Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRichard Helgerson, A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth- Century Europe A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth- Century Europe. Richard Helgerson . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. xvii+120.Aurora Hermida-RuizAurora Hermida-RuizUniversity of Richmond Search for more articles by this author University of RichmondPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRichard Helgerson's new book will no doubt be considered a landmark in the critical evaluation of Garcilaso de la Vega (1498?–1536), as it is the first monographic study of the poet by a highly reputed professor of English literature and early modern culture, that is, by a prestigious outsider to the field of Hispanism. As such, it is easy to predict a high degree of interest among Hispanists, who will likely welcome it as ammunition against the oft-lamented neglect and anachronistic marginalization of Spain in the context of sixteenth-century Europe. One need only recall the example of William Kennedy's The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) to get the idea. “And yet rightly considered”—Helgerson tells us after pointing out the near irrelevance of Garcilaso outside Spain—“Garcilaso deserves far more than the preeminent position he securely holds in the literary history of Spain, deserves a more fully European reputation” (xiii).This is not the first time Helgerson has ventured out of English poetry to make the case for a supranational approach to the “new poetry of sixteenth-century Europe.” Interest in Du Bellay came first and resulted in the bilingual edition of his poetry that Helgerson published in 2006. Sadly, however, Helgerson's latest venture from English will mark less a beginning than an end. After almost three years of battling pancreatic cancer, Richard Helgerson passed away on April 26, 2008. As he confesses in the preface, it was this very diagnosis that caused him to abandon the major comparative project he had in mind (Italy, Spain, France, and England) and concentrate on Garcilaso de la Vega, the “single case study” time would allow him to complete (x). This book is, in other words, his farewell not just to a professional life of literary criticism but also to the critical discourse that gave him the reputation of being “the sensible New Historicist” (see Helgerson's response to Frank's Kermode review of Forms of Nationhood, New York Review of Books, June 25, 1992, and September 24, 1992). In the context of his career, his illness, and his own self-awareness of death and legacy, it is difficult not to see A Sonnet from Carthage as the epitaph of a literary critic who, in the end, could no longer remain at ease within the confines of national boundaries and critical discourses. For Helgerson, Garcilaso de la Vega seems to represent the possibility of being at once the center and the margin, the norm and the exception, the entire history of imperial Europe and the singularity, exceptionality, and humanity of an individual experience.A Sonnet from Carthage is divided into two parts. The second part is a small bilingual anthology in which Helgerson reunites five of the six poems Garcilaso wrote from October 1534 to the end of 1535 in connection with Charles V's campaign in Tunis against the Turks. The intention here is twofold: first, Helgerson attempts to give English speakers some access, however rudimentary, to a poet who remains mostly unavailable in English, a fact that still hinders any European significance proposed today. Considering that only one of these poems, Elegy II, was included by Elias Rivers in his bilingual collection Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain (New York: Dell, 1966)—still the only source available to English speakers—one can easily understand the need of translation for Helgerson's intended readers. Second, the anthology is a radical departure from one of the most enduring traditions in Garcilaso's editorial history : the distribution of poems according to generic form rather than content or date of composition. By bringing together poems previously scattered among generic sections, Helgerson tries to achieve a depth of cultural and historical dimension somewhat missing or diminished before. To those familiar with Garcilaso criticism, this unconventional move may very well serve as an indirect reminder of the superficiality that has plagued and continues to plague not just Garcilaso criticism but, by implication, everything he has been made to stand for, from the meaning of his lyric innovations to the very concept of the Spanish Renaissance. Finally, it should be noted that the one poem surprisingly absent from the final anthology happens to be the sonnet to which the entire first part of the book is dedicated. This is sonnet XXXIII, “A Boscán desde la Goleta,” which would have fallen right in the middle of the anthology had it not been so singled out or, as I would point out, so conspicuously individualized.In the first part of the study, Helgerson approaches Garcilaso de la Vega as a young new poet of empire and nation who anticipates the “whole of the new poetry of sixteenth-century Europe” (x). What Helgerson considers to be the most “vital” or “fundamental” engagements of Garcilaso's imperial poetry are the following “rival