4—
Herrera and the Return to Style

In the years following the publication of Boscán's and Garcilaso's works, the latter's self-proclaimed status as the national heir to Virgil and Petrarch became widely recognized. As he was assimilated to these illustrious predecessors, he was also increasingly proclaimed a model for successors. Garcilaso's double role, as uniquely canonized poet and as stylistic model, is the underlying theme of the Anotaciones , Fernando de Herrera's massive commentary on his poetry. On the one hand, through glosses on Garcilaso's sources, Herrera (ca. 1534–1597) attempts to decenter him by locating him in a broad canon of models and imitators, including Herrera himself; on the other, he presents through his comments on Garcilaso's generic and rhetorical techniques a stylistically oriented theory of poetry. Garcilaso's example becomes the source of Herrera's own poetry, in which he uses intertextual allusion to locate himself as the latest heir and fruit of a poetic tradition that began with the ancients, was revived by Petrarch, and was naturalized by Garcilaso.

The Academic Canonization of Garcilaso

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the coalescing perception of modernity and the growth of national consciousness led to the formulation of national literary canons. Although some acknowledged the medieval poetic tradition, in all Garcilaso was granted a unique status as a rival to Petrarch, the only national poet worthy of imitation and the aristocratic hero who had succeeded in combining the practice of literature with military glory. In the preceding chapters, we saw the gradual canonization of Garcilaso, first as a distinguished courtier and linguistic role-model (Valdés), later as the culmination of efforts to reform Spanish lyric (Boscán) and as

the Spanish Orpheus and the fulfillment of Virgil, Ovid, and Petrarch (Garcilaso himself). While there had been aristocratic authors before him, it was only the exemplum of Garcilaso's life, as Russell noted, that finally healed the breach between poetry and "a strong body of opinion which regarded it as both professionally risky and socially unbecoming for any member of the knightly class" (47; for documentation of Garcilaso's fame as both warrior and poet, see Gallego Morell, "Garcilaso de la Vega en los 'Cronistas'"). Even reactionary writers such as Cristóbal de Castillejo (ca. 1494–1550), who opposed the adoption of Italian forms, advanced the canonization by singling out Garcilaso and Boscán for blame (190–93). Writers of the next generation make even more explicit the parallels between Garcilaso and Petrarch, but also appropriate his example to diverse ends; we shall examine three quite different texts, each of which promotes the canonization of Garcilaso.

Like Castillejo, Gonzalo Argote de Molina (1549–ca. 1596) regretted the neglect of the old Spanish forms. His Discurso sobre la poesía castellana (1st ed. 1575), a treatise rather than an actual oration, divides into sections based on the verse forms being discussed; the first deals with "La copla castellana redondilla" or octosyllable.^[1] Contesting Boscán's "A la duquesa de Soma," Argote characterizes this form as the most ancient and assigns it a genealogy including the Greeks in ancient times and, in modern days, the French (Ronsard is specifically named), the Italians, and the Basques, but the Spanish have made the most perfect use of it. It is the verse form used in the ballads in which the heroes of Castile are celebrated, and Argote defends its capacity for ornament, declaring it "compostura cierto graciosa, dulce, y de agradable facilidad, y capaz de todo el ornato que qualquier verso muy grave puede tener, si se les persuadiesse esto a los poetas deste tiempo que cada dia le van olvidando, por la gravedad y artificio de las rimas Ytalianas" (a composition that is certainly gracious, sweet, agreeably simple, and capable of all the ornaments a much graver verse could have, if one could convince the poets of our time, who neglect it more each day, in favor of the gravity and artifice of the Italian genres, 31). Argote also discusses "versos grandes," twelve to fourteen syllables long; some old Italian poems also use the form, but Argote believes it to be of Arabic origin and (confusing these two nations) quotes a Turkish poem

to support this claim. Likewise he mentions "versos mayores," also neglected by contemporary poets in spite of their genuinely Spanish character.

Yet although Argote laments the neglect of these medieval Castilian forms, he acknowledges that only the hendecasyllable, or "verso Ytaliano," has brought greatness. Again countering Boscán, he asserts a Spanish origin for the form, quoting Mosén Jordi's version of Petrarch's "Pace non trovo . . . ," misdating it to 1250, and then claiming it was Petrarch's source.^[2] More correctly, he disputes Boscán by pointing to Santillana's sonnets, nearly forgotten in the sixteenth century. Leaving aside the question of priority, the Spanish have in any case surpassed the Italians; the hendecasyllable,

al cabo de algunos siglos que andava desterrado de su naturaleza ha buelto a España, donde a sido bien rescebido y tractado como natural; y aun se puede dezir que en nuestra lengua, por la elegancia y dulçura della, es mas liso y sonoro que alguna vez paresce en la Ytaliana. (43)

after all the centuries of exile, has returned to Spain, where it has been well received and treated as a native; and it can even be said that in our language, because of its elegance and sweetness, it is smoother and more sonorous than it ever seemed in Italian.

This achievement, however, is due to Garcilaso, "que en la dulçura y lindeza de conceptos, y en el arte y elegancia no deve nada al Petrarcha, ni a los de mas excelentes poetas de Ytalia" (who in the sweetness and beauty of concepts, and in skill and elegance owes nothing to Petrarch or to the other great poets of Italy, 44). Thus Argote attempts to relieve Spanish poets of any debt to Petrarch and the Italians, though at the cost of setting up Garcilaso as a national counter-model. As far as the characteristics of the hendecasyllable are concerned, Argote, echoing Boscán, finds it learned, grave, and receptive to all sorts of ornaments and figures; among all kinds of poetry, it is the most worthy of the term "heroic." Thus while he agrees with Castillejo that the chief virtue of the traditional forms is their hispanicity, this decreases in value if the hendecasyllable too can claim to be legitimately Spanish.

With its genre-by-genre arrangement, Argote's treatise looks back to Encina and anticipates the return to systematic poetics in the subsequent decades; he also demonstrates an unusual acquaintance

with French poetry. His judgments are balanced: he feels a certain nostalgia for the traditional genres but gives the Italian forms their due; and while he asserts the historical precedence of Santillana's efforts, he concedes that Boscán and Garcilaso had to reintroduce the sonnet and that Garcilaso surpassed not only Santillana, but his Italian models as well—an important concession from one intent on not setting up an exclusive canon. Boscán and Garcilaso are recognized for effecting a radical transformation of Spanish poetry, the former as an important historical link, and the latter as the preeminent poet whose achievements eclipsed all predecessors, both Italian and Spanish, thus sealing the success of the new genres and becoming both model and measuring rod for his contemporaries and successors. The "heroism" of the hendecasyllable is particularly striking because Argote's examples come from lyric rather than epic sources, suggesting that to him the sonnet is the modern equivalent of the epic in the hierarchy of genres, and that Garcilaso's use of it provides the evidence for resolving, in Spain's favor, the cultural rivalry with Italy.

Argote presents Garcilaso as the only Spaniard who could compete with the Italians; in him alone was the translatio achieved. El Brocense (Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, 1523–1601) further elevates Garcilaso to canonical status through his 1574 edition of the poet's works. Indeed, by designating him a writer deserving of textual revision and commentary, El Brocense classicizes him by the very act of exercising the humanist hermeneutic upon his works. In his preface, El Brocense counters those who complain about his documentation of Garcilaso's borrowings by declaring,

[N]o tengo por buen poeta al que no imita los excelentes antiguos. Y si me preguntan, porqué entre tantos millares de Poetas, como nuestra España tiene, tan pocos se pueden contar dignos deste nombre, digo, que no ay otra razon, sino porque les faltan las ciencias, lenguas, y dotrina para saber imitar. Ningun Poeta Latino ay, que en su genero no aya imitado a otros. (Opera omnia , 4.36)

I do not esteem as a good poet one who has not imitated the best of the ancient authors. And if I am asked why, among the thousands of poets we have in Spain, so few are worthy of the name, I would say that there is no other reason, but that they lack the science, languages, and learning to know how to imitate. There are no Latin poets who did not, in their genres, imitate others.

As El Brocense thus differentiates between Garcilaso and the mass of others, he redefines him as a learned rather than courtly poet. He also clarifies his understanding of imitation as a process within generic categories, but across boundaries of time and language; citing (as had Federico Fregoso in the Cortegiano ) the hoary example of Virgil and Homer, his language betrays the concern with military conquest that is at the root of the translatio:

Ansi como es muestra de grandes fuerzas sacar de las manos de Hercules la maza, y quedarse con ella; ansi tomar a Homero sus versos y hacerlos propios, es erudicion, que a pocos se comunica. Lo mismo se puede decir de nuestro Poeta, que aplica y traslada los versos y sentencias de otros Poetas tan a su proposito, y con tanta destreza, que ya no se llaman agenos, sino suyos; y mas gloria merece por esto, que no si de su cabeza los compusiera. (ibid.)

Just as it is a sign of great strength to take his club from the hands of Hercules and keep it, so to take from Homer his verses and make them one's own is erudition, which is given to few. The same can be said of our poet, who applies and transfers the verses and thoughts of other poets for his own ends, with such skill that they are no longer alien, but his; and this deserves even greater glory than if he had composed them in his own head.

