This welcome volume offers the Spanish text and English translations of Francisco de Quevedo’s thirty-six silvas. A verse form that afforded relative liberty in meter and rhyme, the silva in Quevedo’s hands proved to be, arguably, his most dynamic, diverse field of invention and imitation, a place, that is, where the poet could freely explore and dilate amorous, moral, and religious themes that informed his now skeptical, now Christian humanism. Laboring on these poems from 1611 to 1645, Quevedo subtly pays his debts to Statius, challenges Góngora’s appropriation of the silva for his Soledades (1613), and, most palpably, elaborates and refines ideas, conceits, sentiments, and images that would learnedly reconcile the poet’s “melancholy,” as he terms it in a letter, with his experience and understanding of the world.

The volume is introduced by a substantial essay (a shorter version of which appeared in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 63 [2000]: 131–68) by Hilaire Kallendorf and Craig Kallendorf that analyzes the form and content of the silvas, even as it traces Quevedo’s complicated debts to Statius’s Silvae. Carefully examining how closely Quevedo imitated his Roman predecessor by comparing manuscripts, distilling old and new scholarship, and closely reading the poems, the authors assert that “Quevedo came to believe that Statius was a Christian” (52). More specifically: “we can only understand what drew Quevedo to Statius by recovering the Silvae as they were read and understood in Golden Age Spain: texts whose Greek references were still problematic in a Latin-centered humanism, but whose Stoic thought and manneristic style were made even more appealing by the belief that their author was a Christian and their content could therefore guide the reader toward biblical truth” (57). To bolster this claim, in addition to highlighting “substantive Christian themes” (57) in four of the silvas, they point to Quevedo’s annotation on the title page of his copy of the 1502 Aldine Statius owned by Princeton University. There he quotes Enrique de Villena, who in a commentary to his Spanish translation of Virgil, affirms that “at the end [Statius] was a Christian, knowing the Catholic truth” (34, 52). Yet as the authors implicitly admit, the Silver Age Statius was exemplary because of his exorbitant, difficult style as much as for his themes. Further, Quevedo’s thought was highly syncretic, borrowing as it did from the Christian Stoicism of Justus Lipsius, the Neoplatonism of Petrarchans like Fernando de Herrera and Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor, as well as the more religious variety of the same cultivated by fray Luis de León; it heeded, too, more skeptical voices, including that of the Catalan philosopher, Francisco Sánchez. In short, as the poems skillfully translated here attest, for all his metaphysics, Quevedo was also responding to the myriad hypocrisies and contradictions he saw riddling Spanish culture.

Playing on one of Quevedo’s most famous verses, Hilaire Kallendorf presents her translations as “a conversation with the dead” (315). And in the event, these versions not only deftly animate the Silvas for English ears and eyes, but they do so in a manner at once rigorous and accessible. To great effect and affect, Kallendorf artfully, faithfully, renders Quevedo’s refined diction, difficult conceits, and complex syntax. And if one occasionally would quibble with certain choices — a pincel can be a pencil and fuente can be a fountain, but context as well as historical dictionaries like Covarrubias’s Tesoro and the Diccionario de autoridades suggest, respectively, that “paintbrush” and “spring” would be more germane — generally speaking, the translations finely capture the letter and spirit of the originals. Further, the Spanish and English texts are complemented by concise footnotes that explicate allusions that might be obscure to a reader not steeped in Siglo de Oro or classical culture. (Still, line numbers would have been useful, and some might have preferred that the Spanish and English texts appeared en face instead of consecutively.) Finally, if in pondering these poems an English reader will become conversant with Quevedo’s inimitable form of Baroque desengaño (disenchantment), in reading silvas such as “Hymn to the stars” or “The peak of Segura de la Sierra, a very high mountain to the south wind,” he or she will also never be tempted to embrace the ill-conceived critical commonplace that the poet had no real feeling for nature or the beauties found there. In short, this volume should be sought out by anyone fascinated with Spanish Baroque literature.