To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

Abstract

AFTER THE LOSS of its Caribbean colonies in 1898, a national malaise struck a Spanish intellectual and governing elite still clinging to, and eager to maintain, Spain’s imperial might in the Americas. The defeat (known to Spanish intellectuals of the time as el desastre) injected a new urgency to the old concern of what distinguished the Spanish national character—an unease further taunted by Spain’s Celt-Iberian, Roman, Visigothic, Arabic, Jewish, and Catholic identities. Much of the intellectual energy of the so-called “generation of ’98” in the aftermath of the defeat turned inward to pursue an answer to the “Spanish Problem,” fed by a desire to explain the nation’s decline, its perceived backwardness and general stagnation (Blinkhorn 13). In 1906, the same year that sees the formalization of Spain’s place in Morocco at the Conference of Algeciras, Miguel de Unamuno, probing the reduction of Spain’s identity to a “modern” European one, writes: “¡Latinos! ¿Latinos? ¿Y por qué si somos berberiscos no hemos de sentirnos y proclamarnos tales, y cuando de cantar nuestras penas y nuestros consuelos se trate, cantarlos conforme a la estética berberisca?” (Monroe 248; “Latin! Latin? Why if we are Berber should we not feel and proclaim ourselves as such, and when we sing our sorrow and our consolation, sing them according to the Berber aesthetic?”).1 Unamuno’s impulse to identify as Berber what he calls the “Spanish way” paved by passion and wisdom against a modern European one pigeonholed by scientific thinking echoes a refrain in Spain’s modern history: the “Africanization” of Spain that draws on the historical and ethnic heritage of al-Andalus to reflect on the nation’s identity crisis.Although Unamuno’s polemic against Spain’s Europeanization has the effect of seemingly upending entrenched hierarchies, his reckoning produces problematic dualities and reductive oppositions.2 He writes further, in “Sobre la europeización,” that Spain’s spirituality is not one subsumed in “inaction, ignorance, and barbarism” redressing the racial stigmatization of Spain as tainted by the unenlightened, primitive North African disseminated by “the Black Legend.” By the time of Unamuno’s tirade, not only were the terms “modern” and “European” already in play, but the terms “African,” “Arab,” and “Berber” could be read differently in the currents of Spanish intellectual debates according to divergent ideological investments. Unamuno’s ethnonationalist solution to the “Spanish problem”3 associates with the Berber rather than the Arab, recalling a trend among the Catalan and Basque nationalists who proposed a lineage of the premodern European “whites” to the North African Berber. The aesthetic nature of Unamuno’s solution emerges from a nationwide introspection aimed at restoring Spain’s spiritual and moral commitments, but this impulse to turn to the aesthetic precedes him. The eagerness with which modern thinkers and intellectuals assimilated Spain’s Andalusi past into its cultural artery4 is encapsulated in the 1839 discovery of aljamiado-morisco literature, in response to which the poet Serafín Estébanez Calderón declared that the newly discovered texts “would provide much material for the writer of customs and the novelist, who would have a theme of great newness, being able to separate themselves from the road worn down by imitation of the French” (Barletta 56). Unamuno is one among many engaged in a historical tug-of-war—often on both sides—of those who embraced and those who wished to expel the African lineage from Spain’s ethnic and historical bloodline.Though deeply complicated and flawed in their engagement, the three twentieth-century Spanish poets I engage here also pull the rope alongside those who embrace the Andalusi past as integral to Spanish identity. I argue that through literary forms associated with al-Andalus, each carves a space for this past in the longue durée of Spanish literary identity distinct from works of colonial apologists. Federico García Lorca’s Diván del Tamarit, published posthumously in 1940; Joaquín Romero Murube’s collection of poems Kasida del olvido, published in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in 1941; and Clara Janés’s Diván del ópalo defuego, published during an increase in anti-immigration rhetoric in 1996, are works in tension with hegemonic discourses of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My analysis grounds these works in their particular historical moments to show how each work represents a local intersection of various poetic and aesthetic as well as cultural and intellectual trajectories of al-Andalus in modern Spanish poetry. I insist on the connection to the historical moments and cultural frameworks in which these three works emerge so as not to dismiss them as only essentializing or orientalizing the Andalusi past.Cultural historians and literary critics have addressed how Spain’s hybridity was