Luis de Gngora

Luis de Gngora
Luis de Gngora y Argote

Luis de Gngora, in a portrait by Diego Velzquez. Born 11 July 1561 Crdoba, Spain 24 May 1627) Crdoba, Spain Poet, cleric culteranismo

Died

Occupation Literary movement

Luis de Gngora y Argote (11 July 1561 24 May 1627) was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet. Gngora and his lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo, are widely considered the most prominent Spanish poets of all time. His style is characterized by what was called culteranismo, also known as Gongorism (Gongorismo). This style existed in stark contrast to Quevedo's conceptismo.

Biography
Gongora was born to a noble family in Crdoba, where his father, Francisco de Argote, was corregidor, or judge. In a Spanish era when purity of Christian lineage (limpieza de sangre) was needed to gain access to education or official appointments, he adopted the surname of his mother, Leonor de Gngora]].[1] His uncle, Don Franscisco, a prebendary of Crdoba Cathedral, renounced his post in favor of his nephew, who took deacon's orders in 1586.[2] As a canon associated with this Cathedral, he traveled on diverse commissions to Navarre, Andalusia and Castile. The cities that he visited included Madrid, Salamanca, Granada, Jan, and Toledo. Around 1605, he was ordained priest, and afterwards lived at Valladolid and Madrid. While his circle of admirers grew, patrons were grudging in their admiration. Ultimately, in 1617 through the influence of the Duke of Lerma, he was appointed honorary chaplain to King Philip III of Spain, but did not enjoy the honor long. He maintained a long feud with Francisco de Quevedo, who matched him in talent and wit. Both poets composed lots of bitter, satirical pieces attacking one other, with Quevedo criticizing Gngora's penchant for flattery, his large nose, and his passion for gambling. Quevedo even accused his enemy of sodomy, which was a capital crime in 17th century Spain. In his "Contra el mismo (Gngora)", Quevedo writes of Gongora: No altar, garito s; poco cristiano, /

Luis de Gngora mucho tahr, no clrigo, s arpa.[3] Gngora's nose, the subject of Quevedo's "A una nariz", begins with the lines: rase un hombre a una nariz pegado, / rase una nariz superlativa, / rase una nariz sayn y escriba, / rase un peje espada muy barbado.[4] This angry feud came to a nasty end for Gngora when Quevedo bought the house he lived in for the only purpose of ejecting him from it. In 1626 a severe illness, which seriously impaired the poet's memory, forced him to return to Crdoba, where he died the next year. By then he was broke from trying to obtain positions and win lawsuits for all his relatives. An edition of his poems was published almost immediately after his death by Juan Lpez de Vicua; the frequently reprinted edition by Hozes did not appear until 1633. The collection consists of numerous sonnets, odes, ballads, songs for guitar, and of some larger poems, such as the Soledades and the Fbula de Polifemo y Galatea (Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea) (1612), the two landmark works of the highly refined style called "culteranismo" or "Gongorism." Miguel de Cervantes, in his Viaje del Parnaso, catalogued the good and bad poets of his time. He considered Gngora to be one of the good ones. Velzquez painted his portrait. Numerous documents, lawsuits and satires of his rival Quevedo paint a picture of a man jovial, sociable, and talkative, who loved card-playing and bullfights. His bishop accused him of rarely attending choir, and of praying less than fervently when he did go. Gongora's passion for card-playing ultimately contributed to his ruin.[5] Frequent allusions and metaphors associated with card-playing in Gngora's poetry reveal that cards formed part of his daily life. He was often reproached for activities beneath the dignity of a churchman.

