The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet proposes to recount “the fascinating story of the Spanish Golden Age sonnet” (xi). Focused on the work of roughly a dozen canonical greats, Garcilaso through Cervantes (Rutherford's specialty), Góngora, Lope, and Quevedo, with the expected trip across the Atlantic to collect Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and with the addition of the unattributed poem, “No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte,” the distinguished Hispanist and translator John Rutherford stages this story writer by writer. Each section provides a brief biographical sketch of a poet; following comes a selection of sonnets, which appear on facing pages in Spanish and English. Before moving on, Rutherford offers commentary on the poetry and includes a few notes about features of interest.
This organization presents readers with a choice of routes through the book. In addition to working across and between the Spanish poems and their translations, I have experimented with focusing on the Spanish-language texts, considering the story they tell on their own before turning to the notes on individual works. I have also foregrounded the English-language versions of the poems, independent of the Spanish. Each of these approaches opens rewarding questions regarding, on the one hand, the Spanish canon and the concept of the Golden Age, and, on the other, comparative poetics. For example, in the final lines of Garcilaso's well-known sonnet 33, Rutherford substitutes end-stopped lines for Garcilaso's enjambments. This is a wise choice. There is no competing with Garcilaso's deft inscription of verbal momentum, and Rutherford's alternative shows his keen sense for English rhetoric. Other poems are less aesthetically satisfying but equally illuminating. In Rutherford's versions of Garcilaso 5 or Góngora 2 we encounter the inexorable parodic power of u as an end rhyme in English. I wouldn't categorize either translation as unsuccessful; more translation is always a good thing. But they do recall Antoine Berman's phrase “the trials of the foreign,” as well as his observation that translation reveals the essence of the original.
Whether such a thing as an original exists, or whether an essence carries over from one language to another, are matters of debate in translation studies. They are relevant here, as Rutherford sets a defining feature of Spanish poetry in play in this book. The Italianate verses that Renaissance writers Garcilaso de la Vega and Juan Boscán introduced into Spain caused a stir because Castilian publics experienced their rhythms and sonorous patterns as insufficiently rhymed, as prose. Boscán defended this new art, citing sprezzatura and a modern, refined understanding of wit and eloquence. Consequently, and as Rutherford explains, the key elements of the nueva poesía are the hendecasyllable, a register of diction, and a rhythm that subordinates consonance and rhyme. For this reason, some important translators of Spanish lyric choose to work in prose. Rutherford chooses English verse, and when he employs couplets or ABAB stanzas, or when he falls into alliteration, the impact is significant. He alludes to this issue in the introduction, but his explanation appears to shift his goals. Whereas the start of the book proposes a story about Spanish poetry, the introduction concludes with the hope that Rutherford's Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and hybrid styles will produce poems that read “as I imagine their authors would have written them had they been twenty-first-century English poets” (16).
The questions this book prompts about poetics and translation are highly worthwhile. The story Rutherford tells about Spain is more problematic. The category “Golden Age” originated in European narratives about the evolution of literature and culture. Many scholars associate it with post–eighteenth-century politics and with imperialism. In classroom settings, it is important to provide a counterpoint to the purely aesthetic idea Rutherford presents. Margaret Greer's essay, “Thine and Mine: The Spanish ‘Golden Age’ and Early Modern Studies,” provides a concise and informative discussion (PMLA 126.1 [2011]: 217–24).
Similarly, the section on historical background opens with a surprising assertion: “What we now call Spain and Portugal was in the early Middle Ages a series of separate Christian kingdoms stretched across the north of the Iberian peninsula, with the Moors, who had invaded it in the eighth century, occupying a progressively smaller part of the south as the Christian Reconquest advanced” (4). The myth of the Christian reconquest has been debunked. Among other sources, Barbara Fuchs's Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Spanish Identity (2003) furnishes insight into the politics and ideologies that inform the term. Maria Menocal's work is also relevant. The term Moor should be retired from scholarly and critical vocabulary. At best imprecise, it usually carries derogatory connotations that we need to examine with care. Finally, two minor quibbles: apart from “No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte,” there is no discussion of the sonnets composed in religious communities in the 1500s and 1600s. Nor is there any attention to occasional poetry. Both contributed materially and thematically to the Golden Age sonnet corpus.
These issues are easily remedied with a bit of supplemental criticism. Overall, Professor Rutherford's book inspires fruitful reflection on poetics, on translation, and on the stories we tell about the past.