mobilized as a way to reckon with its identity crisis. Barbara Fuchs has shown how after the capitulation of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, and at the height of its imperial power, Spain appropriated Andalusi aristocratic culture as a symbol of cultural and political dominance. Fuchs lays bare the ways that the fledgling nation regulated and regularized its “moorishness”5 between the dual poles of maurophobia and maurophilia that either stigmatized or idealized the “moor” and the Morisco (5). I particularly benefit from Fuchs’s parsing of these two reactions, the latter of which generated such forms as the romancero morisco. Susan Martin-Márquez’s Disorientations (2008) also helpfully tracks the larger historical trends and the debates that straddled the maurophilic and maurophobic responses in the various waves of nation-building. Martin-Márquez takes up from Fuchs a preoccupation with cultural difference that shifted toward an obsession with racial purity following the Morisco expulsion. In the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, al-Andalus returned as the golden age of innovation, and a glorified Muslim past began to take shape in the work of Spanish Arabists who negotiated Spain’s position within the larger European community by reclaiming al-Andalus for its incipit role in Europe’s coming to the age of reason. Nineteenth-century revisions of Spanish history and identity coincided with the rise in Arabic and Hebrew studies in Spain. This move toward Arabism and Hebraism would either spark racial fear within the various regionalist movements that erupted onto the scene later that century and that traded in ethnonationalist language like that of Unamuno’s; or encouragement, as was the case with the Andalucistas. With Blas Infante at their helm, these regionalists proudly claimed the “Black” past of Andalucía. Infante sought autonomy for this region on the heels of the “Black Legend” by maintaining a direct lineage to the Moriscos of al-Andalus and thus powerfully cemented his argument for Andalucía’s colonization by Madrid.6Martin-Márquez’s attention to the cultural and biological obsessions of the various regional identities comes to the fore in Brad Epps’s examination of the image of Africa and Europe in Joan Maragall and Unamuno’s correspondence. Epps further extends his attention from the deployment of these images to ideas of poetry and prose that emerge in their writings. Maragall and Unamuno inflected the generic divisions with nationalism and mobilized them as a way to grapple with the so-called Spanish problem. This article takes up both Epps’s and Maragall and Unamuno’s attention to generic form. I follow a long line of scholars that includes Luce López-Baralt, María Isabel López Martínez, María Ángeles Pérez Álvarez, Sabih Sadiq, and Debra Faszer-McMahon, in addition to those already cited, who have engaged the question of al-Andalus in the context of modern Spain. I extend their line of inquiry and contextualize it within a larger debate of al-Andalus and its place in Spanish cultural identity.Myriad forms emerge in the encounter with the Andalusi past—the casida and gacela, the city-elegy, the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd, the octosyllabo, and the ballad—that organize, impose upon, and even unsettle one another. In my use of the term form, I rely, in part, on Caroline Levine’s work that has opened space between aesthetic and historicist critique. Levine encourages literary critics to consider the networks that emerge from the convergence of multiple forms, writing that “literary form does not operate outside of the social but works among many organizing principles, all circulating in a world jam-packed with other arrangements” (7). I draw from Levine’s notion of form as emerging out of movement and assembly in what she calls an event of “collision”—“the strange encounter between two or more forms that sometimes reroutes intention and ideology” (18). I am concerned, ultimately, with what is formalized literarily in the encounter with al-Andalus.Part of the problem I will be pursuing in this article is a spectrum of cultural identities and historical categories that are in flux and that go by different names. For the sake of continuity, I adopt the term al-Andalus to refer to Muslim Iberia (711–1492 AD), while knowing that it elides the heterogeneity of eight hundred years of history. I use the term Andalusi from here on to refer to the intricate Arab, Islamic, and Berber culture that characterizes this piece of Iberia’s history.7Unlike the earlier Romancero gitano and Poema del cante jondo, in which Lorca attempted to reintegrate and recuperate the figure of the Romani, or gitano, into the Spanish poetic tradition, no such presence of the Arab or Berber occurs in the Diván del Tamarit. Instead, the forms of the dīwān, qaṣīda, and ghazal8 find their first poetic iterations in the Spanish language. In the midst of debates about the place of al-Andalus in the