Style
Culteranismo existed in stark contrast with conceptismo, another movement of the Baroque period which is characterized by a witty style, games with words, simple vocabulary, and conveying multiple meanings in as few words as possible. The best-known representative of Spanish conceptismo, Francisco de Quevedo, had an ongoing feud with Luis de Gngora in which each criticized the other's writing and personal life. The word culteranismo blends culto ("cultivated") and luteranismo ("Lutheranism") and was coined by its opponents to present it as a heresy of "true" poetry. The movement aimed to use as many words as possible to convey little meaning or to conceal meaning. "Gngora's poetry is inclusive rather than exclusive", one scholar has written, "willing to create and incorporate the new, literally in the form of neologisms."[6] Gngora had a penchant for highly Latinate and Greek neologisms, which his opponents mocked. Quevedo lampooned his rival by writing a sonnet, "Aguja de navegar cultos," which listed words from Gongora's lexicon: "He would like to be a culto poet in just one day, / must the following jargon learn: / Fulgores, arrogar, joven, presiente / candor, construye, mtrica, armona..."[7] Quevedo actually mocked Gongora's style in several sonnets, including "Sulquivagante, pretensor de Estolo."[8] This anti-gongorine sonnet mocks the unintelligibility of culteranismo and its widespread use of flowery neologisms, including Gngora's signature. sulquivagante (he who plies the seas; to travel without a clear destination); speluncas ("caves"); surculos (sprouts, scions). He was also the first to write poems imitating the speech of blacks.[9] Gngora also had a penchant for apparent breaks in syntactical flow, as he overturned the limitations of syntax, making the hyperbaton the most prominent feature of his poetry.[10] He has been called a man of "unquestioned genius and almost limitless culture, an initiator who enriched his language with the vast power, beauty, and scope of a mighty pen."[11] As far away as Peru, he received the praise of Juan de Espinosa Medrano (ca. 16291688), who wrote a piece defending Gngora's poetry from criticism called

Luis de Gngora Apologtico en favor de Don Luis de Gngora, Prncipe de los poetas lyricos de Espaa: contra Manuel de Faria y Sousa, Cavallero portugus (1662).[12] As Dmaso Alonso has pointed out, Gongora's contribution to the Spanish language should not be underestimated, as he picked up what were in his time obscure or little-used words and used them in his poetry again and again, thereby reviving or popularizing them. Many of these words are quite common today, such as "adolescente," "asunto," "brillante," "construir," "eclipse," "emular," "erigir," "fragmento," "frustrar," "joven," "meta," and "porcin".[13]

Works
Gngora's poems are usually grouped into two blocks, corresponding more or less to two successive poetic stages. His Fbula de Polifemo y Galatea (Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea) and his Soledades (1613) are his best-known compositions and the most studied.[14] The Fbula is written in royal octaves (octavas reales) and his Soledades is written in a variety of metres and strophes, but principally in stanzas and silvas interspersed with choruses.[15] Gngora's Fbula de Polifemo y Galatea (1612) narrates a mythological episode described in Ovid's Metamorphoses: the love of Polyphemus, one of the Cyclops, for the nymph Galatea, who rejects him. In the poem's end, Acis, enamored with Galatea, is turned into a river.[16] Gngora's Fbula de Pramo y Tisbe (Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe) (1618) is a complex poem that mocks gossiping and avaricious women. Gngora also wrote sonnets concerning various subjects of an amatory, satirical, moral, philosophical, religious, controversial, laudatory, and funereal nature. As well as the usual topics (carpe diem etc.) the sonnets include autobiographical elements, describing, for example, the increasing Title page of the Chacon Manuscript. decrepitude and advancing age of the author. In addition, Gngora composed one of his most ambitions works, El Panegrico al Duque de Lerma (1617), a poem in 79 royal octaves. Cervantes, after reading "El Panegrico", said: "the [work] I most esteem from those I've read of his."[17] He also wrote plays, which include La destruccin de Troya, Las firmezas de Isabela, and the unfinished Doctor Carlino.[18] Although Gngora did not publish his works (he had attempted to do so in 1623), manuscript copies were circulated and compiled in cancioneros (songbooks), and anthologies published with or without his permission. In 1627, Juan Lopez Vicua published Verse Works of the Spanish Homer, which is also considered very trustworthy and important in establishing the Gongorine corpus of work. Vicua's work was appropriated by the Spanish Inquisition and was later surpassed by an edition by Gonzalo de Hozes in 1633.

