Love poetry in the Spanish Golden Age redefines the lyric poetry that is located at the centre of Imperial Spanish culture's own self-image and self-definition. This work engages with a broader evaluation of early modern poetics that foregrounds the processes rather than the products of thinking. The locus of the study is the Imperial 'home' space, where love poetry meets early modern empire at the inception of a very conflicted national consciousness, and where the vernacular language, Castilian, emerges in the encounter as a strategic site of national and imperial identity. The political is, therefore, a pervasive presence, teased out where relevant in recognition of the poet's sensitivity to the ideologies within which writing comes into being. But the primary commitment of the book is to lyric poetry, and to poets, individually and intheir dynamic interconnectedness. Moving beyond a re-evaluation of critical responses to four major poets of the period (Garcilaso de la Vega, Herrera, Góngora and Quevedo), this study disengages respectfully with the substantialbody of biographical research that continues to impact upon our understanding of the genre, and renegotiates the Foucauldian concept of the 'epistemic break', often associated with the anti-mimetic impulses of the Baroque. This more flexible model accommodates the multiperspectivism that interrogated Imperial ideology even in the earliest sixteenth-century poetry, and allows for the exploration of new horizons in interpretation. Isabel Torres isProfessor of Spanish Golden Age Literature and Head of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Queen's University, Belfast.

The Spanish Renaissance--a period of glory that endured from the late 15th century through the 17th century--comes to life in 40 of its greatest poems collected in this remarkable new translation, rendered with passionate fervor and a stylistic brilliance.

A representative selection of the best poetry of Spain's Golden Age.

"Edith Grossman again demonstrates that she indeed is the Glenn Gould of translators."—Harold Bloom Celebrating the Spanish Renaissance's greatest poems and offering a new appreciation of Spain's "Golden Age, " Edith Grossman turns her passionate fervor and stylistic brilliance to the works of Jorge Manrique; Garcilaso de la Vega, a soldier and courtier who wrote love poetry; Fray Luis de León, a converso Jew; San Juan de la Cruz, whose poems are the finest exemplars of Christian mysticism; Luis de Góngora, a great sensualist; Lope de Vega, Cervantes' rival; Francisco de Quevedo, the ultimate Baroque poet; and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the nun whose haunting poetry embodied the voice of Mexico. Through these glorious voices, presented in facing-page Spanish and English, The Golden Age offers a new way to connect with the literary heritage of the Spanish-speaking world.

the first time that these sonnets have been brought together in one book translations that are not just accurate guides to the meaning of the originals but also enjoyable sonnets in their own right Offers detailed and incisive critical commentary on each of the poems; a complete and readable introduction.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain experienced a literary Renaissance akin to that in England, with great poets, dramatists and novelists establishing new forms and blazing new trails: Garcilaso de la Vega, Góngora, Quevedo amongst the poets, Lope de Vega & Calderón de la Barca amongst the dramatists (although both were also poets), Cervantes - of course - amongst the prose writers. The Renaissance in England was also a time when translations of contemporary European literature became more common, beginning with contemporary Italian works, and the importation of the Petrarchan sonnet, and then Montemayor's Spanish version of arcadian pastoral. While Spanish literature was not the main focus of English translators during this period - no doubt affected by the strained political relations bnetween the two countries - it did attract some particularly fine writers to try their hand. This selection is driven by what is available, but it also manages to cover some of the greatest Spanish writers of the Renaissance and the Siglo de Oro: Juan Boscán, Garcilaso de la Vega, Jorge de Montemayor, Miguel Cervantes (some poems from 'Don Quixote'), Bartolomé & his brother Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, Luís de Góngora, Francsico de Quevedo, Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza and Juan Péerez de Montalbán. The translators are Herbert Aston, Philip Ayres, William Drummond of Hawthornden, Sir Richard Fanshawe, Thomas Shelton, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Stanley and Bartholomew Yong. The translations are never less than effective and, especially in the case of Fanshawe's Góngora, often show rare genius at work.