The author of Comentarios reales and La Florida del Inca, now recognized as key foundational works of Latin American literature and historiography, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cuzco, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, and later moved to Spain. Recalling the family stories and myths he had heard from his Quechua-speaking relatives during his youth and gathering information from friends who had remained in Peru, he created works that have come to indelibly shape our understanding of Incan history and administration. He also articulated a new American identity, which he called mestizo. This volume provides guidance on the translations of Garcilaso's writings and on the scholarly reception of his ideas. Instructors will discover ideas for teaching Garcilaso's works in relation to indigenous thought, European historiography, natural history, indigenous religion and Christianity, and Incan material culture. In essays informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, scholars draw connections between Garcilaso's writings and contemporary issues like migration, multiculturalism, and indigenous rights.

Garcilaso de la Vega (ca. 1501–36), a Castilian nobleman and soldier at the court of Charles V, lived a short but glamorous life. As the first poet to make the Italian Renaissance lyric style at home in Spanish, he is credited with beginning the golden age of Spanish poetry. Known for his sonnets and pastorals, gracefully depicting beauty and love while soberly accepting their passing, he is shown here also as a calm student of love’s psychology and a critic of the savagery of war. This bilingual volume is the first in nearly two hundred years to fully represent Garcilaso for an Anglophone readership. In facing-page translations that capture the music and skill of Garcilaso’s verse, John-Dent Young presents the sonnets, songs, elegies, and eclogues that came to influence generations of poets, including San Juan de la Cruz, Luis de Leon, Cervantes, and Góngora. The Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega will help to explain to the English-speaking public this poet’s preeminence in the pantheon of Spanish letters.

Following studies by Goodman, Waley, and Darst, this new study of Garcilaso's work rejects as unfounded the traditional readings of Garcilaso's poetry based on the idea of sincerity and the poet's frustrated love for the Portuguese lady-in-waiting Isabel Freire. In place of the much-abused concept of sincerity, Heiple argues that the intellectual currents of the Renaissance are much more important for the analysis of Garcilaso's poetry. He analyzes in Garcilaso's poetry the uses of Renaissance concepts of mythology, poetic style, theories of love, primitivism, and iconological traditions. Especially important in these analyses are the poetic practices of Petrarchism as defined by Pietro Bembo and the reaction against them proclaimed by Bernardo Tasso. Heiple studies each of the sonnets, tracing their roots in the Hispanic cancionero poetry through Petrarchism and Neoplatonism to the specific reactions against the Italian Petrarchan mode, ending with the sonnets in imitation of the classical epigram. Several longer poems, Canción IV, Elegy II, and Ode ad florem Gnidi, are discussed within the contexts of Renaissance poetic conventions and ideas, bringing to the fore Garcilaso's incisive wit. By abandoning the traditional search for biographical elements in the love poems, Heiple is able to bring new relevant information to the interpretation of well-known texts and provide new readings for many of Garcilaso's poems.

Written by the Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa, the Historia general del Piru (1616) is one of only three extant illustrated manuscripts on the history of Inca and early colonial Peru. This immensely important Andean manuscript is here made available in facsimile, its beautifully calligraphed text reproduced in halftone and its thirty-eight hand-colored images—mostly portraits of Inca kings and queens—in color.

This edited volume offers new perspectives from leading scholars on the important work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), one of the first Latin American writers to present an intellectual analysis of pre-Columbian history and culture and the ensuing colonial period. To the contributors, Inca Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries of the Incas presented an early counter-hegemonic discourse and a reframing of the history of native non-alphabetic cultures that undermined the colonial rhetoric of his time and the geopolitical divisions it purported. Through his research in both Andean and Renaissance archives, Inca Garcilaso sought to connect these divergent cultures into one world. This collection offers five classical studies of Royal Commentaries previously unavailable in English, along with seven new essays that cover topics including Andean memory, historiography, translation, philosophy, trauma, and ethnic identity. This cross-disciplinary volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American history, culture, comparative literature, subaltern studies, and works in translation.

In 1492 the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija proclaimed that "language has always been the companion of empire." Taking as his touchstone a wonderfully suggestive sonnet that Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1535 from the neighborhood of ruined Carthage in North Africa, Richard Helgerson examines how the companionship of language and empire played itself out more generally in the "new poetry" of sixteenth-century Europe. Along with his friend Juan Boscán, Garcilaso was one of the great pioneers of that poetry, radically reforming Spanish verse in imitation of modern Italian and ancient Roman models. As the century progressed, similar projects were undertaken in France by Ronsard and du Bellay, in Portugal by Camões, and in England by Sidney and Spenser. And wherever the new poetry emerged, it was prompted by a sense that imperial ambition—the quest to be in the present what Rome had been in the past—required a vernacular poetry comparable to the poetry of Rome. But, as Helgerson shows, the new poetry had other commitments than to empire. Though imperial ambition looms large in Garcilaso's sonnet and others, by the end of the poem Garcilaso identifies not with Rome but with the Carthaginian queen Dido, one of empire's legendary victims. And with this startling shift, which has its counterpart in poems from all over Europe, comes one of the most important departures the poem makes from its apparent imperial agenda. Addressing these rival concerns as they arise in a single sonnet, Richard Helgerson provides a masterful and multifaceted image of one of the most vital episodes in European literary history.

The soldier Garcilaso de la Vega was the most influential poet to introduce Italian Renaissance verse forms, poetic techniques and themes to Spain. Inspired by the metres of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Sannazzaro, Garcilaso was a consummate craftsman, who elevated the lyrical quality of Spanish verse. His works were quickly accepted as classics and largely determined the course of poetry throughout Spain’s Golden Age. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature’s finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents Garcilaso’s complete works in English and Spanish, with illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Garcilaso’s life and works * Concise introduction to Garcilaso’s life and poetry * Features J. H. Wiffen’s 1823 verse translation * Excellent formatting of the poems * Includes the original Spanish text * Special Dual Spanish and English text of the sonnets — ideal for students * Easily locate the poems you want to read * Features two resources, including a biography— discover Garcilaso’s literary life CONTENTS: The Life and Poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega Brief Introduction: Garcilaso de la Vega The Works of Garcilasso de la Vega, Surnamed the Prince of Castilian Poets Original Spanish Text Contents of the Spanish Text Dual Spanish and English Text: The Sonnets The Resources Life of Garcilasso (1823) by J. H. Wiffen Essay on Spanish Poetry (1823) by J. H. Wiffen