Luis de Gngora

Gngora and the Generation of '27

The Generation of '27 took its name from the year in which the tricentennial of Gngora's death, ignored by official academic circles, was celebrated with recitals, avant-garde happenings, and an ambitious plan to publish a new critical edition of his work, as well as books and articles on aspects of his work that had not been fully researched.[19] The Generation of '27 was the first to attempt to self-consciously revise baroque literature. Dmaso Alonso wrote that Gngora's complex language conveyed meaning in that it created a world of pure beauty. Alonso explored his work exhaustively and called Gngora a "mystic of words."[20] Alonso dispelled the notion that Gngora had two separate styles "simple" and "difficult" poems- that were also divided chronologically between his early and later years. He argued that Gngora's more complex poems built on stylistic devices that had been created in Gngora's early career as a poet. He also argued that the apparent simplicity of some of Gngora's early poems is often deceptive.[21] Rafael Alberti added his own Soledad tercera (Parfrasis incompleta).[22] In 1961, Alberti declared, "I am a visual poet, like all of the poets from Andalusia, from Gngora to Garca Lorca."[23] Lorca presented a lecture called "La imagen potica en don Lus de Gngora" at the Ateneo in Seville in 1927.[24] In this lecture, Lorca paid Jean Epstein the compliment of comparing the film director with Gngora as an authority on images.[25]

References in fiction and philosophy

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza proposed in his Ethics (1677) that a man can die before his body stops moving. As an example he mentioned "a Spanish poet who suffered an illness; though he recovered, he was left so oblivious to his past life that he did not believe the tales and tragedies he had written were his own".[26] Spinoza historian Carl Gebhardt wrote that "this was probably Gngora, whose works Spinoza possessed, and who lost his memory a year before his death".[27] The narrator of the Captain Alatriste series, a friend of Francisco de Quevedo within the stories, illustrates Gngoras feuding with Quevedo, both by quoting poetry from each as well as describing Quevedos attitude toward Gngora through the course of the story. Excerpts of poetry from one against the other are included within the story itself and poetry from each is included at the back of some of the books. In Giannina Braschi's bilingual novel Yo-Yo Boing! contemporary Latin American poets have a heated debate about Gngora's and Quevedo's role in defining the Spanish empire through their works. In the second of the five parts of Roberto Bolao's novel 2666, "The Part about Amalfitano", one of the characters (the poet, whose name is never explicitly stated) quotes a verse from Gngora: Ande yo caliente y rase la gente.

References
[1] Asociacin Cultural Nueva Acrpolis en Ganda. GNGORA Y GARIBALDI (http:/ / www. nueva-acropolis. es/ gandia/ pagina. asp?art=3968) [2] Arthur Terry, An Anthology of Spanish Poetry 1500-1700. Part II (Pergamon Press, 1968), 19. [3] "There's no altar, but there's a gambling den; not much of a Christian, / but he's very much a cardsharp, not a cleric, definitely a harpy."http:/ / centros5. pntic. mec. es/ cpr. de. ciudad. real/ Textos/ Quevedo. htm [4] http:/ / sonnets. spanish. sbc. edu/ Quevedo_Nariz. html. Translation: "Once there was a man stuck to a nose, / it was a nose more marvellous than weird, / it was a nearly living web of tubes, / it was a swordfish with an awful beard." [5] Bartolom Bennassar, The Spanish Character: Attitudes and Mentalities from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 167. [6] Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra, Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Duke University Press,1993), 197. [7] Quoted in Dmaso Alonso, La lengua potica de Gngora (Madrid: Revista de Filologa Espaola, 1950), 114. [8] CVC. Las stiras de Quevedo. El soneto de Quevedo: Sulquivagante, pretensor de Estolo: ensayo de interpretacin (http:/ / cvc. cervantes. es/ obref/ quevedo_critica/ satiras/ arellano. htm)

