Spanish Poems Research Articles

"Queda sin gloria… /tu fábula": On the Myth of Apollo and Daphne and the Meaning of Love in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry

Abstract: Seventeenth-century Spanish poems on Apollo and Daphne foreground rape so as to mock the god, and by metonymy what he represents within each poem, for not being "man" enough to violate the nymph. Modeled after Garcilaso de la Vega's sonnet 13, the poems operated two key changes in the myth with respect to the Ovidian source: to omit either or both Cupid and Peneus; and turn what started out as a tragedy into a comedy. This article analyzes texts by Juan Jerónimo Serra; Soto de Rojas; Lope; Polo de Medina; Quevedo; Rioja; and Fray Gonzalo de San Miguel, among others.

Some Reflections on the Translatability of Christmas Carols and Christmas Poems

The aim of the following paper is to identify and analyze some of the challenges we face when translating Christmas carols and poems from Romanian into Spanish and vice versa. Translating poetry and especially Christmas carols is not an easy task because, in addition to a good knowledge of the source and target languages, it requires a vast knowledge of both Spanish and Romanian cultures. Even though they are Romance languages and Christianity (with its two variants, Orthodox and Catholic) is the official religion of Romania and Spain, lexical and cultural particularities can be identified in the texts, since it uses a specific language. This is not to say that there are no cultural similarities regarding the interpretation of the birth of Christ. There are several similarities in terms of action and biblical characters, which are reflected in both Romanian and Spanish versions. Our aim is to see how far we can go with the translation of Christmas carols and poems, whether the translated text maintains the original message or not and to try to see if it is possible to preserve, in some cases the rhyme, or at least partially. The corpus we will use in our research comprises 24 Romanian Christmas carols and 13 Romanian poems translated into Spanish and 21 Spanish Christmas carols, as well as 13 Spanish poems translated into Romanian. These texts were translated by the students of Applied Modern Languages during a practical translation course, the final variant including our suggestions and revisions.

The Mary Jacobs Prize Essay 2023: ‘Translation and Ideology in Sylvia Townsend Warner: Six Romances of the Spanish Civil War into English’

Upon her return to Britain from Spain following her attendance at the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture held in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia in 1937, Sylvia Townsend Warner translated six Spanish romances. Five of the six Spanish poems examined here – those by Leopoldo Urrutia, Manuel Altolaguirre, Julio D. Guillén, José Herrera Petere and Félix Paredes – first appeared in Romancero general de la guerra de España (1937). The sixth, by Francisco Fuentes, had been published in 1936 in Milicia Popular. This article analyses Warner’s English versions of these poems with the aims of illuminating the political motives behind her translation decisions and adding to our knowledge of her relation to the urgent cultural politics of the late 1930s.

Un canvi de perspectiva. La poesia de Czesław Miłosz i la primera recepció

A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE: CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ’S POETRY AND ITS FIRST RECEPTION In the criticism and studies of Czesław Miłosz’s work, the cycles “The world (naive poem)” and “Voices of the poor people”, from the book Rescue (1945) occupy a place of enormous importance because it opens two lines of the postwar Polish poetry, initiates the so-called polyphony of the Polish author and establishes links with other literary traditions, especially the Anglo-Saxon and T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. But these elements should not necessarily always be kept in a translation, rather they can lead to other reminiscences. In the article, we study this fenomen based on the theories of Antoine Berman and focused in the first published translation of the Polish author’s poems in Spanish.

스페인 중세 시 『죽음의 무도』에 드러난 사회 비판 연구

The purpose of this study is to analyze the change in social consciousness after the outbreak of the Black Death, which was revealed in the late medieval Spanish poem Danza General de la muerte, and to reflect on its significance. As is well known, the Black Death Pandemic sacrificed nearly a third of Europe''s population between 1347 and 1351, and was taken a significant opportunity to accelerate the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Danza de la muerte as new motif in literature and art that emerged in many European countries after the Black Death, contains sharp social criticism as well as views on life and death changed after the Black Death. In particular, the consciousness of equality of all people in the face of death and the strict judgment of the vested classes who have corrupted or forgotten their duties is remarkable. In that sense, Danza general de la Muerte served as a new milestone in the satirical literature that criticized the hierarchical order and privileged groups of medieval society, and had a great influence on Renaissance and Baroque literature thereafter. Since the Black Death is a representative example of how pandemic played a decisive role in changing the direction of history and the appearance of the times, it is expected to be a reference point when considering the change of direction in the post-COVID-19 era in the future.