El Brocense also defends his treatment of Garcilaso by pointing to the example of the Italian commentaries on Ariosto and Sannazaro; just as they had succeeded in canonizing those authors, so he proposes to do the same for Garcilaso (4.37). Indeed, he achieves his aim in the commentary proper, as he reinforces Garcilaso's stature by situating him, through a restricted genealogy of sources, among Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Sannazaro, Ariosto, Bembo, and Bernardo Tasso (see Javitch, "Shaping"). That this view subjected El Brocense to the censure of others such as Jerónimo de Lomas Cantoral (who declared, "solo hieren al que à dado / el mundo justo Lauro y digno assiento" [they only injure him who gave to the world a just laurel and a worthy location], quoted in Coster, 56) points to the split between those who continued to subscribe to the aesthetics of sprezzatura and those who seek to improve the language by neo-Ciceronian means.^[3]

Clearly El Brocense was influenced by Ciceronian theories of imitation and attempted to prove that Garcilaso was a relatively Ci-

ceronian imitator. The ultimate step in the canonization process can be found in the brief treatise "Discurso sobre la lengua castellana," by Ambrosio de Morales (1513–1591).^[4] As a literary oration, Morales's work is Ciceronian in genre and style as well as ideology. His purpose is to encourage the cultivation of Spanish letters, and his first step is to argue for the legitimacy of literary studies by citing the familiar example of the Greeks and the Romans, who did not scorn the development of their native linguistic skills. Thus Plutarch continued to write in Greek after many years' residence in Rome, and Cicero through his power of speech became preeminent in the political arena, while translating the best of the Greek philosophers into Latin. Morales also draws parallels between the ancients and the modern-day Italians, "exercitándose todos con gran cuydado en su lenguaje; y aunque saben los que entre ellos son doctos, el Latín por excelencia, escriven muy poco en esta lengua y muy mucho en la suya" (exercising themselves with such care for their language, that although the learned among them have excellent Latin, they write little in this language and much more in their own, 181). As further instances of this dedication to the mother tongue, he points to the discussion in the Cortegiano over whether Petrarch or Boccaccio should be the correct model, and to Bembo, who wrote a book dedicated specifically to the codification and improvement of the Italian language. There are no learned men in Italy who do not dedicate themselves to the illustration of their language, learning Greek and Latin only "para tener llaves con que puedan abrir los thesoros de entrambos, y enriquescer su vulgar con tales despojos" (to have keys with which they can open both treasures, and enrich their vernacular with these spoils, 181).

One may question Morales's actual familiarity with the Italian situation: there were indeed many Italians who wrote not in the vernacular but in Latin, and the adoption of the vernacular was the subject of, if anything, greater controversy in Italy than in Spain. Moreover, his representation of the linguistic discussion in the Cortegiano is, as Terracini points out (Lingua come problema , 170), a singularly Bembist one. Despite these errors, Morales represents the Italians, along with the Romans and the Greeks, as models of a people who cultivated their own language; he brings them into the "Discurso" only to contrast with the Spanish. Most of Morales's examples are taken from Cicero, Quintilian, and Bembo, and they pro-

vide an ideologically appropriate introduction for the exposition of his theory of an educated language.

This topic takes up the next section of the "Discurso"; here, Morales argues for a middle path between vulgarity and affectation. In the 1546 version of the "Discurso," the latter seemed the greater threat, and Morales concedes that some writers sin by using foreign words and new ways of speaking that few understand, only because they desire to be different from others, and not from a wish to speak the same language with greater prudence and care (183). Such people give linguistic cultivation a bad name, for true eloquence such as Cicero's comes not from the use of unusual words but from craft in the selection and arrangement of everyday vocabulary to attain grace, variety, melody and sweetness in the sounds, and the like. True elegance could not be further from affectation:

¿Y este pulir desta manera la habla quán ageno, quán differente, y quán contrario es de la affectación? El cielo y la tierra, lo blanco y lo negro, lo claro y lo escuro, no están más lexos de ser una cosa, que éstas dos de juntarse, o parescerse. Pero tanto no condenemos en nuestro lenguaje el cuydado del bien hablar, sino dolámonos de ver que estamos tan fuera de quererlo y saberlo hazer, que tenemos por mal hecho aun sólo intentarlo, y lo que sería gran virtud y excelencia, culpamos con o vicio y fealdad. (184)

This polishing of speech: how alien, how different, how contrary is it to affectation? Sky and earth, black and white, clear and murky are not farther from being the same thing than are these two from joining or resembling each other. Therefore let us not condemn the dedication to good speech in our language, but instead lament that we are so far from desiring and knowing how to do it, that we hold it wrong even to attempt it, and that that which should be a great virtue and excellence, we blame as a vice or a blemish.

Subject matter, too, has contributed to the lack of literary development; echoing Nebrija and Garcilaso, Morales grants that books written in Spanish have attained great popularity, but declares them to be of no interest to the learned. Indeed, their despair has not been without cause, for nothing is written in Castilian save love stories and fables (186). As a result, Spanish literature has earned the same contempt that Diogenes Laertius had for perfumes when he cursed "los hombres desonestos y afeminados, que por usar mal

de cosa tan preciosa, han hecho que los hombres virtuosos no puedan honestamente gozar della" (unchaste and effeminate men, who by misusing something so precious, have made it such that virtuous men cannot honestly take pleasure in it, 186).

Morales's emphasis on the dangers of affectation shows the influence of Castiglionian aesthetics even as he adopts a more strictly Bembist/Ciceronian position on questions of style. The Castiglionian rejection of affectation is balanced by Morales's choice of a monologic genre and the Ciceronian style in which it is written. Genre and style are as much signs of Morales's ideology as his actual arguments; in place of the give-and-take of interlocutors, opposing views are reduced to silence, the ultimate Ciceronian hell, and survive only by implication. Similarly, Valdés's reliance on his own colloquial speech, "sin afetación ninguna escrivo como hablo" (without any affectation I write as I speak, 154), gives way to a style in which the ersatz orality of oratory apes writing. Moreover, it is difficult to tell what affectations Morales rejects, for while he pleads for an everyday, common vocabulary, he had earlier praised the Italians for incorporating into their language "despojos," booty taken from Latin and Greek, thus indicating an openness to neologisms and loanwords.

Indeed, whatever it was that prompted this section of the "Discurso," in the later, revised version the condemnation of affectation is preceded by an expanded discussion of the dangers of untutored speech. While affectation is a consequence of ambition, carelessness (descuydo ) is the result of the lack of pride in their language shown by the Spaniards, who treat it instead with scorn and vituperation (181–82). Believing that as nature teaches language, she is the mistress of its perfection, Spaniards hold anything that departs from common usage to be a vile affectation, and they reserve care and dedication for the study of Greek and Latin, overlooking the distinctions among the speech of rustics, of city dwellers, and of courtiers. The Romans took care that children learn language from a woman because women are more conservative in their usage; would such care be necessary if eloquence came naturally? Nature needs the help of art:

[A]yudada naturaleza con el mejor uso, saca más ventaja y perfeción. ¿Pues qué los otros que todo lo tienen en Castellano por affectado? Éstos quieren condenar nuestra lengua a un estraño abatimiento, y

como enterrarla biva, donde miserablemente se corrompa y pierda todo su lustre, su lindeza y hermosura. . . . Yo no digo que afeytes nuestra lengua Castellana, sino que le laves la cara. No le pintes en el rostro, mas quítale la suziedad. No la vistas de bordados ni recamos, mas no le mengües un buen atavío de vestido, que aderece con gravedad. (182)

When nature is helped with good practice, it gains profit and perfection. So what of the others who hold everything in Castilian affected? They want to condemn our language to a strange decline, and to bury it alive, where it will miserably decompose and lose all its luster, its beauty, its handsomeness. . . . I do not say you should powder our language, but wash its face. Do not paint its countenance, but take away the dirt. Do not dress it with brocades and embroidery, but do not begrudge it good clothing so that it may dress with gravity.

In this series of highly repetitive, conventional, and sometimes contradictory metaphors, one can see Morales groping for an appropriate way to express the balance between nature and art. Most of them are subtractive: good speech is pure, like mother's milk, clean, free of cosmetics, and polished. But to deprive language of embellishment is also to take away its beauty and to bury it alive. Through the comparison to perfume, something naturally pleasing in itself but abhorrent when used by effeminate men, Morales tries to give language an element of masculinity, perhaps to counterbalance the earlier remarks about the mother tongue. Morales also appeals to masculinity and in particular to the aristocracy through his use of examples drawn from the lives of noble Romans to support his argument, and through the military word despojo .

In addition to the general suspicion with which Spaniards regard any attempts to ornament the language, Morales sees one other cause for this lamentable state of affairs: the lack of examples to imitate. In the closing section of the "Discurso" he attempts to extricate the language from this situation by pointing to those few Spanish writers who could indeed serve as models. His principal interest is in prose, and the models range from the fifteenth-century Fernando del Pulgar to Boscán's translation of the Cortegiano . Morales then addresses lyric poetry, praising Boscán for having introduced to Spanish a variety of genres, such that it is in no way inferior to Italian. These borrowings would be of little value, however, if it were not for Garcilaso:

Luz muy esclarescida de nuestra nación, que ya no se contentan sus obras con ganar la victoria y el despojo de la Toscana, sino con lo mejor de lo Latino traen la competencia, y no menos que con lo muy precioso de Virgilio y Horacio se enrriquescen. (187)

The most splendid light of our nation, whose works no longer content themselves with victories and spoils from the Tuscans, but now compete with the best of the Latin, and enrich themselves with nothing less than the most precious of Virgil and Horace.

On their face, these words, first published in the 1546 edition and then retained forty years later, imply an end to the cultural struggle with Italy and the relationship of inferiority it engendered; the Spanish have now matched the modern Italians and compete directly with the classics. Yet the praise of Garcilaso is belied by the spirit of competition with Italy that permeates the entire "Discurso", and which was its point of departure. The paucity of acceptable models reinforces the sense of inferiority and recalls the terms of Garcilaso's preface to the Cortegiano translation. Paradoxically, Morales's work thus betrays an enormous contempt for Spanish letters, and even as it condemns this contempt in others, it reaffirms it. He has nothing to say about the repeated attempts of writers from the time of Nebrija on to ennoble Spanish; no poets before Boscán are mentioned, and none after Garcilaso.^[5] This neglect is particularly striking when one remembers that this is no simple list of good writers, rather, a list of authors to be imitated in an exclusive way. Moreover, the position of Spanish relative to Italian and the classics is only potentially one of equality; Boscán did his best by importing the genres, but in terms of actual achievements other than Garcilaso's, it lags behind.

Yet despite his criticism Morales does not, as did Nebrija, Valdés, and especially Boscán, offer any radical alternatives. On the contrary, as a Ciceronian his position is hyperconservative: his call for greater erudition and care does not involve a rejection of courtly ideals, as shown by his repeated praise for Castiglione's book; and the inclusion of Garcilaso, in a canon limited largely to historians and other prose writers, affirms his unique status among humanists and courtiers alike. Most important of all, Garcilaso's role as the singular model shows, as early as 1546, the potential fossilization of the Spanish Petrarchist tradition. What had begun as a movement

to open poetry to new forms and new diction threatens to become a restricted, official code for lyric poetry.