Luis de Gngora
[9] Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra, Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Duke University Press, 1993), 197. [10] Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra, Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Duke University Press,1993), 197. [11] John Armstrong Crow, The Epic of Latin America (University of California Press, 1992), 300. [12] Biografia de Juan de Espinosa Medrano (http:/ / www. biografiasyvidas. com/ biografia/ e/ espinosa_medrano. htm) [13] Dmaso Alonso, La lengua potica de Gngora (Madrid: Revista de Filologa Espaola, 1950), 112. [14] Personas que escriben bonito (http:/ / www. conevyt. org. mx/ cursos/ enciclope/ luis_de_gongora. html) [15] Personas que escriben bonito (http:/ / www. conevyt. org. mx/ cursos/ enciclope/ luis_de_gongora. html) [16] Personas que escriben bonito (http:/ / www. conevyt. org. mx/ cursos/ enciclope/ luis_de_gongora. html) [17] http:/ / www. upf. edu/ todogongora/ _pdf/ Ponce_Cxrdenas_El_Panegxrico_al_duque_de_Lerma_Trascendencia_de_un_modelo_gongorino. pdf [18] Personas que escriben bonito (http:/ / www. conevyt. org. mx/ cursos/ enciclope/ luis_de_gongora. html) [19] Csar Augusto Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima (2001, Bucknell University Press), 37. [20] Personas que escriben bonito (http:/ / www. conevyt. org. mx/ cursos/ enciclope/ luis_de_gongora. html) [21] Arthur Terry, An Anthology of Spanish Poetry 1500-1700. Part II (Pergamon Press, 1968), 20. [22] Argos 16/ Ensayo/ Guadalupe Mercado (http:/ / argos. cucsh. udg. mx/ 16oct-dic00/ 16emercado. htm) [23] Quoted in C.B. Morris, This Loving Darkness: The Cinema and Spanish Writers 1920-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 87. [24] Garcia Lorca, Federico - CanalSocial - Enciclopedia GER (http:/ / www. canalsocial. net/ GER/ ficha_GER. asp?id=1300& cat=biografiasuelta) [25] C.B. Morris, This Loving Darkness: The Cinema and Spanish Writers 1920-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 47. [26] Spinoza (1677/1985), p. 569 (scholium to proposition 39 of part 4) [27] Spinoza (1677/1985), p. 569, footnote 22

Sources
This articleincorporates text from a publication now in the public domain:Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopdia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press Spinoza, Baruch (1677/1985). Ethics. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, volume 1. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

External links
English translations of some of Gngora's poems (http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/) Gngora website, Brown University Department of Hispanic Studies (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/ Hispanic_Studies/gongora/indice.htm) See Tfd(Spanish) Poems by Gngora (http://www.los-poetas.com/h/gongo1.htm#SONETOS) See Tfd(Spanish) Luis de Gngora y Argote (1561-1627) (http://luis.salas.net/indexlg.htm) (texts of his poems, in Spanish) See Tfd(Spanish) Luis de Gngora y Argote (1561-1627) (http://www.poesia-inter.net/ Luis_de_Gongora_y_Argote.htm) (texts of his poems, in Spanish)

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File:Diego Rodrguez de Silva y Velzquez - Luis de Gngora y Argote - Google Art Project.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Diego_Rodrguez_de_Silva_y_Velzquez_-_Luis_de_Gngora_y_Argote_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg License: unknown Contributors: Boo-Boo Baroo, Escarlati File:Luis Gngora Sign.svg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Luis_Gngora_Sign.svg License: Public Domain Contributors: Luis Gngora Image:Portada Manuscrito Chacn.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Portada_Manuscrito_Chacn.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: Antonio Chacn File:PD-icon.svg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:PD-icon.svg License: Public Domain Contributors: Alex.muller, Anomie, Anonymous Dissident, CBM, MBisanz, PBS, Quadell, Rocket000, Strangerer, Timotheus Canens, 1 anonymous edits

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