Spanish literary tradition, and with the influx of Spanish translations of Arabic and Andalusi poetry—spearheaded by prominent Arabists such as Julián Ribera, Miguel Asín Palacios, and Emilio García Gómez, among others—Lorca wrote the twelve gacelas and nine casidas that make up the posthumously arranged Diván between 1931 and 1934, before his assassination by Francoist forces in 1936.These translations were formative to his work beyond poetry. Lorca heavily cites the Spanish orientalist Gaspar María de Nava, Conde de Noroña’s anthology Poesías asiáticas in his 1922 lecture on the cante jondo, given at a conference that the poet organized alongside the musician Manuel de Falla that aimed to revive interest in the diverse racial, cultural, and religious influences on the origins of flamenco.9 The Arabic poems in Conde de Noroña’s anthology range from the pre-Islamic period (ante-Islam) to the Andalusi period in the fourteenth century, and also include translations of Persian and Turkish poetry. In this anthology, Lorca would have mostly encountered fragments translated from longer poems as well as the qitʿa, or occasional line of poetry describing nature or love. This appears to be the case for the tenth-century poem “A una muchacha llorando”10 (“To a crying girl”) by Ibn al-Rūmī, one of many Arabic poems translated and given the title “A una muchacha” by Conde de Noroña. Although Ibn al-Rūmī is not himself an Andalusi poet, all the elements of the typically Andalusi genre known as the rawḍiyya11 are present in the following lines: Cual la viola del huerto,Cuyas suaves hojasBrillan con el rocíoQue derrama la aurora,Parece la flor mia,Cuando á la angustia brotanDe sus ojos azulesMil perlas deliciosas.As the viola of the grove,Whose smooth leavesGlisten with the dewThat the dawn pours out,So too it seems my flowerWhen in distress sproutsFrom her blue eyesA thousand delicious pearls.(Noroña 118)The association of the young girl with a flower in a grove (huerto) is a hallmark of the rawḍiyya, which tended toward examples of cultivated beauty over the wilderness of the pre-Islamic qaṣīda. Thus, Ibn al-Rūmī characterizes the girl’s beauty by associating her “blue eyes” with pearls of the sea, rather than simply the water itself. In these few lines, the compressed work of a metaphorical association entwines the different images of the natural world—the grove, water, pearls, and dawn—with one another. Thus, the pearls that pour from the young girl’s eyes are the dewdrops on the leaves, the dawn a cause of distress, and the girl the flower.In Lorca’s “Casida de la muchacha dorada” (“Qasida of the Golden Girl”),12 a similar metaphorical blending occurs, portraying a girl who is surrounded by water as the dawn broaches the scene (58; “se bañaba en el agua,” “vino el alba sin mancha”). It also depicts a progression similar to that of Ibn al-Rūmī’s poem—from the girl bathing in the water at the beginning to the blazing water that overpowers the girl, and rather than washing her, gilds her.La muchacha mojadaera blanca en el aguay el agua, llamarada.Vino el alba sin manchacon cien caras de vaca,yerta y amortajadacon heladas guirnaldas.La muchacha de lágrimas,se bañaba entre llamasy el ruiseñor llorabacon las alas quemadas.(Lorca 58)The girl as she dippedwas white in the waterand the water, ablaze.The immaculate dawn camewith a thousand bovine faces;stiff and shroudedwith frozen wreaths.The girl full of tearswas bathing in flames,and the nightingale weptwith its wings burnt.(Lorca 59)The two poems echo one another not only in their use of similar images: Lorca’s “immaculate dawn,” Ibn al-Rūmī’s dawn that “pours out”; Lorca’s “thousand bovine faces,” Ibn al-Rūmī’s “thousand delicious pearls”; but also in that each poem concentrates the natural imagery into one of precious metal or stone; Lorca’s “golden girl” and Ibn al-Rūmī’s tears that are “delicious pearls.” Additionally, both poems present a temporal progression that parallels the poem’s emotional development—the girl’s distress intensifies as the day passes in Lorca’s casida.Another anthology, Poemas arábigoandaluces by Emilio García Gómez,13 was published first in the Revista de occidente and then in 1930 as a book. It contains translations exclusively from al-Andalus and is arranged geographically in three parts, beginning with the “Poetas del Occidente de AlAndalus,” followed by “Poetas del Centro de AlAndalus,” and concluding with “Poetas del Oriente de AlAndalus.” Both versions feature translations from a thirteenth-century anthology of Andalusi poets.14Conde de Noroña’s anthology does not use the term casida to title any of the translated poems. Lorca encounters this term as a loanword from the Arabic qaṣīda in García Gómez’s article published in 1928 in the Revista de occidente. García Gómez explains the formal qualities of the qaṣīda in the introduction to his translations and offers a summary of the form’s origins in the Arabian desert and its subsequent arrival in al-Andalus—and then to contemporary Spain through his translations. The tenth-century Andalusi poet Ibn Hāniʾ’s qaṣīda, which García Gómez titled “Comienzo de la ‘casida de las estrellas’” (“Beginning of the ‘Qasida of the Stars’”), demonstrates the resonance between the two poets’ casidas separated by ten centuries: La tiniebla ha comenzado a desanudarsus trabas y el ejército de la noche se aprestay se alinea para dar la batalla a la aurora.Los luceros huyen para dejar paso a las Pléyades,que son como sortijas que brillanen los dedos de una mano escondida.