A History of Spanish LiteratureFitzmaurice-Kelly, James
History
A History of Spanish Literature
Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James
Spanish literature -- History and criticism
A like romantic memory attaches to Macías' friend, Juan Rodríguez
de la Cámara (also called Rodríguez del Padrón), the last poet of
the Galician school, represented in Baena's _Cancionero_ by a single
_cántica_. The conjectures that make Rodríguez the lover of Juan
II.'s wife, Isabel, or of Enrique IV.'s wife, Juana, are destroyed by
chronology. None the less it is certain that the writer was concerned
in some mysterious, dangerous love-affair which led to his exile, and,
as some believe, to his profession as a Franciscan monk. His seventeen
surviving songs are all erotic, with the exception of the _Flama del
divino Rayo_, his best performance in thanksgiving for his spiritual
conversion. His loves are also recounted in three prose books, of
which the semi-chivalresque novel, _El Siervo libre de Amor_, is still
readable. But Rodríguez interests most as the last representative of
the Galician verse tradition.
Save Ayala, who is exampled by one solitary poem, the oldest singer in
Baena's choir is Pero Ferrús, the connecting link between the Galician
and Italian schools. A learned rather than an inspired poet, Ferrús
is remembered chiefly because of his chance allusion to _Amadís_ in
the stanzas dedicated to Ayala. Four poets in Baena's song-book herald
the invasion of Spain by the Italians, and it is fitting that the
first and best of these should be a man of Italian blood, Francisco
Imperial, the son of a Genoese jeweller, settled in Seville. Imperial,
as his earliest poem shows, read Arabic and English. He may have met
with Gower's _Confessio Amantis_ before it was done into Castilian by
Juan de la Cuenca at the beginning of the fifteenth century—being
the first translation of an English book in Spain. Howbeit, he quotes
English phrases, and offers a copy of French verses. These are trifles:
Imperial's best gift to his adopted country was his transplanting of
Dante, whom he imitates assiduously, reproducing the Florentine note
with such happy intonation as to gain for him the style of poet—as
distinguished from _trovador_—from Santillana, who awards him "the
laurel of this western land." Thirteen poems by Ruy Paez de Ribera,
vibrating with the melancholy of illness, shuddering with the squalor
of want, affiliate their writer with Imperial's new expression, and
vaguely suggest the realising touch of Villon. At least one piece by
Ferrant Sánchez Talavera is memorable—the elegy on the death of the
Admiral Ruy Díaz de Mendoza, which anticipates the mournful march,
the solemn music, some of the very phrases of Jorge Manrique's noble
_coplas_. In the Dantesque manner is Gonzalo Martínez de Medina's
flagellation of the corruptions of his age. Baena, secretary to
Juan II., in eighty numbers approves himself a weak imitator of
Villasandino's insolence, and is remembered simply as the arranger of
a handbook which testifies to the definitive triumph of the compiler's
enemies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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