Plaidoyer pour la traduction de la poésie à l’École Normale Supérieure au Gabon

In the educational world of Gabon, the poem is an accepted pedagogical support in the progress made by the National Pedagogical Institute. But in the three foreign language departments of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in general and in the Spanish Department in particular, the lack of translation of poetry as an educational activity is a fact which, until today, weakens the training and hence, the students-teachers leaving and in class situation. This essay, which focuses on interpretative, literary and linguistic theories, aims to understand the reasons behind this deficient situation, but above all to propose an exploitation of the poem A Dorila of Juan Meléndez Valdés. Il will be a question of exposing the path that leads to the translation of a Spanish poem and implicitly to highlight the contribution of this activity in the leaners.

Seven Poems on Migration

Seven Poems on Migration Wendy Call (bio) and Irma Pineda (bio) Translator’s Introduction IRMA PINEDA (BINNIZÁ) has published nine books of poetry. Naxiña’ rului’ladxe’ / Rojo deseo (Red desire), published by Pluralia Ediciones in 2018, won Mexico’s Caballo Verde prize for best book of poetry. She currently serves as senior advisor for science, education, and culture for the MORENA Party in the Mexican National Congress. She is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s National Association of Writers in Indigenous Languages (ELIAC) and was a 2013–15 member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In January 2020, she began a three-year term as one of two representatives of Latin American Indigenous peoples at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Pineda writes bilingual poems in Spanish and in Diidxazá (also known as Isthmus Zapotec). Diidxazá has probably 75,000 speakers and is part of the family of languages known collectively as Zapotec, which has approximately 460,000 speakers (Sistema de Información Cultural [SIC] Mexico 2020). Pineda creates what she calls “parallel poems,” one version in Diidxazá and another in Spanish, reflecting her lived experience: a constant flow between two languages, two cultures, two cosmovisions. Educated in Spanish-only public schools in her hometown of Juchitán, Pineda learned to write in Isthmus Zapotec by looking up words one by one in books she borrowed from her neighbors’ bookshelves. At that time, there was no proper Isthmus Zapotec dictionary. Years later, Pineda’s mother, Cándida Santiago Pineda, founded the first (and still the only) library in her family’s neighborhood in Juchitán, in Mexico’s southeastern state of Oaxaca (Pineda 2012). Fewer and fewer children in Juchitán grow up speaking fluent Diidxazá. [End Page 145] Meanwhile, Diidxazá vocabulary shrinks under the relentless pressure of Spanish. Irma Pineda and other bilingual Indigenous writers in Mexico describe their literary work as “language rescue,” as well as artistic expression. That dual intent is often unappreciated by Mexico’s wider literary community, which long excluded them. Until recently, Mexican bookstores would shelve Indigenous writers’ fiction, poetry, essays, and drama under “Anthropology” rather than “Mexican Literature.” In a 2008 essay, Irma Pineda explained, “Indigenous Mexican cultures are developing a literature that recovers the cosmovisions and aesthetic values of our own cultures, strengthens our languages by reincorporating archaic words and creating neologisms, and also integrates the concerns of a globalized world with local community reflection” (Pineda 2008, 1). The poems published here are drawn from Pineda’s 2007 poetry collection, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos (Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like River Water), published by Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas (ELIAC), a national Mexican association of Indigenous-language authors. ELIAC began its own publishing house because traditional Mexican publishing houses did not take their members’ literatures seriously (Pineda 2012). Like many of Pineda’s poetry collections, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ has a strong narrative arc; each poem serves as a microchapter in a highly compressed story in poems. It is a collection of persona poems told in two fictional voices from Pineda’s hometown: a person who has immigrated to the United States as an undocumented worker and that person’s partner, who has stayed at home. Pineda’s home community, Juchitán, has experienced heavy outmigration as people leave for jobs in Mexican cities, along the U.S.-Mexico border region, or in the United States. The current migration crisis in the United States—government officials separating families; government officials refusing to allow political, economic, and ecological refugees to apply for asylum; and children housed in cages—makes the poems of Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ urgently important. These persona poems weave a narrative about the physical and emotional challenges of migration under less dire conditions than those we are currently seeing. In the dozen years since these poems were first published in Mexico City, the situation for Pineda’s friends and neighbors who migrate to the United States has grown more awful than we could have imagined. Pineda...