By the final quarter of the sixteenth century Garcilaso had emerged as the prince of Spanish poets and the national rival to Petrarch. Yet attempts such as Morales's to legitimize Spanish literature only reveal a deep pessimism, according to which Garcilaso's accomplishments were unique, while the rest of Spanish literature remained backward. When he expressed a national feeling of inferiority to Italy, Morales was not only echoing the trope of Spanish belatedness but also using it to raise Garcilaso to the status of a Cicero or a Petrarch, someone whose attainments would only with difficulty be equated. To Amado Alonso, Morales's emphasis on amelioration of the language and on the use of literary models makes him an early champion of artistic hegemony over the language (88–93). Yet it is not at all clear that Morales has an aesthetic rather than a utilitarian purpose in championing good usage, and his biographical situation shows how Garcilaso could be appropriated by groups other than Boscán's courtly circle of readers.^[6] In the 1546 edition of the "Discurso," published only three years after Garcilaso's works and at the beginning of his time at Alcalá, Morales emphasizes the dangers of affectation; but by 1586, at the end of his academic and bureaucratic career, the lack of cultivation seems the greater danger. In such a context Garcilaso was valuable as a model who could demonstrate the need for erudition and especially for the kind of education that the universities dispensed and Morales himself possessed. El Brocense too had ties to both the nobility and the university: in his childhood he was a page to the Portuguese king, John III, and later a courtier to Philip II's first wife, Maria; and although he gave up the court for the university, he continued to have friends in high places who effectively protected him from the Inquisition until 1600 (see Bell, 27–58, esp. 30–31). Through their representations of Garcilaso, both Morales and El Brocense seek to appropriate his example to legitimize a university education as a source of linguistic excellence; Garcilaso's canonization, expressed in Castiglionian and Ciceronian terms, rested on the analogous pillars of the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, and the academy.

At a time in which, as Lynch put it (2.15), the king was his own chief civil servant, Morales's interest in prose may be due to the need for better writers in the royal bureaucracy; Donisotti, in his

introduction to Bembo, speculated on a similar motivation for the Italian's Ciceronianism (35–37). Moreover, that a discussion of Boscán's translation as a model for prose leads Morales into the topic of poetry shows the association in his mind between the Cortegiano and the Spanish Petrarchist school, as well as the latter's status as the preferred form of lyric poetry. Morales's cultural formalism parallels the political formalism of Philip II, in whose reign the forms but not the substance of Charles V's imperial system were perpetuated: where the peripatetic Charles had tried to be, in his person or through viceregal appointments often drawn from his own family, the ruler of each of his separate realms, Philip increasingly subordinated his realms to a bureaucracy based in Castile.^[7] With the reduction of the status of Italy to one resembling a colony, the usefulness of Italian culture as an indication of the monarchy's internationalism naturally declined, while the perceived cultural superiority of the Italians rankled all the more.

Yet the hurdle posed by the canonization of Garcilaso was not only social. The initial canon, with its basis in limited ideological, linguistic, and literary criteria, easily posed a challenge to later writers. By emphasizing the importance of canonic imitation and citing Garcilaso as the only model for poets, El Brocense and Morales succeed in turning him into a strong, blocking poet and burden Spanish poets with an added degree of poetic belatedness, as they must struggle not only against Petrarch and the Italians but against one of their own compatriots, now dead for fifty years. For a revisionist, paradoxical response to that challenge, we must turn away from the academy and to another poet, Fernando de Herrera, and his Anotaciones .

Herrera's Anotaciones I: Decentering Garcilaso

Garcilaso's canonization, grounded in both aesthetic and sociolinguistic criteria, only increased the burden on a socially marginal successor such as Fernando de Herrera. In his Anotaciones , or notes to Garcilaso's work (1580), Herrera tried to make room for himself in this highly restricted canon by redefining it, so that Garcilaso was no longer at its center. Doing so meant using the commentary in a subversive way, for commentaries were most often employed, as by

El Brocense, as paratexts that promoted canonization. Herrera, however, took advantage of the opportunities offered by the commentary as a genre to put forward a version of literary history that is a carefully crafted fiction used for polemical purposes. His notes attempt to widen the reader's intertextual location of Garcilaso's poetry, while the profusion of source citations undermines the poet's image as a courtier whose poems were acts of sprezzatura; instead Herrera appropriates him as a predecessor for the learned kind of poetry that he himself writes. At the same time the nature of Herrera's proposed sources challenged the narrow kind of imitation and canonization championed by El Brocense. Herrera seized the opportunity to quote sources and analogues, inserting himself into the intertext through the inclusion of translations of classical poetry and quotations of his own poems, as well as through the very quantity of annotations, which dwarfs the original texts. Moreover, the overly learned citations have a countereffect, as the mass of contradictory information subverts the very notion of authority and thus of canonicity. This interpretation of the Anotaciones finds support in the responses of contemporary readers.

As Herrera found, a move to displace Garcilaso was viewed as an attack on the forces controlling the canon. These were principally the Castilian nobility, who could claim Garcilaso as one of their own, a warrior who, by fighting against the Turks, was a modern crusader and thus linked national identity (war against Muslims), literary achievement (ascendancy over Italy), and the new empire. It also included the authorities at the Universities of Salamanca and Alcalá, who since Nebrija had been asserting their control over the Castilian dialect, which was itself achieving linguistic hegemony throughout Spain.^[8] Herrera, as an Andalusian autodidact of unknown origins, was thoroughly excluded from both groups.^[9] The controversy surrounding the reception of the commentary thus demonstrates both Herrera's poetic struggle against an overwhelming predecessor and the social dimensions of the conflict over control of the literary language. Garcilaso's canonization, joined to the continuing sense of Spanish belatedness, resulted in both a crisis for vernacular humanism and a multiple threat to Herrera. While Garcilaso's fame as a courtier and a military hero may have made poetry respectable for the nobility, it also threatened to make it their prerogative; it is no accident that from the time of Valdés, Garcilaso—a nobleman and

a Castilian—had been invoked as a linguistic authority Thus Herrera's attack is not so much directed against Garcilaso, whose ameliorating effect on the language Herrera must admire, but against the notion of a canon, the ideologies that govern its formation, and the institutions that control it. In order to reduce Garcilaso's presence, Herrera attempts to alter the reader's conception of Garcilaso as a perfect soldier-poet, turning him instead into a scholar more like Herrera himself, and less the original and unique figure presented in Morales's Discurso . That this was Herrera's intent was recognized and resisted by his earliest readers; the passion of the defenses of Garcilaso by "Prete Jacopín" (pseudonym for Juan Fernández de Velasco, d. 1613) and Tomás Tamayo de Vargas (1588–1641), among others, underlines the poet's special position in the canon and attests to the radical nature of Herrera's views.^[10]

Herrera himself is quite forthright about his intention to replace the ideal of the courtier-poet. The preface to the Anotaciones presents the humanist aim of educating the young, "para que no se pierda la poesía española en la oscuridad de la ignorancia" (so that Spanish poetry not be lost in the darkness of ignorance, 307), as had writers from Nebrija to Morales.^[11] But shortly thereafter, in the very first note, Herrera connects this very darkness to the profession of arms:

[L]os españoles, ocupados en las armas con perpetua solicitud hasta acabar de restituir su reino a la religión cristiana, no pudiendo entre aquel tumulto y rigor de hierro acudir a la quietud y sosiego de estos estudios, quedaron por la mayor parte ajenos de su noticia; y a pena pueden difícilmente ilustrar las tinieblas de la oscuridad, en que se hallaron por tan largo espacio de años. (313)

The Spanish, occupied exclusively by arms until they had finished restoring their kingdom to the Christian religion, unable amid that struggle and the clash of iron to heed the quiet and solace of these studies, remained for the most part far from [poetry's] regard. Barely and only with difficulty can they light up the darkness in which they found themselves for so many years.

In a manner typical of the commentary, this important statement is buried halfway into the first note; here, Herrera tries to combine the conventional rhetoric of the preface with the assertion that it is impossible to be both a warrior (as were Garcilaso and, of course,

the condestable Fernández de Velasco) and a true man of letters. It is with this subversive idea that Herrera begins his revisionary account of Garcilaso's place in the canon.

Equally subversive are Herrera's techniques, for to accomplish his displacement of Garcilaso he takes advantage of several features of the commentary as a genre. As Javitch shows (Proclaiming , 3–10, 48–70; idem, "The Shaping"), commentaries on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso were written specifically to promote canonization through the careful citation of select sources, an effect copied by El Brocense and also achieved by E. K.'s glosses on Spenser. Because of these precedents and the associations of a commentary with classical scholarship and the study of canon law, Herrera's work would seem to be underlining Garcilaso's canonical stature. By its very nature, however, a commentary creates what Berman called a coming-and-going (90), a centrifugal effect disrupting the reading of the original by drawing attention away from the source text commented upon, and directing it instead to the annotations as an alternate text. Thus capitalizing on the genre's agonistic possibilities, Herrera attempts through these notes to replace the restricted canon El Brocense had earlier created. The new, open canon in turn poses a challenge to the very notions of literary authority and canonicity.

Herrera utilizes these features of the commentary in several ways. His primary technique is to redefine the readers' notion of Garcilaso's intertextuality, not only by emphasizing the degree to which he imitated earlier poets, but by also expanding the canon of sources. For example, with little or no introduction (e.g., "la imitación es de" [it is an imitation of]), he glosses three lines from Garcilaso's sonnet 7 with two quotes from Propertius, one from Tibullus, and another one from Bembo (Anotaciones , 334–35). For other lines in the poem he gives references to Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Bernardo Tasso, and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (328–34); El Brocense had cited only Horace and Tasso (267), and Tamayo later limited himself to an emendation of the text (600). Similarly, he provides for sonnet 11 references to Petrarch, Gerolamo Muzio, Virgil, Claudian, and Tasso (342–44), while El Brocense made references only to Virgil and Sannazaro (268), and Tamayo again only edited the text (602).

