, expressions, and other features. The work concludes with a literary criticism of the poem.
Although the epigram was not printed until 1553 in Hernando de Acuña's translation of Olivier de La Marche's Le chevalier délibéré , it does not actually written to praise that work of elegiac tone and religious content, but rather about epic verses about the victory of the Spanish army over other peoples, which Acuna should have written while a teenager recently incorporated to the imperial army. This is shown by the analysis of the content of that book, that of the epigram and of the other liminal poems, which were clearly composed in praise of that translation of Acuña of this French book of moral content.

The role played by the ancient Latin poetry and by the composition of Latin poems in the revival of vernacular poetry in the sixteenth century has many similarities with the influence of Greek authors and poems written in Greek by Roman authors in the birth of classical Latin poetry. We find in both periods the same procedures of imitation in a strange language, and of translation and adaptation of genres, themes, motifs and techniques to the own language. Just as ancient Rome was conquered by the literary arts of Greece, so the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile were conquered by the literary currents that reached Iberia from Naples and Sicily, since all these lands belonged to their same kings. We analyze specially the literary circles of the city of Seville since the time of the Catholic Kings, and the work of bilingual authors such as Alfonso de Palencia, Rodrigo de Santaella, Antonio de Nebrija, Lucio Flaminio Sículo, Franco Leardo, Antonio Carrión, Pedro Núñez Delgado, Juan de Quirós, Juan de Mal Lara and Fernando de Herrera. When a valid model was set in Spanish literature, Latin poetry paled in secular society from the second third of the sixteenth century. Both the process and the results were similar in ancient Rome and Renaissance Spain: a vernacular poetry that was in line with the rules of classical poetry, which provided some works that could be used as school models to replace the authors of a foreign literature. Virgil and Horace replaced Homer and Pindar in Roman schools, such as the poems of Garcilaso and Herrera replaced the Latin classics as the models for the Spanish poetry.

En esta investigación, elaboraré en primer lugar una síntesis de la crítica literaria “Garcilaso Inca de la Vega” por Antonio Cornejo Polar. A continuación, condensaré el comentario literario “Nueva Interpretación de los « Comentarios Reales » de Garcilaso el Inca” por Antony A. Van Beysterveldt. Por último, compararé las dos interpretaciones, resaltando las analogías y destacando las divergencias.

Proponemos aquí una nueva forma de abordar la estancia de Garcilaso de la Vega en Nápoles, y con este objeto, revisaremos algunos lugares comunes sobre su supuesta trayectoria poética que pueden enmascarar ángulos ciegos acerca de la cronología de su italianización.