Authorship attribution of Spanish poems using n-grams and the web as corpus

In many areas of professional development, the categorization of textual objects is of critical importance. A prominent example is the attribution of authorship, where symbolic information is manipulated using natural language processing techniques. In this context, one of the main limitations is the necessity of a large number of pre-labeled instances for each author that is to be identified. This paper proposes a method based on the use of n-grams of characters and the use of the web to enrich the training sets. The proposed method considers the automatic extraction of the unlabeled examples from the Web and its iterative integration into the training data set. The evaluation of the proposed approach was done by using a corpus formed by poems corresponding to 5 contemporary Mexican poets. The results presented allow evaluating the impact of the incorporation of new information into the training set, as well as the role played by the selection of classification attributes using information gain.

Translations

Translations of poems in French, German, Italian and Spanish into English.

Plath's Spanish poems and tropes

Although critical attention has focused on Ariel, Sylvia Plath’s earlier poems are also worth examining since they reveal significant details concerning the writer’s evolution towards that final achievement. After getting married in June 1956, Plath and Hughes travelled to Spain and settled in Benidorm for their honeymoon. It is the poems derived from that period and Plath’s response to the alien setting that are analyzed in this paper. The corpus of “Spanish poems” and its most salient motifs will be identified and examined to assess the emotional and artistic response of Plath’s encounter with Spain in her work. A rhetorical analysis of these poems will be carried out but biographical data from Plath’s journals, correspondence and prose will also be considered. Finally, two later poems will be examined to demonstrate that Spain left its imprint in Plath’s mind, supplying suggestive imagery which turned the Spanish landscape into a violent mindscape.

Dai Wangshu’s translations of contemporary Spanish poetry and its application to the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language

This paper is intended to be a study of the translation of the contemporary Spanish poetry by the former Chinese poet Dai Wangshu, and how his translations are used in the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language in China. Dai dedicated his most attention to the poems of the Generation of 27 and the romances of the Spanish Civil War. His love of Spanish poetry wasn't a coincidence but had much to do with his own aesthetic standards, attitude and experience. His translations, which are popular in China, can easily arouse young Chinese students' interest in Spanish poetry and literature, and lead them to the exploration of the original works, enhancing their comprehension of Spanish poems and improving their Spanish as a foreign language.

Apolonio’s Pecado: Kingship and sin in the Libro de Apolonio

The thirteenth-century Spanish poem Libro de Apolonio (LA) shares many features with other works of the cuaderna vía; among them is the frequency with which the personified figure of sin makes its appearance. One finds the word pecado in the opening scene of the LA, where the narrator says that sin, always restless, manages to stir up desire in King Antioco and makes him turn his gaze on his own daughter (6). Soon again, in reference to the same incestuous king, the narrator writes that “metiólo en locura la muebda del pecado” (26). With two early references in the LA to sinful impulses, the narrator suggests that pecado is the root cause of Byzantine-like adventures that take Apolonio across the Mediterranean world. To further underscore its importance, the author uses the word pecado in a variety of contexts a minimum of thirty-one times. Given its near omnipresence, it is essential that one consider the nature and role of sin when interpreting the work. As a window through which to view sin, this essay focuses on the hero’s status as king. If Apolonio is referred to as pilgrim on occasion, it is no less significant that the main character is referred to as king no less than thirty-five times in the work. It could be that the author wants us to bear in mind that we are not dealing with “everyman,” but with a king. By viewing Apolonio in this light, one can proceed to examine his royal performance to assess to what degree his shortcomings might be considered pecado.

