¡Esperanza de todos!
Y todos con el sol y la mañana
Se juntan en rumor,
En brillo sonreído,
En un aplauso que se va esparciendo
De la gente a la nube,
Del balcón a la espuma que se irisa
Junto al remo en realce
Festivo.
El barullo solar
Remueve de continuo los errantes
Pies que se arrastran con sus transeúntes
En búsqueda y espera.
¿Por dónde la esperanza?
Se aúpan a los árboles los niños,
Crecen entre las hojas.
Se perfilan en júbilo las verjas,
Ya del adolescente.
Un calor inicial, calor temprano
De la más compartida primavera,
Anuncia
La magnitud dichosa del estío.
Sobre el rumor difuso el grito pasa
Lejos ya y disolviéndose,
Blando grito de nadie para nadie.
Llega a flotar un gozo que suaviza,
Si no impide, la discordancia al raso.
¡Batahola de fiesta,
De calor que es amigo,
De gente como bosque,
Bajo el sol multitud centelleante
De sonrisa y mirada,
Tan múltiples que pierden todo rumbo
Por entre tantos cruces
De rayo, savia y multitud que espera!
Esperanza: la esperanza de todos.
Un compás, un desfile,
Invocación, exclamación, loores,
—O nada más requiebros—
Y el río verde que desfila casi
Rojizo, si no sepia,
El río que acompaña
También,
De puente en puente primavera abajo,
Magno río civil de las historias.
¿Por dónde la esperanza?
La multitud se apiña hacia el relumbre,
Todo se estorba en una pleamar
Que se recibe como seña y dádiva
Del estío futuro.
¡Confusión —con un rayo
De sol buído sobre los metales,
Arneses, lentejuelas, terciopelos
De triunfo!
La esperanza valiente
Se interna, se difunde,
Hermosa, general:
Pueblo, compacto pueblo en ejercicio
De salud compartida,
De una salud como festivo don,
Como un lujo que allí se regalase.
Y sobre las aceras,
Algún lento celaje transeúnte.
Y las torres, las torres ataviadas
De simple abril en cierne,
Las torres desde siglos
—Ya sin orgullo— bellas para todos.
¿Por dónde al fin, por dónde?
Todos van juntos a esperar ahora,
Festivos,
A esperar la esperanza.
¡Oh virgen esperanza, si divina,
Tan abrazada al aire,
Y a la voz que más alto se remonta,
Y al silencio de muchos un momento!
Son muchos
A través de un rumor pacificado,
Muchos sobre su paz
De hombres,
En torno a su esperanza
De abril.
Y la sangre circula por los cuerpos,
Eficaz sin deber de sacrificio,
Sangre por esta espera.
¡Qué profunda la hora y matutina,
Feliz engalanada
Con su simple verdad primaveral!
Y se Cruzan los vivas,
Altos vivas radiantes.
Bajo el azul, de súbito . . . ¿Silencio?
Un vítor. ¡Vítor! La ovación en acto
De pura convergencia soleada.
¿Un coro? No. Mejor:
Abril común sobre una sola tierra,
¡Abril!
Es posible una vez
Enriquecerse en gozo por la suma
De tanto ajeno gozo,
Por la acumulación conmovedora
De claridad y espera:
En el aire un futuro
Libre, libre de muerte
—O con vida en la muerte, más allá.
¡Esperanza en la vida inacabable
Para mí, para todos,
Vía libre a las horas!
Grito hacia sol, raudal, nivel de fiesta:
La multitud se ahinca en su alegría,
Y todo se reúne,
Feraz.
¡Esperanza de todos!

After a long delay caused by the pandemic, the beautiful Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (edited by Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Caroline Egan. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2022) appeared in May of this year. My essay “Time of Catastrophe: Temporalities in the Transatlantic Relación of Diego Portichuelo de Ribadeneyra (1657)” includes a review of literature on early modern Spanish maritime texts and an analysis of Portichuelo de Ribadeneyra’s conscious shaping of time and space in his autobiographical nonfictional narrative.

In conjunction with the #TwitterMigration, I have recently opened a new social media site on hcommons.social (as in, Humanities Commons). This is a site that is linked to the Mastodon universe, but particularly suited to a dyed-in-the-wool Humanities professor like myself. You can find me at: @marineraentierra@hcommons.social

Members of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry have just zoomed a choral reading of the “Cántico espiritual” (San Juan de la Cruz). We had readers from the U.S., Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Romania, Scotland, England, and probably other countries that I’m forgetting! It was marvelous. An incredibly moving experience. Thanks to the organizers of this event! #CancioneroDeAbril #SRBHP