El Brocense, by his restricted canon, sought to identify Garcilaso as a practitioner of Ciceronian/Petrarchan imitation; while Herrera's citations are recognizably from the same tradition of source criti-

cism, their effect is different from that of the other commentaries, and they must be put in the context of a correct understanding of Renaissance imitation theory and poetic practice. It is a commonplace of Renaissance scholarship that the use of sources is not in itself derogatory; yet as we saw, El Brocense himself was criticized for emphasizing Garcilaso's use of imitation. Although Herrera does not directly enter the debate over the proper way to imitate, by stressing the diverse sources for Garcilaso's poetry he points in the direction of a more eclectic approach to imitation, espoused earlier by Erasmus, as well as by Castiglione through his use of the bee metaphor. This is the kind of imitation Herrera himself practiced, and he seeks to legitimize it by appropriating for himself Garcilaso's example. But by stressing the use of imitation he also indirectly opens a line of attack on Garcilaso, for imitation was not a universally recognized virtue. Such "modern" concepts such as originality, self-expression, and plagiarism were not unknown during the Renaissance, and many literary theorists, following Horace and Quintilian, identified imitation more with the apprenticeship of young poets than with the mature achievements of those who themselves are to be models.^[12] Herrera himself was accused of copying from Julius Caesar Scaliger by Prete Jacopín (see Coster, 54–57, 166–68), and Quevedo maligned him as "ladrón y no poeta" (thief and no poet; Komanecky, 126) for supposedly stealing from Francisco de la Torre. Furthermore, it was on the very question of Garcilaso's originality and sincerity that Tamayo chose to declare his distance from Herrera:

Si Herrera se persuadió que Garcilaso no usó color retórico en sus versos, de que antes no hubiese consultado o su memoria, o sus libros, engañóse sin duda, porque los afectos naturales en hombres de ingenio, y más en materias amorosas, no requieren estudio particular o para su expresión, o para su perfección. La naturaleza sola . . . los pule, los dilata, los perfecciona. (597)

If Herrera persuaded himself that Garcilaso did not employ the colors of rhetoric in his poems without first consulting his memory or his books, doubtless he deceived himself, for natural affections in men of genius, particularly in matters of love, require no particular study for their expression or perfection. Nature alone . . . polishes them, enlarges them, perfects them.

Moreover, in addition to implying Garcilaso's debt to minor poets, Herrera's many source citations make it difficult for a reader to know the context in which these poems should be read, for while the multiplicity of sources is impressive, it is not entirely to the point. Garcilaso was probably not specifically imitating Propertius and Tibullus in sonnet 7, the example given earlier; he may have been imitating Bembo, whose poem is the closest in time and the most similar, but more likely he was employing a commonplace that the other poets also employed. An even more important question, however, is why Herrera wishes his readers to believe that Garcilaso is familiar with these poets. The identification of multiple sources for Garcilaso's poems forces Garcilaso to compete within a broader canon, thus undoing the narrowing efforts of Morales and El Brocense. It also allows Herrera to trumpet his own learning, the depth of which was questioned by subsequent writers.^[13] In addition, he not only shows off his knowledge but implies an equal or even greater degree of learning on Garcilaso's part—Garcilaso must have been quite a scholar himself to have known all of these often obscure classical and Italian poets. This may be true, but it undermines Garcilaso's reputation as an ideal soldier-poet. Herrera would have us see Garcilaso's poems not as acts of sprezzatura but instead as the results of much labor and scholarship, a point Tamayo both recognized and objected to:

¿Quién creerá que tuvo necesidad de guía el ingenio felicísimo de nuestro Poeta, ni tiempo su corta vida tan bien ocupada para imitar con tanta particularidad cosas que sin dificultad a cualquiera se ofrecieran . . .? Fuera de que muchas veces son sólo lugares comunes. (597; see Almeida, 57)

Who will believe that the happy genius of our poet had the need of such a guide, or that in his short, well-spent life he had the time to imitate with so much care things that without any difficulty are available to anyone . . . ? Not to mention that often they are only commonplaces.

Tamayo's comments are important for they reveal Garcilaso's reputation as a poet of such genius that he had no need for learning; it is Herrera's intention to subvert this image, not only in order to attack Garcilaso's unique canonical status but also to locate him on the poets' side of the soldier/poet division and to appropriate him as a

predecessor for learned poetry. His source citations are suspect, for he attempts through them to alter the reader's perception of the nature of the poetry, from spontaneous to learned, and to change accordingly the reader's assessment of Garcilaso's achievement.

If Herrera seeks to expand the canon of possible sources, he also tries to turn Garcilaso into just one more member of a poetic movement by also quoting other sixteenth-century Spanish poets who imitated the same lines. Thus, for sonnet 17, line 8, after giving Petrarch as a source, he also quotes, without any introduction, similar lines from Boscán and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (362). At times, these excerpts from sources and parallel examples become quite lengthy. For sonnet 6, for example, he gives four sources, and parallels by Bernadim Ribeiro and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (326–27). For sonnet 4, he gives, at various points, sources in Theocritus, a hymn to Priapus, Pliny, and Petrarch; while as parallels he cites Camoens, Juan Saez Zumeta, Fernando de Cangas (two examples), Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and an entire sonnet by Gutierre de Cetina (323–24). The use of complete sonnets is particularly important, for Herrera includes this second poem in spite of its having very little in common with Garcilaso's at all. The only detail the two sonnets share is the notion of vain hope, and had Herrera merely wanted another instance of the same motif, he could have quoted just the last two lines of Cetina's poem. By incorporating the entire poem, he diverts the reader's attention from the tenuous thematic connection and toward Cetina's poem as an alternate text, a different but equal way of handling the same motif. The inclusion of parallels such as these has the cumulative effect of decentering Garcilaso as the key poet of the sixteenth century implying that the other poets, too, achieved the equivalent of what Garcilaso achieved.

Herrera is also not adverse to presenting even his own poems as parallels to Garcilaso's. The phrase "dejad un rato" in sonnet 11 reminds Herrera of "haber hecho un soneto, que para que tenga vida y no se pierda en silencio y oscuridad, . . . me atrevo entrejerillos [i.e., los versos] en estos excelentísimos de Garcilaso" (having written a sonnet which, in order that it have life and not be lost in silence and obscurity, . . . I dare to introduce them [i.e., the verses] among these excellent ones of Garcilaso's, 343). The text of Herrera's sonnet follows; similar quotations of his own poems also accompany sonnets 8 and 12 (two poems). Moreover, this is not the only method

Herrera employs to introduce his own works into the commentary, for he often provides a Spanish translation of texts in Italian and Latin. His versions depart considerably from the originals and thus themselves are parallel imitations of Garcilaso's models. For example, Herrera translates the texts from Propertius and Tibullus mentioned above, producing translations that are themselves more like imitations of the source texts. The translations tend to begin literally but undergo amplification as he goes along, and he translates these three elegiac couplets into three different verse forms. The result is thus relatively "free" translations, not unlike the Garcilaso poems that Herrera is glossing.^[14]

Together with the other Spanish imitations, Herrera's translations create a context for Garcilaso's poems which in turn, when read along with their sources, are themselves perceived as imitations. The accumulation of unlikely sources, translations from the classics, and alternative imitations results in a further diminution of Garcilaso's text as a unique literary event and the sole focus of interest; it becomes one of many possible texts. At the same time, the other imitations gain stature by being offered as parallels to Garcilaso's poetry, which serves to increase the reputation not only of Mendoza, Cetina, Boscán, and the other Spaniards, but also of Herrera himself, both directly as a poet and indirectly as a translator, an effect recognized and criticized by Prete Jacopín in his response:

I vos que dixistes que no pretendíades más que la fidelidad de las traductiones, ¿no pudiérades traduzir más fielmente? . . . [S]in respeto ni consideración ponéis vuestros versos con los del Petrarca, Ariosto, don Diego de Mendoça i otros grandes poetas, queriendo correr parejas con ellos. (118)

And you who said you had pretended to nothing more than fidelity with your translations, couldn't you translate more faithfully? . . . [W]ith neither respect nor consideration, you place your verses among those of Petrarch, Ariosto, Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and other great poets, wishing to equal them.

As Asensio has shown. this indeed became the most controversial feature of Herrera's work: El Brocense himself complained about the intrusion of Herrera's own poetry into the commentary, and in 1639 the Portuguese commentator Faría y Sousa was still complaining:

"singularmente me instiga el ver traídos tantos lugares sin propósito, i Poesías propias i de amigos" (it still particularly galls me to see him bringing in so many quotations to no end, particularly his own and those of his friends; quoted in Asensio, "El Brocense," 24).^[15]

Yet it is not only through those annotations containing sources and parallel imitations that Herrera attempts to decenter Garcilaso; the extended notes on a word or a literary technique also tend to deflect interest away from the poems, by their very length emphasizing the commentary as an alternate discourse and challenging the concept of literary authority. His commentary to these lines from sonnet 16 offers an example:

ni aquel fiero rüydo contrahecho
d'aquel que para Júppiter fue hecho
por manos de Vulcano artificiosas.
(6–8)

nor that fierce noise which mimicked
that other one which for Jupiter
was made by Vulcan's skillful hands.

Herrera glosses Vulcano by giving extensive mythological information. Citing Cicero, Homer, Hesiod, Lucian, and Diodorus Siculus, he identifies five such deities in the ancient world, while also quoting Marcus Varro's etymological explanation for the name (358). Herrera then goes on to explain Vulcan's various attributes, including the reasons for his association with lightning, his fall from heaven, and his lameness. His other sources include Eusebius, Valerius Flaccus, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Lucan, Lorenzo of Anania, Dionysus of Alexandria, Galen, St. Isidore, and more. Herrera's use of so many authorities broadens the canon of knowledge a poet might have and redefines it in a European rather than a Spanish context, yet the net result of this piling on of information is that the sources cancel one another out. The original poem could have been understood by anyone with an idea of Vulcan's connection with thunder; the annotations only confuse the reader, draw attention away from the poetic text, and by raising too many possibilities make interpretation of the poem impossible. Moreover, this is not an isolated case of overglossing; in fact, it is a device that Herrera employs quite often. Among the other items that receive such encyclopedic treatment are mythological figures such as Diana, Tityrus,

and Orpheus, allegorical ones such as sleep (sueño ) and nemesis , concepts such as idea , and even geographical references such as the Danube River.