Exploring Digital Literacy Practices via L2 Social Reading

This exploratory study analyzes the digital literacy practices that resulted from learner-learner interactions within a virtual environment when collaboratively reading eighteen Spanish poems via a digital annotation tool over a four-week period in a college-level Hispanic literature course. Using an ecological theoretical perspective and centering on the affordance construct (van Lier, 2004), we investigate how linguistic characteristics of the poems affect the nature of learners’ annotations and also analyze how learners’ written comments/annotations change over time when engaging in L2 social reading. Findings suggest that when the lexical diversity of the poems increased, the number of literary affordances that emerged in learners’ annotations decreased. Statistical analyses also revealed that the total number of errors and the lexical diversity of learners’ written annotations did not change when looking at the class as a whole. However, change in writing was noted at the individual learner level. We conclude with a number of pedagogical suggestions regarding the incorporation of digital social reading in L2 environments and offer future avenues for research in this nascent area.

Remembering Paco Ibáñez at the Olympia: A political communitas in exile

In December 1969 the Spanish singer-songwriter Paco Ibáñez gave a concert at the Olympia in Paris to an audience composed of Spanish exiles and French students. Ibáñez’s selection, interpretation, musicalization and performance of a wide range of mainly Spanish poems for the occasion created a text that denounced the policies of Franco and, at the same time, allowed the French part of the audience to express their solidarity in a political cry for freedom. This article begins by situating Ibáñez in exile in France where, avoiding Francoist censorship, he thrived as an anti-Francoist musician. Focusing on the emblematic Olympia concert that epitomizes Ibáñez’s artistic output, the second part of the article analyses the performative text created by the poems chosen and interpreted by Ibáñez together with the audience’s reaction to them. This text, the article argues, encouraged collective struggle in the face of oppression, and the communitas generated that night exemplified it.

‘Epic geography’ of the Cantar de Mio Cid

It is well known that one of the main concerns of medieval Spanish epic poems is topology: the Cantar de Mio Cid is marked by a great regard for geographical detail as observed in its characters’ journeys, its careful annotation of even the simpler toponyms or of the harder ones to localise. The representation of place, however, does not avoid the unique ‘perspective’ that imbues epic discourse from the standpoint of form, content and ideology, since the ‘plausibility’ of settings, landscapes and movements does inextricably coincide with their symbolical and metaphorical value.

Повтор как одно из лексико-синтаксических средств создания единства синтаксического периода в стихотворных переводах Ф.Г. Лорки

Radchenko Galina Ivanovna, Demchenko Valentina Ivanovna In the article on the examples of translation of Spanish poems by the poet F.G. Lorca into Russian addresses the conservation of melody and rhythm of the original in the translation. In connection with membership of the Spanish and Russian languages to the Indo-European group we have ample opportunity to compare syntactic text-forming tools. One of syntactic means to recreate the rhythm of verse is the translations of a period. The period is usually based on the lexical and syntactic parallelism and repetition is made as a complex sentence. Our study showed that in the period of construction, connection parts and members of both Spanish and Russian versions are multilevel repetitive. Although it is possible the construction period and without the use of repetitions based on intonation and the sense of unity of its parts. Different versions can be a syntactic structure and semantic content, which range from the clear superiority of the first part to the harmony parts. Key words : period, repetition, part of the period, period of the members, parallelilizm of syntactic structures.

Through a Veil: Some Propositions Regarding Translation

I first became interested in translation while serving a mission in southern Spain in the early 90’s. The Church came out with a new Spanish translation of the Book of Mormon, and I would spend hours during language and scripture study reading the old and new versions side by side, considering the choices the different translators had made. When I got home from my mission, I started finding poems in Spanish and doing my own translations of them. If I could then find a published translation of the poem, I would compare my version to the other, deciding what I wanted and valued in a translation and trying to learn how I could do better. On a trip back to Spain five years after the end of my mission, I found a book by the poet Rafael Perez Estrada, fell in love with it, and decided to translate and publish it. I was eventually successful in doing so, and since then I’ve published several other book-length translations. I’ve also received several awards, including an Idaho Humanities Council fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (the latest for 2015). My current project is a book of microfictions by the Argentinean author Ana Maria Shua (who I brought to BYU–Idaho to do a reading several years ago). The following distillations constitute some of my current thoughts on literary translation. They stem from my practice, my study, and, to be frank, my own innate predilections and biases. While I believe that these are essentially true and, I hope, meaningful, they are not intended to be comprehensive or dogmatic but should rather be viewed as possibilities, provocations, goads toward productive thought and practice. Few if any of the ideas here are new; I’ve tried to credit sources for specific notions when necessary, and I apologize for any cryptomnesia on my part. To translate is to write. Though translations are derivative works, a translator has written every word of a text that he or she has translated. To translate is to read and write simultaneously, and a good translator must be equally adept at both. You never read a text more closely than when you translate it.