Professor Davis has organized a special session on “El mar y sus metáforas: Navegando la poesía hispánica del siglo XVII” for the XIV Biennial Conference of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, to be held at the University of California – Irvine, October 17-19, 2019. This session, dedicated to the memory of Alicia de Colombí-Monguió (1943-2019), will meet on Friday, October 18 at 1:30-3:10 p.m. in the Humanities Instructional Building, 135. Please join us if you happen to be in the Irvine area!
Speakers include:
Jimena N. Rodríguez, University of California Los Angeles. “En sus refranes tiene el marinero brújula, rumbo, estrella y derrotero: El Refranero delmar y el imaginario del océano”
Juan Vitulli, University of Notre Dame. “No es sordo el mar. Reconstruyendo la poética de Hernando Domínguez Camargo”
Ana Laguna, Rutgers University, Camden. “A Shipwrecked Journey to Parnassus”
Elizabeth Davis, The Ohio State University. “Navegar por Tierrafirme hacia el Puerto de Belén. Transatlantic Villancicos sung for the Matins of the Birth of Christ our Lord (Sevilla and New Spain, 1646-1681).”

Dr. Davis has recently published the following article in the peer-reviewed journal eHumanista, Vol. 40 (2018): 331-353.

“Heading For Constantinople: Typecast Muslims in the Spanish Mediterranean (1492-1615)”

This essay tracks the course of persistent representational strategies used by early modern Spanish writers to depict a Muslim “other” whom they had come to view as an antagonist. Some of the most repetitive typecasting for the Islamic foe evolves but also carries over from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. The text set includes El Abencerraje, Juan Rufo’s epic La Austriada, and several of Cervantes’ captivity texts.

CENTER OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES: MEDREN 5194
DEPT. OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE: SPAN 7520
TITLE: Early Modern Spanish Life Writing and the Picaresque Novel
MEETING TIME & PLACE: T – 5:30-8:15 p.m., Hagerty Hall 455
INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Elizabeth Davis

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Recent theories of autobiography posit a theatrical and discursive construction of the self that takes place in the process of writing the autobiographical text. Interestingly, some of these features already appear in early modern Lives (Vidas) and in fictional pseudo life stories of the period, such as the Spanish picaresque novel. In this course, we will look at early modern life writing, including fictional and non-fictional narratives from Spain and her distant colonies, from the perspective of the aforementioned theories. The course will be taught in English, using translations (as close to contemporary as possible) of the Spanish novels, some of which are very curious in themselves. For example, there is an abridged version of La Pícara Justina, one of the few picaresque novels with a female protagonist, rendered into English as The Spanish Jilt by one Captain James Stevens in 1707, that claims to be “not a translation, but an extract of “all that is good and diverting in the original,” omitting all that is “unsavory.” Students may decide to find out which “distasteful” parts Stevens left out, and why. Because of the nature of the books in this course—both the early Spanish editions of the novels and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translations—, students can expect to consult the magnificent Cervantes Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Thompson Library. Working with interconnected versions of the different novels should offer students an exciting opportunity to do library work related to the history of the book as they develop their course paper.

To ground our analysis of pseudo-autobiographies in the conventions of actual early modern life writing, we will open the course by reading the life narrative of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, a member of a high noble family who went to England in perilous times and was imprisoned there for Catholic proselytizing. Most of the course, however, will deal with the picaresque novel, a type of fictional narration that focuses on the inglorious side of imperial Spain: the stories of impoverished waifs and beggars, tricksters and scoundrels, sex workers and adventurers. In addition to the primary texts, students will read a sampling of theoretical articles and case studies on life writing and autobiography, and an important scholarly monograph on the debates about the causes and potential remedies for poverty in Spain at the time. The first fictional work we will take up is the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, which some critics consider a “precursor” to more canonical exemplars of the picaresque genre, such as Mateo Aleman’s The Rogue (Guzmán de Alfarache), Francisco de Quevedo’s The Grifter (El Buscón), and The Spanish Jilt, mentioned above. Miguel de Cervantes never wrote a picaresque novel, but he did write two short pieces of fiction that participate in the picaresque genre. We will read both “Rinconete and Cortadillo” and “Dialogue between Scipio and Berganze, dogs of the Hospital of the Resurrection in the city of Valladolid” in this course. Finally, students will see how Spain’s picaresque novel “goes transatlantic” by reading a recent translation of The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez, The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th-Century Pirates, one of several well-known picaresque-style narratives situated and written in Latin America. For the final project, students will carry out research that might lead to an in-depth analysis of a particular picaresque novel, or a comparison between one of these and another kind of life writing, such as that of Spanish soldiers (see Miguel Martínez, Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World). Because the Spanish picaresque was influential for authors like Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, Byron and Dickens, it is easy to envision a final research paper that is comparative or interdisciplinary in nature.