These encyclopedic glosses further identify poetry with scholarship, and so promote literature as an activity incompatible with the knightly profession of arms.^[16] But the overly learned citations also have a countereffect: the mass of contradictory information brings into question whether any single one of these authorities can be correct, and by so doing undermines the notions of authority and canonicity, for it challenges the common-sense interpretability of the texts. By multiplying and thus diluting authority, the obscure citations further weaken the notion of a limited canon and thus further diminish Garcilaso's position as an authoritative model.

Herrera achieves the same decentering effect in his comments on the literary genres and techniques employed by Garcilaso; once again, attention is focused away from the poem and instead on a particular genre or trope as a thing in itself.^[17] Significantly, these comments amount to small treatises embedded in the Anotaciones and are the sections most often quoted, independently of the Garcilaso poem to which they are appended. In them, one can most clearly see Herrera's conception of literary history and the subtle ways he redefines Garcilaso's place within it. To Herrera, a genre exists independently of the poems that compose it. In his very first note, he characterizes the sonnet as "la más hermosa composición, y de mayor artificio y gracia de cuantas tiene la poesía italiana y española" (the most beautiful composition, with more artifice and grace than any other poetry, Italian or Spanish, 308) and discusses the various literary techniques he considers most appropriate for sonnets. Historically, the greatest writer of sonnets was Petrarch, who was also the first great imitator, for he not only imitated the Provençal poets who directly preceded him but went back to the Romans as well. After Petrarch there was a gap in poetry writing, ended in the early sixteenth century by Sannazaro and especially Bembo. Herrera credits Santillana with being the first to bring poetic eloquence from Italy to Spain, approvingly quoting an entire sonnet; and he lists Boscán, Mendoza, Cetina, and finally Garcilaso coming after him. Through this list Herrera attempts a subtle displacement: by introducing six intermediaries between Petrarch and Garcilaso and slightly altering the actual chronology of sonnet writers in

Spain (Garcilaso should precede Cetina and Mendoza), Herrera locates him farther from the source. Thus he emphasizes Garcilaso's position as the latest (but not necessarily the last) link in a European tradition, rather than as the beginning and end of a Spanish one.

Herrera's comments on the elegy are similar. In the course of his history of the genre, he reiterates the myth of the dark age that descended on Italy and Spain after the invasion of the Goths. Although the Italians were the first to restore poetry, the Spanish language "es sin alguna comparación más grave y de mayor espíritu y magnificencia que todas las que más se estiman de las vulgares" (is without comparison graver and of greater spirit and magnificence than all those which are most esteemed among the vernaculars, 417–18). Yet in words that echo Nebrija's and Encina's, Herrera expresses his sense that Spanish remains in danger, "porque aunque ahora lo vemos en la más levantada cumbre que jamás se ha visto . . . antes amenaza declinación que crecimiento" (for although we now see it at the highest peak on which it has ever been seen . . . decline seems more imminent than growth, 419).

Coster took these comments of Herrera's at face value and asserted that Herrera was ignorant of the Spanish lyric before Boscán, save for the works of Santillana, which Herrera would have known through his acquaintance with Argote de Molina, who possessed a manuscript of his works (89, 311–12).^[18] In fact, Herrera has enough references to Ausías March, Juan de Mena, and others to demonstrate at least some familiarity with earlier lyrics. Rather, Herrera has again fashioned his version of Spanish literary history for primarily polemical ends. What is remarkable about this passage is not his apparent ignorance of medieval Spanish lyric but his overt expression, at the end of the sixteenth century, of the fear that had been implicit in Spanish considerations of literary history since the end of the preceding century: that Spanish letters are at their peak and about to decline. He writes his annotations to combat the threat of oblivion that was first expressed by Nebrija and later echoed by Encina, Boscán, and Morales, in a discourse that had paralleled that of national and then imperial expansions.^[19] Herrera does not think that the creativity of Spanish poets has been fully dissipated, only that the desire to outdo the achievements of the canonized past must be recultivated—and here it is clear that the past must refer not just to Rome or even to Rome and Italy but also to the immedi-

ate Spanish past, and in particular to Garcilaso. It is the job of the poet to express common sentiments in new and elevated ways, "y cuanto es más común, siendo tratado con novedad, tanto es de mayor espíritu, y, si se puede decir, más divino. Esto es lo que pretendió Petrarca, y por qué resplandecen más sus obras" (for what is most common, if treated in a new way, is thus of greater spirit and, one might say, is more divine. This is what Petrarch attempted, and why his works are so brilliant, 420).^[20]

Petrarch should thus once again become the model, as he was for Garcilaso, but as a scholar-poet and for his use of both imitation and invention. This idea is developed in several of the later entries, in which Herrera returns to the situation of Spanish in comparison to other languages. The need for more achievements comes out, finally, in a long diatribe near the end of the Anotaciones , appended as a note to eclogue 2. Herrera glosses the phrase el osado español (the daring Spaniard, line 1539) with a complaint about Italians who deride the Spanish. To counter them, he catalogs the achievements of the Iberian nation from the time of Hannibal to the present. These achievements are primarily military:

Porque los despojos ganados de Italia y Francia, la reducción de toda España a la religión de Cristo, y las victories de Africa, son hazañas maravillosas, pero semejantes a otras de los grandes príncipes; mas comenzar a levantar la cabeza contra la grandeza de Francia, y quebrantar su soberbia, teniendo tantos contrarios y quejosos en España, y crecer en tanta reputación y en tanto imperio con perpetuo curso de dichosos sucesos, y penetrar sus banderas lo encubierto de la tierra por mares no conocidos, es hecho mayor que todos los que se saben de algún rey cristiano. (554)

For the spoils won from Italy and France, the reduction of all of Spain to the Christian religion, and the African victories, are marvelous exploits but similar to others of great princes. But to begin to lift one's head against the greatness of France and to break her pride, considering the many critics and whiners in Spain, and to grow in reputation and empire with an endless string of happy successes, penetrating with her flag the hidden parts of the earth over unknown seas, is a deed greater than any others known of a Christian king.

Herrera's tone is different here from what it was at the beginning of the Anotaciones; the Spaniards' martial daring is indeed a virtue, but

its efficacy in securing fame has been limited because it remains unpublicized.^[21] The contempt cannot be blamed entirely on the Italians; the Spanish too are at fault for failing to appreciate the special importance of the man of letters:

Mas ¿para qué me alargo con tanta demasía en estos ejemplos? Pues sabemos que no faltaron a España en algún tiempo varones heroicos; faltaron escritores cuerdos y sabios que los dedicasen con inmortal estilo a la eternidad de la memoria. (555)

But why do I go on with this excess of examples? For we know that Spain has never lacked heroes; she has only lacked sound and wise writers who with an immortal style can commit them to everlasting memory.

Here Herrera returns to the theme first sounded at the very beginning of the Anotaciones: the critical importance of poetry, the complemental nature of arms and letters, and thus the need for professional poets. Invoking the trope of the poet as the source of fame, he implies that courtiers such as Garcilaso who compose poetry as amateurs, while capable of great achievements, are not able to bring Spain the international reputation it deserves. Moreover, the canonization of Garcilaso is partly responsible for this impasse for, far from bringing Spain literary glory that surpasses Italy's, it has led to stagnation in the development of Spanish letters by perpetuating the myth of the courtier-poet. What Spain needs are men dedicated entirely to letters; the scholar-poet is not inferior to the man of arms, but instead his fitting successor, the only one capable of completing the ascendancy of Spain. Indeed, only he will be able to complete the task that was merely begun by the great warriors of the past.

At issue in Herrera's commentary is the evaluation of Garcilaso's stature in comparison to that of his predecessors and successors. Certainly Herrera greatly values both Garcilaso's poetry and that tradition which he sees stretching from the ancient world, through the Provençal and Italian poets, to Garcilaso and his Spanish contemporaries.^[22] To Herrera, however, it is necessary that Garcilaso be viewed simply as part of that broad tradition, rather than as its culmination, for if the latter is the case, then there is little room for successors. Herrera reading Garcilaso becomes a bit like Petrarch touring Rome and imagining the ruins beneath the ground (see

Greene, 88–93): in effect Herrera subreads Garcilaso, dismembering with his annotations the unity of the text in a search for other texts hidden therein. He thus claims an access to the text's origins that eludes his contemporaries, and may have eluded Garcilaso himself.

Yet as Waller noted apropos of Petrarch, "the 'father' in Freud could be considered not only a biological entity, but also the representative within the family structure of the whole sociological and political matrix in terms of which the child will have to re-define him- or herself in order to move from the position of a child to the position of an adult" (36). In a broad perspective the Anotaciones represent a reaction to canon formation, analogous to the controversy over Ariosto in Italy, or to Du Bellay's demolition of Sebillet's French national canon in the Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549), wherein as Saulnier has shown there were also elements of class conflict. Herrera's concern with poetry as a calling in its own right is evident in the appearance of his own poetry two years later, the first major poetry collection prepared for publication by its author since Boscán's, forty years earlier (see "Love and Allusion," below). Yet Herrera's target was not so much Garcilaso's poetry as its position in the canon, and to the degree that Herrera felt it necessary to break with the literary establishment, he certainly succeeded (see Bianchini, "Herrera and Prete Jacopín"). In this context, Herrera's designation of Petrarch as the true model is not only an attempt to find a predecessor who combined the practice of scholarship with the composition of poetry, but to substitute a remote, less threatening, and Italian poetic father for a proximate, intimidating, and Castilian one. His use of a commentary as his vehicle is not as paradoxical as it might seem, for if it classicizes Garcilaso, by subjecting him to the humanist hermeneutic it also proclaims his remoteness and highlights the discontinuities in the poetic tradition.