Naturaleza muerta y "vanitas" en la poesía española contemporánea

This article focuses on the analysis of various contemporary Spanish poems that recreate the theme of Still Lifes, in the specific variant of Vanitas. Although these poems can be inserted within the literary tradition of elegiac poetry, they follow more closely the pictorial tradition of Still Lifes, especially developed during the baroque era. These specific poems highlight the visual aspects of the Still Lifes represented, using detailed and accurate descriptions of the objects and the procedure of rhetorical ecfrasis. For example, the descriptions are so vivid one could imagine the degeneration or the corruption of the objects. Based on this idea, the article attempts to explain or justify the possible causes of this thematic recurrence in the current Spanish poetry, and then analyzes the selection of these poems in its fundamental characteristics.

El Niño by John Adams (review)

John Adams. El Nino. DVD. Kent Nagano / Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin. With Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Willard White. Directed by Peter Sellars. [Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2013. 101669. $29.99. John Adams and Peter Sellars have a history of presenting musical theatrical works that take established notions about genre and turn them on their ear. The pair initially rocketed to infamy in 1987 by setting President Nixon's historic 1972 meeting with Mao Tse-tung as an opera. Nixon in China was an immediate success not only for its ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter, but for its postminimalist musical settings as well. Two projects soon followed that engaged ever closer historical events: the opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) about the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro and the song play / Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995) set after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. By the new millennium, Adams and Sellars had charted such a clear trajectory that observers could rightfully expect another CNN opera, as detractors sneeringly termed their work. Then they took a swerve with El Nino. Instead of a fully-staged operatic work on recent events, El Nino was a flexible oratorio, designed to present the Nativity of Jesus Christ either in a concert setting or as a staged work. Here was a major departure, one that aroused many critics' curiosity before the work premiered nine days before Christmas in 2000. It turns out that not that much had changed. Adams and Sellars may have shifted genre and time period, but they were still busy thwarting convention. Instead of taking the Nativity story from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, they elected to present the stoiy from a female point of view. The narrative still proceeds from the Annunciation to Mary through Jesus's birth and on to the Massacre of the Innocents under Herod and the flight to Egypt. However, the texts that relate the story range from the gnostic gospels of the Apocrypha to settings of Latin chant by Hildegard von Bingen to the Spanish poems of Rosario Castellanos. This patchwork of texts provides shifting perspectives and opens up the Nativity to new dimensions and revelations. Sellars's staging of El Nino captures the work's multiple ways of seeing by placing the action in three areas. First are the singers on stage, clad in solid colors with only a chair for a prop. Above them hangs the second area, a giant screen that continually projects a film of extremely shaky footage of modern life that augments the sung text. Rounding out the presentation are dancers who weave among the singers, acting as Greek chorus and expressing the principal characters' inner feelings. …

Return to Commentary: On the Tears of Moses in the Libro de buen amor

This essay explores the significance of what are described as the “tears of Moses” in the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor (“Book of Good Love”). Using digitized corpora , I show how exegesis of this biblical image focused on Pharaoh’s daughter being moved by the weeping of the infant Moses. Her compassion was equated with the bridal and maternal Church lovingly receiving and nourishing the spirit of the Law of Moses as her groom and infant Christ. The Spanish poem parodies these meanings by portraying the relationship between the narrator and his procuress as that of a crying baby being soothed by his mother. In a subversion of the heart-rending cries of Moses being consoled by the Church, the old bawd enables him to seduce the object of his lust by perversely appealing to her maternal compassion.