(García Gómez 85)The darkness has begun to take offits tethers and the enemy of the nightlines up, preparing to battle the dawn.The stars flee to make wayfor the Pleiades, which are like ringsthat shine on the fingers of a hidden hand.Lorca’s “Casida de la mano imposible” (“Qasida of the Impossible Hand”) develops a similar relationship between a hand and celestial space. In the second stanza, the hand “Sería el guardián que en la noche di mi tránsito / prohibiera en absoluto la entrada a la luna” (Lorca 54–55; Would be the guardian on the night of my passing / to halt, absolutely, the moon’s entry). I read these metaphorical resonances as clues toward the place of al-Andalus and its forms in contemporary Spanish literary production. Encouraged by the overall textual effects of the Diván, these resonant images became a way to understand how Andalusi poetry can be engaged as making up the text rather than merely being an untethered inspiration that remains facile or romanticized.15In the “Gacela de la terrible presencia,” personal desire is subordinated to the description of the landscape through a kind of rhyming image that occurs between the “reeds” of the penultimate stanza and the “young waist” of the final stanza, an image that recalls the common Andalusi trope which describes the woman’s waist as a thin reed: “Pero no me enseñes tu limpio desnudo / como un negro cactus abierto en los juncos” and “Déjame en un anisa de oscuras planetas, / ¡pero no me enseñes tu cintura fresca!” (Lorca 20–21; But do not show me your lucent nakedness / as a black cactus opens out in reeds; Leave me to yearn for dark planets / but do not show me your young waist). A poem translated by García Gómez attributed to the eleventh-century poet and ruler of Seville al-Muʿtamid Ibn ʿAbbād (more on this important figure below) contains the lines “el ramo tentador de su cintura / Y era el abrirse de un botón de rosa” (García Gómez 347; The tempting bouquet of her waist / was the opening of a rosebud). The images and metaphors resonant with the Andalusi literary tradition are thus organizing forms in the Diván.García Gómez points out in an afterword written for (but then not published in) a Granadine edition of the Diván that thematic resemblances between the Arabic lyric and Lorca’s can also be found in the nocturnal tryst: la noche no quiere venir,para que tú no vengasni yo pueda ir(64)Night doesn’t want to comethat you may not comethat I may not go,as well as in what García Gómez calls the “pseudo-chastity of the Bedouin” of the “young waist” verse cited above (65). García Gómez also links Lorca and al-Andalus through a devotion to Granada’s landscape. Granada is explicitly named in only three of the poems in Lorca’s collection; the city, however, emerges with force in the various references to water—fountains, rivers, cisterns, wells—as well as in the evocative sites that serve as placeholders from which one recalls the past—the walls, the balcony, and of course the Tamarit groves where Lorca composed the poems that were to make up the Diván. While I agree with García Gómez’s assessment that in Lorca’s work we do not find an “extravagance” nor an “imitation” of the “Arabic lyric,” I disagree when he implies that they are not imitations on the grounds that Arabic poetry’s metaphorical mechanism did not appeal to Lorca.16 Just as the city is not mentioned but only alluded to, so, too, is the past made stronger in the grove, in Granada’s walls, in the water imagery that overpowers any sense of place to evoke loss.17 This is the tragic mode of ay in the “Gacela of a hundred-year love” (its sister the Arabic-derived olé that Lorca referred to in his lecture on the cante jondo).18 There is a trajectory in Lorca’s oeuvre that returns to the land, to an Andalusia that is both real and part of a personal myth; Lorca’s Andalusian cities, which still bear the same names they did in al-Andalus, emerge throughout his work, and in the Diván he returns to his old querencia—Granada’s landscape peppered with the architecture of its past.García Gómez was distinctly preoccupied with questions of literary identity. In the prologue to his anthology, he spends some time examining the categories that make up its title, which he claims “está lleno de problemas” (is full of problems), particularly in its bringing “Arabic” and “al-Andalus” as qualifiers of “poetry.” He asks, “hasta qué punto y en qué medida y proporción están realmente unidos? Hasta