Once again Bloom's theory of poetic agon provides a vocabulary with which to restate a Renaissance controversy: the question is whether Garcilaso successfully performed an act of metalepsis (as he himself implied, in the third eclogue), transforming earlier poets into predecessors, or whether he is just one more poet who contributed his own clinamen or swerve to the tradition. Our own conception of Garcilaso as a very strong poet must not blind us to Herrera's different point of view, that of a poet who directly struggled with Garcilaso's legacy. The Anotaciones can be read independently of the

propriety of their remarks about Garcilaso, as the fiction of Herrera's contest with an overwhelming predecessor. The publication of the Anotaciones in 1580 may be taken as a demonstration of Herrera's successful appropriation of prior literature, and of his readiness to overcome his reticence and publish his own poems. The first readers recognized that his commentary was not a neutral literary history, but ironically Herrera's own subsequent inclusion in the canon, as much for the Anotaciones as for his poetry, eliminated this reading, because he owes that canonization to a paratext dependent on Garcilaso and because such intracanonic struggles seemed unbecoming. By rereading Herrera through the eyes of his critics we gain the insight to reconstruct the family romance of that conflict; an active misreading on our part restores the fiction that originally animated Herrera's work.

Herrera's Anotaciones II: The Poet's Eye

In the preceding section we examined Herrera's Anotaciones in terms of their overall decentering technique applied to Garcilaso's poems as canonical texts, focusing on the source citations and thematic glosses. Herrera's explicit comments on literary theory also deserve examination; while many are derived from classical and Italian sources, his expression of these ideas in Spanish places them in the context of tendencies we have been examining since Nebrija. In this section we will focus on Herrera's emphasis on sensual, and particularly visual, imagery as it relates to his theory of metaphor; on his theory of translation and its importance for the illustration of the language and for literary history; and on his genre theory and its relation to the translatio .

One of Herrera's first glosses deals with metaphor. Garcilaso's sonnet 2 reads, "Mis lágrimas han sido derramadas / donde la sequedad y el aspereza / dieron mal fruto dellas, y mi suerte" (My tears have been spilt where drought and harshness yielded a bad harvest from them and my fortune, 9–11). Herrera draws the reader's attention to what he calls this "traslación de la agricultura" (318) and explains that "traslación," or metaphor, is the most common of figures. He begins with a linguistic and philosophical exposition of the need for metaphor: things have names, and while words or

names are but signs for things, words can also be made to refer to something else; the Greeks called this "tropos de la mudanza del entendimiento, y Aristóteles del verbo metaphérou que es trasfiero, metáforas, y los latinos traslaciones" (tropes of changed meaning, and Aristotle, from the verb metaphérou , which means transfer, metaphors, and the Romans called them traslaciones , 318). Figures of this type are almost always pleasing because they result in brevity instead of "revueltas y torcimientos de vanas palabras" (twisting and turning of worthless words, 319) and because the resulting expressions are more unusual and interesting. The use of metaphor can thus be preferable to the use of the name itself, as long as the virtue of clarity is observed and the connection is immediately apparent; clarity results in an intellectual fusion between the writer and the audience such that "el que oye va llevado con la cogitación y pensamiento a otra parte" (he who hears is transported by this thinking to another place, 319).

Yet although metaphor is consequently an intellectual process, it is also a sensual one; and although Herrera conceives of metaphors springing from any of the senses, he gives the place of honor to visual figures:

Porque el olor de la cortesanía, la blandura y terneza de la humanidad, el murmurio del mar, y la dulzura de la oración, son deducidas de los demás sentidos. Pero las [translaciones] de los ojos son mucho más agudas y de mayor eficacia y vehemencia, porque ponen casi en la presencia del ánimo las cosas que no pudimos mirar ni ver. (319)

For the odor of courtiership, the softness and tenderness of humanity, the murmur of the sea, and the sweetness of speech are derived from the other senses. But those [metaphors] derived from eyesight are much more acute and of greater efficacy and vehemence because they almost place before the soul things we cannot see.

Metaphors were first employed out of necessity, to discuss things that had no name, but because they embellished an oration, they came to be employed for their own sake. The trope has enormous potential, as almost any word can be transferred to a new "place," while the only inherent danger, easily avoided, is taking words from places that are not in themselves noble. Moreover, because the purpose of a metaphor is to clarify, the words should be taken from a

neighboring field: "[C]onviene que la traslación sea vengonzosa, que significa de cosa cercana y fácil, porque se hace áspera cuando se deduce de lugar muy apartado; o cuando es tan oscura, que tiene necesidad de exposición" (It is desirable that the comparison be becoming, which means from something proximate and simple, for it becomes harsh when derived from a distant place, or when it is so obscure that it needs to be explained, 320). Naturally, a certain moderation should be exercised in the quantity of metaphors in a single composition, but there is no absolute limit. Herrera concludes by drawing distinctions between metaphor and simile and between metaphor and catachresis, while explaining the relation between metaphor and allegory.

Herrera's account of the origin of metaphor extends the privileged position this figure held in Spanish Petrarchist theory and practice.^[23] For Herrera, metaphor is not merely an ornament like the other figures, but one with a special heuristic value, for it allows us to talk about things that have no names and to establish relations not previously perceived. Herrera's views thus constitute a secular variant of the metaphor theory of Fray Luis de León and St. John of the Cross.^[24] As a consequence, clarity is essential, for the very purpose of metaphor is to enlighten. Herrera amplifies the importance of clarity in his note on Garcilaso's sonnet "Hermosas ninfas." After praising the splendor of the poem (342), he goes on to assert that its clarity results from the placement of words in an order that lends itself to comprehension. Herrera proceeds:

Es importantísima la claridad en el verso; y si falta en él, se pierde toda la gracia, y la hermosura de la poesía . . . porque las palabras son imágenes de los pensamientos. Debe ser la claridad que nace de ellas luciente, suelta, libre, blanda y entera; no oscura, no intrincada, no forzada, no áspera y despedazada. (ibid.)

Clarity is extremely important in poetry; if it is lacking, all the grace and all the beauty in the poem are lost . . . for as words are images of thoughts, the clarity that comes from them should be resplendent, loose, free, soft, and complete, not dark, not intricate, not forced, not harsh, not dissociated.

Yet the term is itself a visual metaphor, and by emphasizing it Herrera further reveals the priority of sight in his system of literary

aesthetics. As important as its meaning is, it is only one of many visual ingredients in Herrera's aesthetic vocabulary, and by associating it with metaphor he again highlights the visual and conceptual elements of the latter.^[25]

This concern with the visual may in part be due to Neoplatonic theory, for Herrera stresses its importance in glossing terms such as love (328), spirits (336), and beauty (hermosura , 367), all of which are explained in terms of sight perception. Similarly, the efficacy of metaphor was explained in terms of placing the previously unseen before the reader's eye. The concern with eyesight leads Herrera to an equivalence between the poet and the painter, as in his gloss on Garcilaso's representation, in the first elegy, of the Tormes as a river-god surrounded by nymphs. Blurring the distinction between ekphrastic description of artistic works and actual painting, Herrera alludes to representations of river-gods with the heads and horns of a bull. He begins by using the verb fingir ("los fingían los antiguos con cabezas de bueyes o toros con cuernos" [the ancients pretended they had heads of oxen or bulls, along with horns]); he then uses pintar in an ambiguous manner that may refer either to painting or to poetry ("y por otra razón lo pintan con cuernos" [and for other reasons they paint it with horns]); and finally he uses pintar in a totally metaphoric way with reference to a poetic text ("Claudiano . . . pinta diferentemente de esta tristeza al Po" [Claudian . . . paints the Po differently without this sadness], 432–33). Not surprisingly, Herrera's diction here echoes that of Garcilaso's description of the nymphs' tapestries in the third eclogue. Herrera's slip into the same figural language betrays his Horatian concept of the poet as a painter of scenes for a reader's visual imagination, but it again underscores the primacy of the visual as the foundation of poetry.^[26]

This emphasis on the visual does not mean that Herrera was unconcerned with matters of sound; indeed, several entries in the commentary are devoted exclusively to the sound of certain lines.^[27] For example, he glosses Garcilaso's line "y si no le fabrico y le renuevo" (elegy 2, line 163), commenting that vowels sound more sweetly than consonants, for there is no one who does not understand that the frequent and dense gathering of vowels can lead to a long phrase, but also one that is overstuffed and degenerate; the joining or collision of vowels is called synaloepha. Elsewhere he discusses the appropriateness of enjambment to the hendecasyllable. But just

as he rejects hyperbaton, one of the very licenses fifteenth-century theorists such as Encina had particularly endorsed, so too he rejects the aural aesthetics of octosyllabic poetry, in terms that recall Boscán's "A la duquesa de Soma":

Verdad es, que el número mueve y deleita, y causa la admiración; pero nace el número de la frasis. . . . ¿Qué cosa hay más sin arte y sin juicio, y que con más importuna molestia canse las orejas, que oyen, que trabar sílabas y palabras siempre con un sonido y tenor? (420)

It is true that meter moves and delights, and causes admiration; but meter should result from the phrasing. . . . What is less artful and discriminating, and with more aggravation wearies ears that hear, than always to bind syllables and words with the same sound and tenor?

Elsewhere we see Herrera, even when describing the effects of sound, resorting to the vocabulary of sight, as when he refers to "aquella viva claridad y elegancia de luz con que resplandecen en las orejas" (that lively clarity and elegance of light with which they shine in the ears, 511). The effect here is not only synesthesia but also an inadvertent revelation of the position of sight and sound in his aesthetic hierarchy.

Herrera's distinctions among visual, aural, and logical techniques is reflected in his theory of literary translation. Herrera turns to this topic in the context of the situation of Spanish in comparison to other languages, an issue that arises in several of the later entries. Commenting on Garcilaso's description of a hunt in the second eclogue, Herrera points out that the passage is a near translation of the eighth prosa of Sannazaro's Arcadia . Instead of criticizing Garcilaso's plagiarism, as Prete Jacopín implies (131), Herrera deems the translation so well done that it demonstrates the capacity of Spanish to express any topic that has previously been expressed in another language. Nonetheless, each language has its own qualities, which are difficult to translate:

[M]as hay algunas cosas dichas con tanta viveza y propriedad y significación en cada particular y nativo lenguaje . . . que aunque las hagan vecinas y moradoras de otra habla, nunca retienen la gracia de su primera naturaleza. Porque tienen algunas propriedades y virtudes la hermosura de la lengua toscana, la gracia de la francesa, la

agudeza y magnificencia de la española, que trocadas con las extrañas, aunque tengan el sentido, pierden aquella flexión y medida de palabras o nümeros. . . . Y así quieren los que saben, que el que imita no proponga tanto decir lo que los otros dijeron, como lo que no dijeron. (ibid.)