impulses” (66): a program of vernacular renewal based on the necessary companionship of language and empire; a set of formal innovations—new meters, new stanzas, new genres—directly inspired by ancient Greece and Rome and modern Italy; a simultaneous awareness of the loss of self or alienation that empire and Italianate art will bring about; a commitment to a place (Carthage) overrun by “placeless imperial itinerancy” (41); and an affiliation among the forgers of imperial poetics (Boscán and Garcilaso) so close and personal that Helgerson is at pains not to openly refer to it as homosexual. Developing the tensions of these commitments in six small chapters, Helgerson returns to a topic much frequented by New Historicism: the historical association between imperial politics and Petrarchan poetics. This time, however, the emphasis seems to be less on their mutual accord or complicity than on a state of permanent conflict and split between the project of empire and the project of poetry. Hence, instead of the expected dismissal of yet another imperialist court poet, this reading of Garcilaso turns out to be a dramatic confrontation between a highly impersonal and devastating empire and a highly individualized and sensitive poet.To illustrate the series of tensions and commitments that define the whole of the new poetry of sixteenth-century Europe, Helgerson selects a sonnet Garcilaso addressed to Boscán in the summer of 1535, in which the poet recalls the destruction of ancient Carthage as a historical backdrop to the conquest of Tunis by Charles V. Although Helgerson prefers to see it as a “remarkable epitome” (67), the sonnet works rather as a synecdoche of many degrees, as it helps represent not only the six poems related to the conquest of Tunis but also Garcilaso's entire corpus, the whole lyric poetry of sixteenth-century Spain, the whole of the European new lyric, and, from here, any possible relation between humanism and imperialism. As a perfect example of synecdoche, what we are confronted with is not the whole but the part, not the impersonal and incommensurable empire but the unique and individual—the sonnet, the poet, the critic—making the reader all the more ready to identify and commiserate with Helgerson's humanist post-New Historicist plea: “In a single fourteen-line sonnet, which had not even been included in the earliest collections of Garcilaso's work and which never emerged as one of his most intensively studied poems, I found expressed the deepest ambitions, longings, reservations, affections, jealousies, disillusionments, and interdependencies that had shaped the new poetry wherever it appeared.…And yet Garcilaso and the particular experience out of which he wrote remained irreducibly individual in a poem that deserved attention all on its own” (x).Although Helgerson does not attempt any explanation for the critical disregard of sonnet XXXIII, one has to welcome both his surprise and impulse to remedy the situation as particularly refreshing. Certainly, it is one of the wonders of Spanish literary criticism that the most testimonial and innovative poems of Garcilaso, a poet canonized as the first individual voice of Spanish letters, should suffer the most neglect. New Historicism has corrected this situation to some degree, and we need to note that Helgerson's interest in Garcilaso's Tunisian poems follows a number of readings also informed by a New Historicist perspective (Anne Cruz and José María Rodríguez García are mentioned in the bibliography; others, like Eric Graf and Javier Lorenzo, are not). Still, there are many traces in this neglect of a history that remains widely unexplored in Garcilaso criticism. An important hint is that history has never been an easy path for Spain to prove either its modernity or the vigor of its intellectual life. And Garcilaso's Tunisian poems are so contaminated by history and politics that the only way to avoid them is by setting them aside. If we add to this the fact that Francoism highly energized the complicity of Garcilaso with the Spanish empire, we may begin to guess why there is such reluctance among contemporary critics to fully engage the cause of an imperialist Garcilaso. In this sense, Helgersons's assessment of Garcilaso as a soldier who is as disengaged from his military and political career as he is committed to lyric poetry may end up being more reassuring than challenging to the canon of Garcilaso criticism.As for the historicity of Helgerson's own reading of Garcilaso, it would be in keeping with his legacy to at least attempt a reading. Helgerson, who knew well the demands of such a perspective, tries to make it easy for us: “My idea…was shaped by a book I picked up as an occasional distraction for those long chemotherapy sessions in the oncology suite, Jared Diamond's Collapse.…With less ample time than Diamond had, I could attempt only a single case study. But Garcilaso and his sonnet seemed ideally suited” (x). In its attempt to salvage an individual sonnet from our contemporary sense of collapse, this book needs to be read in the context of the profound fear and nostalgia that is driving humanism back to the discourse of humanism. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 3February 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/658374 Views: 237Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.