dónde es arábiga, es decir, puro eco y resonancia de la que se cultivaba en el Oriente árabe (y ahora prescindimos del puro vehículo idiomático), y hasta dónde es ‘andaluza,’ es decir, reflejo de la sensibilidad hispánica, de las reacciones intelectuales y sentimentales de los musulmanes españoles?” (22; To what extent and proportion are they really united? To what extent is it Arabic, that is, pure echo and resonance of the one that was cultivated in the Arab East (and here we dispense with the pure idiomatic vehicle), and to what extent is it “Andalusian”—that is, a reflection of the Hispanic sensibility, of the intellectual and sentimental reactions of Spanish Muslims?).19 Lorca and the other poets of the so-called generation of ’27 thus brushed up against al-Andalus and its forms within a broader discussion of Spanish poetic identity.20While the Diván has been the subject of much attention from scholars including Sabih Sadiq, María Ángeles Pérez Álvarez, Mahmud Sohb, Celia del Moral Molina, and Mario Hernández, belonging more broadly to a strain of scholarship interested in the huella, or traces, of the Andalusi past in contemporary Spanish literature, the Kasida del Olvido has garnered much less interest. The poet Romero Murube was the director and curator at the Alcázar in Seville from 1935 until his death in 1969. He reportedly kept two drafts “de las casidas lorquianas” between his papers, and from this literary affinity, the Kasida del Olvido came to light in 1945. The work is more self-conscious in its engagement with the Andalusi past than Lorca’s Diván, despite the fact that, as López Martínez notes, the title is a misnomer for a collection of poetry that does not contain, as the title suggests, one unified poem, but several poems within it for which diván would have been a more appropriate term. The Kasida from the onset broaches the question of identity, as it begins with the heading “Etopeya inicial” (“Initial Ethopoeia”) and adopts multiple vocal identities thereafter.The first poem, “Burla y fracaso del alcaide del alcázar,” is a kind of prologue that depicts a peregrination through Spanish history set against a distinctly Andalusi landscape of rivers, gardens, and Islamic architecture in which the poetic voice narrates the search for Don Joaquín: Por palacios y jardinesa buscar a Don Joaquín.Por el corredor al patioLo vieron los mozos ir.[. . .]Con los moros almohadescantaba en un alhamí,y el Sultán lo condecoracon la orden medjahuí.(Romero Murube 9)Through the palaces and gardensin search of Don Joaquín.Through the corridor to the patiothe young men see him go.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .With the Almohad Moorshe sang in Aljamiado,and the Sultan decorates himwith the Medjahui order.The search for Don Joaquín takes place first with the Almohads, a noteworthy moment to begin this history. The Almohads, a Berber dynasty that arrived in Muslim Iberia in 1121, were characterized by their detractors, and imagined thereafter, as uncouth desert rulers who replaced a sophisticated Arab civilization. The poetic voice follows Don Joaquín, who goes on to converse with Alfonso the Wise, “la grafía marroquí,” and to walk with Don Pedro El Cruel / Justiciero following “un alguacil” (executive officer);21 from there he goes on to criticize “Doña Isabel y Fernando / por su celo en el regir” (10; Doña Isabel and Fernando / for their zeal in ruling). The poem lays out the passage of centuries of Sevillian history through the progression of its rulers as part of its elegiac tribute to the city. Each of these historical encounters stages a dialogic interaction with the past—from singing to criticizing to debating. The interrogation of whether Don Joaquín “pasó por aquí?” (passed through here) in each of the three parts of the poem reifies a transhistorical continuity by casting the search for Don Joaquín as traversing the annals of a particular region’s history that begins with Islam in Spain.Yet not all of Seville’s rulers are relegated to merely historical markers in the poem’s trajectory. One, al-Muʿtamid ibn ʿAbbād, a poet and one of the rulers of Seville in the eleventh century and a figure of great interest to artists and intellectuals in the Iberian Peninsula, stands out particularly in this collection. Blas Infante, the staunch Andalusian nationalist I mentioned earlier, undertook a pilgrimage to al-Muʿtamid’s grave and wrote a play on the life of the Sevillian poet-ruler in 1920 (Calderwood 117). The eponymous Spanish literary journal al-Motamid, which ran from 1947 to 1956 in Northern Morocco, became an important ground for the coming generation of Moroccan Hispanophone writers. The “Kasida del rey Almotamid” casts the poetic-I in his voice and is an elegy to Seville; much in the vein of the rithāʾ al-mudun (“city-elegy”) the Andalusi poet himself composed, it speaks to and addresses the city. The opening lines recall those of the first poem, “Por barrios, torres, murallas / Por los huertos, por el río” (61; through neighborhoods, towers, ramparts / through the orchards, through the river), after which we are introduced to the poetic narrator: “¡Estoy cansado de luces!