But some things are said with such vividness and propriety and meaning in each particular and native language, that even if made residents of a neighboring speech, they never retain the grace of their first nature. For the handsomeness of Italian, the grace of French, and the wit and magnificence of Spanish have their own properties and virtues, but if exchanged with other languages, that flexibility and measure of the words or numbers is lost. . . . And thus the wise wish that the imitator not attempt to say what others said, but what they did not say.

Herrera here joins the perennial Renaissance debate over the efficacy of translation; it is somewhat surprising, in view of the many translations that he himself offers, to see him come down against the possibility of translations accurately reflecting the originals, even though this was the position of most Renaissance theorists who concerned themselves with literary translation in the abstract. Yet this seemingly contradictory appraisal of Garcilaso can be resolved if one reviews the criteria for success. Spanish is as good as any other language, and there is nothing expressible in another language that cannot be said also in Spanish. Concepts have an existence that is independent of the expression in any one language, and they are consequently translatable in spite of each language's having its own unique virtues. Herrera's description of these virtues—the beauty of Italian, the grace of French, the wit of Spanish—has a Castiglionian air about it, not least in its lack of specificity. Thus, along with most Renaissance theorists, Herrera sees the possibility for translating the res but not the verba; he differs from many others in not restricting res to philosophical and scientific writings, but positing a literary res that can be translated.^[28] This is precisely what Garcilaso does with the passage from Sannazaro, restating it and imitating it in Spanish. But he does not attempt to reproduce it exactly in Spanish, for the special qualities of the original, which cannot be matched even in neighboring languages, are associated not with matter but with the character of the language.

Herrera also comes close to defining imitation as a form of trans-

lation, as when he says of Garcilaso's first elegy, "esta elegía es traducida, aunque acrecentada mucho, y variada hermosamente" (this elegy is translated, though much augmented and freely altered; 450). Here Herrera restates the value of innovativeness to the good imitator and transfers it to the translator; typically, he also illustrates the principle through the structure of the note itself. As usual, he begins by giving the text of the model, but then comments,

Bien sé que son molestas a los que saben las traducciones desnudas de artificio, y sin algún ornato . . . pero no atiendo en esta parte satisfacer sus gustos, sino los de los hombres que carecen de la noticia de estas cosas; y por esta causa vuelvo en español los versos peregrinos de nuestra lengua. (452)

I know well that these translations, naked of artifice and without any ornament, are a bother to those who know [the original languages] . . . but I do not attempt in this part to satisfy their taste, rather that of those who have no knowledge of these things; and for this reason I turn into Spanish those poems which are foreign to our language.

Whatever pedants may think, translations will always have a role to play as long as Spaniards remain ignorant of foreign literature; Herrera thus sets up his own translation, which follows, as an alternate to Garcilaso's, its presence justified on the same grounds of the translator's license. While Herrera's focus on intervernacular translation between related languages recalls Boscán and Garcilaso, his precision about translation theory stands in contrast to their prefaces to the Cortegiano translation (see the first section of chapter 2). Boscán's emphasis had been on the reception of the subject matter and on the desirability of thereby illuminating Spanish literature; Garcilaso's, on Boscán's skill in remaining faithful to the original while maintaining a pure Castilian style. Although Herrera praises Garcilaso's transformation of Sannazaro, it is not for its fidelity to the original, and much less for enriching the Spanish language with a rendition of a bird hunt; rather, his focus is on the technical and philosophical issues of literary translation.

A bit farther on Herrera takes up the problem of translating scientific res with no Spanish equivalents. Although Castiglione, through Canossa, had defended the use of neologisms in an ever-mutable language, Boscán and Garcilaso had come out against them as signs

of affectation. Herrera, by contrast, is positive about their use, for "lícito es a los escritores de una lengua valerse de las voces de otra" (it is legitimate for writers in one language to use words from another, 471). Thus unlike Boscán, who had sacrificed specificity in seeking to use only Spanish words to render Castiglione's Italian, Herrera recommends the borrowing of words from the source language: "Divídese en dos especies la formación de los vocablos nuevos: por necesidad para exprimir pensamientos de Teología y Filosofía y las cosas nuevas que se hallan ahora, y por ornamento" (The formation of new words can be divided into two kinds: for the expression of philosophical and theological ideas and of the new things that are now being found, and for ornament, 527). Naturally, he is more interested in the latter of these processes, in which words are borrowed for poetic effect. In language similar to Castiglione's, Herrera recommends the enrichment of Spanish by borrowing words from ancient and foreign languages, and justifies this effort by pointing to the example of the Romans and the way in which they enriched Latin by borrowing even from the barbarians.^[29] Languages mature slowly, and none suddenly attain perfection; it is legitimate to engender new tropes, for thus was Latin enriched. Herrera would allow the use of neologisms in Spanish because it is a living language, in contrast to Latin, whose vocabulary survives only through those relics of ancient writers which still exist. Garcilaso himself incorporated Latinisms and Italianisms into his poetry, and others should not fear to do likewise: "Apártese este rústico miedo de nuestro ánimo; sigamos el ejemplo de aquellos antiguos varones que enriquecieron el sermón romano con las voces griegas y peregrinas y con las bárbaras mismas" (Let this rustic fear flee from our souls; let us follow the example of those ancient noblemen who enriched Latin discourse with words that were Greek and foreign and even barbarian, 525). By polarizing linguistic attitudes into those of "rústicos" and those of "varones," Herrera makes the same distinction as Morales, though replacing "booty," despojos , with "words," voces . The concept of linguistic booty resurfaces, moreover, in the next page of the commentary, where Herrera argues that there is no language that cannot stand to be enriched "con los más estimados despojos de Italia y Grecia, y de los otros reinos peregrinos, puede[se] vestir y aderezar su patria y amplialla con hermosura" (with the most esteemed spoils of Italy and Greece and other foreign

realms, can his country dress, adorn, and amplify itself with beauty, 526), as long as one has art and judgment. Similarly, he argues that one author's not using a word does not mean that others cannot, and thus, in effect, that there are no canonical linguistic models.

This claim, ironically, allows Herrera to defend Garcilaso's use of orejas instead of the more elevated oídos , complaining about the tyranny "que nos obliga a conservar estos advertimientos, nacidos no de razón o causa alguna, sino de sola presunción y arrogancia" (that forces us to heed these strictures, born not from reason or cause, but from presumption and arrogance, 522). Yet by arguing that these strictures should no longer be applicable, now that Spaniards "osamos navegar el anchísimo Océano y descubrir los tesoros de que estuvieron ajenos nuestros padres" (dare to navigate the wide ocean and to discover the treasures that were unknown to our fathers, 522–23), Herrera reverts to the idea of a cultural backwardness that lags behind imperial accomplishments; implicit in these remarks is an admission that Spanish is not as rich as he had earlier made it out to be, and that it still needs to strive for greater richness. Thus the principle of linguistic freedom concords with the thrust of the entire commentary, which is precisely that, great as Garcilaso's achievement—and by extension the linguistic tools of his day—may have been, Spanish should not stagnate but aspire to still greater achievements on both the literary and the linguistic levels. And those who have the duty to effect just this improvement are the poets, who

hablan en otra lengua y no son las mismas cosas que trata el poeta que las que el orador, ni unas mismas leyes y observaciones. . . . [E]s la poesía abundantísima y exuberante y rica en todo, libre y de su derecho y jurisdicción sola sin sujeción alguna y maravillosamente idónea en el ministerio de la lengua y copia de palabras por sí. (527)

speak in another language, for the poet does not speak of the same things as the orator, nor does he follow the same laws and observances. . . . Poetry is most abundant and exuberant and rich in everything, free and by its right and jurisdiction separate, without any subordination, in itself marvelously independent in administering the language and the wealth of words.

Thus just as Herrera's theory about the possibility of literary translation is tied to his interest in visual and sensual imagery, his interest

in its effect is connected to the question of enriching the language through neologisms, as the state is enriched by foreign wealth. Just as a political aristocracy rules the country, so too a poetic aristocracy must exercise hegemony over the language, if the translatio is to be realized. Once again, the key issues are the extent of Garcilaso's accomplishments, and the need for their continuation and extension.^[30]

The translatio in turn serves as a foundation for Herrera's genre theories. Herrera has notes on all of the major genres employed by Garcilaso: the sonnet, the canción , the elegy, the eclogue, and the "estanzas o rimas octavas" of the third eclogue.^[31] In all cases, one of his principal concerns is to relate these modern genres, as much as possible, to classical equivalents and to account for their use by Garcilaso in modern Spain. Thus at the head of the first note he presents the sonnet as the modern heir of the epigram, the ode, and the elegy, fully capable of treating all subjects and of being ornamented. Indeed, it is harder than the epigram because its length is limited and because, in addition to meter, the poet has to concern himself with rhyme, formal considerations that can place constraints on the use of ornamentation. This definition by analogy and contrast is not historicized until much later, when Herrera recounts the form's modern origins: Petrarch was "el primero cue los labró bien y levantó en la más alta cumbre de la acabada hermosura y fuerza perfecta de la poesía" (the first who forged them well, and raised them to the highest peak of finished beauty and perfect force of poetry, 309–10), followed, after a gap of some centuries, by Sannazaro and Bembo who, though judged harsh and affected in his diction and style, was the first true expert on the flowers that adorn Latin and Italian poetry (311).^[32] In his gloss on the canción , Herrera identifies it with classical lyric, giving a long history that traces it from the Greek odes of Anacreon, Pindar, and Sappho through Horace, but without mentioning the more immediate Italian or Provençal antecedents or the fifteenth-century Spanish genre. The elegy too is traced back to its classical roots, with particular praise for Tibullus and, as noted, an account of the dark age that set in after the fall of Rome to the barbarians, while the eclogue is likewise characterized by references to ancient poets such as Daphnis, Moscus, Bion, Theocritus, and of course Virgil. Herrera sees Petrarch and Boccaccio as the first to have written eclogues since antiquity, although their eclogues, as well as those of Pontano, are not worth

remembering (475). Instead, Sannazaro is singled out as the greatest modern Italian writer of eclogues, while Boccaccio is credited with inventing the rima octava , in which he was succeeded by Poliziano and Ariosto.

