Juan Boscán y la fama: el influjo de los Triumphi de Petrarca

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on early modern Spanish poet Juan Boscán (c. 1490–1542) has considerably enhanced his reputation as a lyricist and established a more consequential place for his work in the literary canon. Such characterization can be said to have an early echo in the image of Boscán that we find in his sonnet CXVI (‘Amor m’embia un dulce sentimiento’) and in Garcilaso de la Vega’s Elegía II and Égloga II. In these poems, Boscán is described as a gifted poet whose writings will survive time and will earn him fame among his contemporaries. A careful examination of this flattering image of Boscán reveals its indebtedness to the symbols and the vocabulary associated with fame in Petrarch’s Triumphs and other texts related to this allegorical poem. Garcilaso and Boscán cannibalized these texts in an effort to raise Boscan’s poetry and reputation to the level of their Tuscan predecessors.