/ ¡Ebrio sin haber bebido!” (I am tired of lights / I am drunk without having drunk). The poem demands and pleads: “¿Por qué el amor nos destruye / en un celeste exterminio?” (62; Why does love destroy us, / in a heavenly extermination?) and “Dejad perderse mis horas / ante un jazmín . . . ¡Y el olvido!” (Let me waste my hours before a jasmine, and before forgetfulness). This poem, like others in the Kasida del olvido, strives to keep forgetfulness at bay through continuous and willful acts of remembrance. It reads like the Andalusi city-elegy that registers the loss not just of the city, but of the empire and status of the poet. The ritha’, according to Alexander Elinson, relies on repetition to counter the rupture that comes with death. The loss of place is also the loss of a literary culture—the Kasida del olvido recalls from oblivion this loss. As such, Romero Murube manages to continually foreground, emphasize, and redefine this recalled past that has been overlooked. In a sense, one can read the phrase “pasó por aquí” of the first poem and the subsequent passages throughout the collection as also signifying the uncertainty of the poet having “passed through here” at all, or indeed whether the poet coming through these histories to arrive at the present moment is already taken for granted. By casting the voice of the poetic-I as that of al-Motamid, the text allegorizes the shifting and porous relationship to the Andalusi past while giving it a voice that returns it to the poetic landscape. This porosity is further amplified with the inclusion in the collection of cantos and romances—a kind of convivencia of genres and traditions.As with the “Kasida del rey Almotamid,” the “Kasida de la amante y la madrugada” (“Qasida of the Lover and the Dawn”) offers the voice of an Arab stratified in the image of the nocturnal tryst and the comparison of the waist to the curve of a riverbed. Romero Murube describes the lovers in a garden at night: Apartémos, amante,de la fiesta. Ya se burlala paz del campo, la noche,de ese anhelo sin harturaque es vivir. Ven y busquemosnuestra paz en la profundacalma inmensa, sosegada,transparentada de luna.(Un árabe hubiera dichoal rodear tu cintura,que era como el cauce finodel río, cuando se curvapara buscar azaharesen la orilla . . . )(Romero Murube 47)Let us go, lover,from the party. Already peacemakes mockery of the countryside, of the night,of that longing without fullnessthat is living. Come, let us look forour peace in the deepimmense calm, the quiet, the transparent moon.(An Arab would have saidaround your waist,like the thin channelof the river, when it curvesto look for flowerson the shore . . . )The image of the beseeching lover seeking peace away from the revelry of a party resonates through the centuries from its antecedent in the Andalusi poetic corpus. The final image, included as a parenthetical, transposes into the text through the figure of the Arab, a trope of the Arabic literary tradition that describes the waist by comparing it to a curved riverbed. What is striking about this parenthetical near-quotation is that the Arabic word azhares does the work of quotation that the expository phrase preceding it references (“An Arab would have said”). The text performs the integration of an Arabic form on two levels: in the poetic language of the Arabic tradition as well as in the word azhares, which would indeed have been used by an Arabic speaker instead of the other word flores. This kind of linguistic quotation is at work throughout the collection—half of the words used in the title “Burla y fracaso del alcaide del alcázar” are words derived from the Arabic, and other poems also contain Spanish words of Arabic origin in several verses as the rhyme word, both those unavoidable in the language and those like the word azhares above that parrot the Arabic language in Spanish.The convivencia of genres in the collection reinforces the connection of the Spanish casida with the romance tradition of poets like Lope de Vega, Góngora, and Quevedo. The romance incorporates a wide variety of themes and itself has historically been fragmentary in nature, just like the qitʿas translated in the anthologies. The genre is notable for its “capacity to absorb and adapt narrative and poetic materials of the most diverse origins,” making it particularly popular during the Romantic period “with its interest in popular traditions and the distinctive character of national cultures” (Armistead 138). The interpretation of the casida in the generic terms of the romance—as several poems cited above feature the octosyllabic meter and assonant rhyme—might be considered a kind of domesticated translation of the Arabic qaṣīda. However, these forms have alternatively expanded and bounded one another. None of the poems are immediately recognized as Span