Garcilaso de la Vega (poet)

• 1. Introduction

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  Garcilaso de la Vega died in Nice on the 14th of October 1536. A wound from a battle at Le Muy had tormented him for 25 days. He was a Spanish soldier, and he was also the poet who changed how Spanish verse sounds.

  Spain has read his poems without a break from his own lifetime to the present. They reached print only after his death. Other writers had tried to bring Italian Renaissance verse into Spanish, and Garcilaso was neither the first nor the only one. Even so, he became the most influential of them.

  How did a man who spent his career in the emperor's campaigns reshape the music of Spanish poetry? What did he borrow from Italy, and what did he build from it? And why do poets and novelists still return to him, centuries later?

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• 2. A Second Son's Schooling

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  Toledo was the city where Garcilaso was born, but nobody can say exactly when. Sources place his birth between 1498 and 1503. One authority argues for a date between 1487 and 1492, and another points to 1501. His father, also named Garcilaso de la Vega, was the third son of Pedro Suárez de Figueroa. He served as a nobleman and ambassador in the royal court of the Catholic Monarchs. His mother was Sancha de Guzmán.

  The mayorazgo, the legal entitlement to a father's estate, did not pass to Garcilaso, because he was the second son. His education was extensive all the same. He mastered five languages: Spanish, Greek, Latin, Italian and French. He also learned to play the zither, the lute and the harp.

  In 1509 his father died, and Garcilaso received a sizeable inheritance. With his schooling finished, he joined the military, hoping to win a place in the royal guard.

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• 3. Service to the Emperor

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  In 1520 Charles V named Garcilaso a contino, a member of his imperial guard. Three years later, in 1523, Garcilaso was made a member of the Order of Santiago.

  Las armas y las letras, arms and letters, was a fashionable motif of the age, and Garcilaso embodied it. During his lifetime he was well known in poetic circles and in military ones.

  The campaigns of Charles V carried him across Europe. His duties took him to Italy, Germany, Tunisia and France.

  In 1532 he was exiled for a short period to an island in the Danube. His host there was Count György Cseszneky, the royal court judge of Győr.

  France was where he fought his last battle. The king wanted to take Marseille and, through it, control of the Mediterranean Sea. That goal was never realized.

  Italy, one of his many postings, was also the homeland of the poets whose techniques he would carry into Spanish.

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• 4. Love and Marriage

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  Guiomar Carrillo was the first lover of the poet, and the two had a child together. That son was Lorenzo, who was born outside marriage.

  Isabel Freire, a lady-in-waiting of Isabel of Portugal, has also been named as a suspected lover. Today that romance is regarded as mythical.

  In 1525 Garcilaso married Elena de Zúñiga, who served as a lady-in-waiting for Leonor, the favorite sister of the king. The wedding took place in his hometown of Toledo, at one of the family's estates.

  Garcilaso had six children in all, beginning with Lorenzo. The others were Garcilaso, Íñigo de Zúñiga, Pedro de Guzmán, Sancha and Francisco.

  The Church of St. Dominic in Nice was the first place where his body was buried. Two years later Elena had it moved to the Convento de San Pedro Mártir in Toledo.

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• 5. Eleven Syllables

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  Garcilaso raised the length of his lines from eight syllables to eleven. That change gave his verse greater flexibility. He was influenced by many Italian Renaissance poets, and he adapted their eleven-syllable line to the Spanish language.

  The sonetos, or sonnets, were the main home of this line. He wrote most of them in the 1520s.

  Sonnets were not his only import. The estancia is a stanza formed by eleven- and seven-syllable lines, and he helped introduce it to Spanish. The lira is a stanza of three seven-syllable lines and two eleven-syllable lines. A third form, the endecasílabos sueltos, consists of unrhymed eleven-syllable lines.

  The mood of his verse changed along with its form. He is best known for tragic love poetry, which stands in contrast to the playful verse of the poets before him.

  Scholars read his output as following three stages of his life, each with its own favored forms.

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• 6. Three Periods

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  The Spanish period came first, and during it Garcilaso wrote the majority of his eight-syllable poems. His Italian or Petrarchan period followed. In those years he wrote mostly sonnets and songs.

  The Neapolitan or classicist period brought the rest of his more classical work. This includes his elegies, letters, eclogues and odes.

  Forty Sonetos make up the largest group in his catalogue. Alongside them stand five Canciones, eight Coplas, three Églogas, two Elegías and the Epístola a Boscán, a letter addressed to Boscán.

  Allusions to classical myths and to Greco-Latin figures run through these poems. So do great musicality, alliteration and rhythm. Religion is absent from them.

  A few lines from the eclogues show these qualities better than any list.

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• 7. Lines Worth Quoting

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  The third eclogue contains a passage that favors plain talent over polish. It reads: Más a las veces son mejor oídos / el puro ingenio y lengua casi muda, / testigos limpios de ánimo inocente, / que la curiosidad del elocuente. In other words, pure wit and an almost silent tongue are often heard better than the curiosity of the eloquent.

  The phrase dolorido sentir, aching feeling, appears in another poem. The source praises his gift for putting the sense of life into writing, and these lines show it: No me podrán quitar el dolorido / sentir, si ya del todo / primero no me quitan el sentido. They cannot take away his sorrow, he says, unless they first take away his senses entirely.

  The first eclogue shows the Renaissance current called neo-Platonism, which tried to lift love onto a spiritual, idealistic plane. That outlook differs from the traditional Catholic view of Heaven. The speaker proposes: Contigo mano a mano / busquemos otros prados y otros ríos, / otros valles floridos y sombríos, / donde descanse, y siempre pueda verte / ante los ojos míos, / sin miedo y sobresalto de perderte. He imagines walking hand in hand to new meadows, rivers and shaded valleys, where he could always see her without fear of losing her.

  Later poets and novelists would borrow from these very eclogues, and one of them took a book title from them.

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• 8. Heirs and Echoes

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  Juan Boscán published Garcilaso's poems in 1543, seven years after the poet's death. Annotated editions followed, and the first and most famous of them appeared in 1574.

  Jorge de Montemor, Luis de León, John of the Cross, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora and Francisco Quevedo all count among the poets he influenced. In the 21st century, pastoral poets such as Seamus Heaney, Dennis Nurkse and Giannina Braschi have revived that influence.

  In the second volume of Don Quixote, the hero quotes one of Garcilaso's sonnets. Cervantes also placed the poet in El licenciado Vidriera, where Tomás Rodaja carries a volume of Garcilaso on his journey across Europe.

  Pedro Salinas took the title of his poem sequence La voz a ti debida from the third eclogue.

  Gabriel García Márquez gave Garcilaso a place in his novel Of Love and Other Demons. Father Cayetano Delaura, one of its main characters, is an admirer of the poet. The story is set in 18th-century colonial Colombia, where Delaura is forced to give up being a priest because of a tragic love affair.

  Braschi, a Puerto Rican poet, wrote a poetic treatise on the Eclogues. She also wrote a book of poems in homage to the Spanish master, titled Empire of Dreams.

  English readers received an early volume in 1930. It was The Odes and Sonnets of Garcilaso de la Vega, translated by James Cleugh and published in London by Aquila.

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