This accumulation of classical and Italian poets is not meant, however, to heighten his Spanish readers' awareness of Italian literature, for on the contrary Herrera feels that the Spanish writers of his day have given themselves over too greatly to admiration of the Tuscans:

Pero no sé cómo sufrirán los nuestros, que con tanta admiración celebran [más] la lengua, el modo del decir, la gracia y los pensamientos de los escritores toscanos, que ose yo afirmar, que la lengua común de Españia. . . . Porque me parece, que más fáscilmente condescenderán con mi opinión los italianos, que tienen algún conocimiento de la nuestra, que los españoles, que ponen más cuidado en la inteligencia de la lengua extranjera, que de la suya. (312)

I do not know how ours can bear it, for with so much more admiration they praise the language, mode of speaking, grace, and thoughts of the Tuscan writers than, I dare say, the common language of Spain. . . . For it seems to me that those Italians who have knowledge of our language would more easily coincide with my opinion than would Spaniards, who place more care in the knowledge of a foreign language than of their own.

Here, in language similar to Morales's, Herrera castigates his fellow poets for neglecting their native vernacular. Yet that this neglect does not take the form of poetic composition in the classical languages, but, instead, of excessive imitation of Italian, underlines the canonical and classical status that the Italians have received. Underlying this passage is Herrera's variation on the basic trope of the Spanish Renaissance: the lists of antecedents in each genre exist precisely because they are Garcilaso's antecedents, and thus he emerges as the great mediator who imported and legitimized these foreign forms, the originator rather than the culmination of the translatio .

Herrera's comments on these genres extend beyond their history to their intrinsic features; while using them as a way to differentiate himself from the aristocratic, Castiglione-based aesthetics of Garcilaso and Boscán, he also takes advantage of the succession of genres to present a full-scale prescription for lyric poetry as practiced in

Renaissance Spain. For the sonnet he provides one of the earliest formal descriptions in Spanish, noting that it is composed of fourteen hendecasyllabic lines divided into two quatrains and two tercets, with one set of rhymes in the quatrains and another in the tercets. These requirements make it difficult for the inexperienced poet: because of the poem's concentrated nature any mistake stands out, and Herrera recommends that its theme should be a single "sentencia ingeniosa y aguda" (thought both ingenious and sharp, 308), avoiding obscurity but not descending into facility. Indeed, in language that specifically counters the recommendations of Valdés, Boscán, and Garcilaso, Herrera condemns the identification of writing with speech:

[E]n este pecado caen muchos, que piensan acabar una grande hazaña cuando escriben de la manera que hablan; como si no fuese diferente el descuido y llaneza, que demanda el sermón común, de la observación, que pide el artificio y cuidado de quien escribe. No reprehendo la facilidad, sino la afectación della. (308; see Almeida 103)

Many fall into this sin, thinking they have accomplished a great deed when they write as they speak, as if there were no difference between the carelessness and plainness called for in common speech, and the degree of observation called for by the skill and care of someone who writes. I do not reprove true facility, but only its affectation.

Not surprisingly, clarity is recommended, without contortions to accommodate the rhyme, but equally reprehensible are the lack of vigor, the use of low language, and having the rhyme dictate the matter rather than the other way around. Latin poets enjoyed greater freedom because modern poetry, in addition to meter, requires rhyme, while the rhythm of the hendecasyllable is not as malleable as it might seem, for any eleven syllables do not necessarily constitute a line of verse.

Herrera's comments on the sonnet introduce both the formal and the thematic requirements of lyric poetry. This course is continued in his remarks on the canción , which, as already noted, Herrera identifies with the very roots of lyricism itself. To Herrera, this is above all the genre of love; and, citing Anacreon as one of the first great lyric poets, he invests it with the Greek poet's sensuality:

[E]s su poesía toda amatoria, que como dice Pausanias en la Ática , fue el primero, después de Safo, que gastó gran parte de sus versos en declarar sus amores. Porque nació sólo para juegos y cantos y danzas y besos y convites, todo entregado en deleites sensuales y de gula. Mas aunque tiene viles y abatidas consideraciones y deseos, no se puede dejar de conceder que dice con mucho donaire, y que en aquella poesía mélica no esté todo lleno de miel y dulzura y gracia entre todos los griegos y latinos y vulgares. (392)

His poetry is all about love, for as Pausanias said in the Attica , he was the first, after Sappho, who spent the greater part of his poems in declaring his love. For he was born only for games and songs and dances and kisses and banquets, completely given over to the pleasures of the senses and of the palate. But although he has low and vile considerations and desires, one cannot but concede that he speaks with elegance, and that Melic poetry is not all full of sweetness and honey and grace, among all the other Greeks, Romans, and vernacular [writers].

In contrast, Pindar is given relatively short shrift, while Sappho is praised as a woman of great spirit, admirable in the declaration of her passions and secret love (393). In contrast to Greek, Latin literature was relatively weak in lyric poets save for Horace, who alone is worthy of being read; yet Herrera's comments about him are restrained, with more space devoted to an ambivalent condemnation of Catullus's love poetry. The note concludes with the observation that a canción can be subdivided into stanzas, whose length, verses, and rhyme are consistent but free for the poet to determine, and that it is usually concluded with a shorter epilogue.

Herrera returns to the topic of love poetry in the note on the elegy; after analyzing the origin of its name and discussing its history in ancient Rome, Herrera concludes that it is a very flexible genre, capable of absorbing a great variety of attitudes:

Y porque los escritores de versos amorosos o esperan, o desesperan, o deshacen sus pensamientos, y inducen otros nuevos, y los mudan y pervierten, o ruegan, o se quejan, o alegran, o alaban la hermosura de su dama, o explican su propria vida, y cuentan sus fortunas con los demás sentimientos del ánimo, que ellos declaran en varias ocasiones, conviniendo que este género de poesía sea mixto . . . y por esto no se deben juzgar todos por un ejemplo, ni ser comprendidos en el rigor de una misma censura. (417)

For the writers of these love poems either hope or despair, or undo their thoughts and introduce new ones, and change and pervert them, or beg, or complain, or rejoice, or praise the beauty of their beloved, or justify their own lives, and tell of their fortunes along with the other sentiments of the soul, which they declare on various occasions, for poetry of this type should be varied . . . and for this reason all should not be judged by a single example, nor included in the severity of a single censure.

Although this is a fair description of Roman elegy and not incorrect in pointing out the classical genre's variety, the comment could also serve as a definition of Petrarchist lyric. This coincidence of course is not accidental: the Roman elegists were among the principal sources of influence on Petrarch himself, and the connection is strengthened when Herrera identifies terza rima as the modern metrical equivalent of the elegiac couplet, and Dante and Petrarch as its chief practitioners. Yet coming after the notes on the sonnet and the canción , these remarks further Herrera's exposition of the historical link between the modern lyric and the Petrarchist model. Thus while the poet's principal themes should be his hope and his despair, the undoing of reason, praise of the beloved's beauty, and the like, infinite variety is also possible in love poetry, and no single model should be canonical. In the context of Herrera's own time, this is not a warning against the unique imitation of Tibullus, Propertius, or Ovid (none of them hypercanonical), nor even of Petrarch, but of Garcilaso, as singled out by El Brocense and Morales.

Just as Herrera's remarks on the canción and the elegy focus on subject matter as much as on form, so too do his comments on the eclogue. These have fountains with the sweetest water, and are full of trees with the largest fruit and plants and vines of incredible abundance (473). Thus Herrera identifies richness and fertility, metaphors of copia , as the genre's distinguishing characteristics, rather than the pleasantness of the Arcadian place. Again, too, love is the principal subject of the poems:

La materia de esta poesía es las cosas y obras de los pastores, mayormente sus amores; pero simples y sin daño, no funestos con rabia de celos, no manchados con adulterios; competencias de rivales, pero sin muerte y sangre. Los dones que dan a sus amadas, tienen más estimación por la voluntad, que por el precio. (474)

The subject of these poems is the possessions and works of shepherds, particularly their loves; but these should be simple and without harm, not doleful with furious jealousy, nor stained with adultery; with competitions among rivals, but with neither death nor blood. The gifts they give to their beloveds should be more valued for their intention than for their worth.

In eclogues, diction should always be elegant; words should taste of the earth and the fields, but not without gracefulness, nor should they be ignorant or archaic. Rather, rusticity should always be tempered with a vocabulary appropriate to tender sentiments. Thus, Virgil and Sannazaro are praised, while Mantuan and Encina are censured; here, above all, Garcilaso has matched the achievements of his predecessors.

Nearly absent from Herrera's poetic theory is any discussion of the epic. Because of the commentary's paratextual status, the genres that Herrera defines are necessarily those that Garcilaso employed, and the near identification of lyric with love poetry is a result of what he and his significant predecessors made of it. However much Herrera may want to decenter Garcilaso, he stands between the Sevillian and the earlier poets, a lens that focuses as much as a barrier that impedes. Thus Herrera's neglect of the epic in the Anotaciones is not just the result of a rejection of Aristotelian theory, but a nearly inevitable consequence of the fact that Garcilaso himself did not practice it.^[33] Moreover, because Garcilaso and Petrarch largely neglected the epic, at least in the vernacular, in favor of lyric, for Herrera the lyric takes the place of epic in the hierarchy of genres, as can be seen in his notes on these lines from the dedication of Garcilaso's first eclogue to Pedro de Toledo, viceroy of Naples:

el árbol de vitoria
que ciñe estrechamente
tu glorïosa frente
dé lugar a la yedra que se planta.
(35–38)

Let the tree of victory that tightly girds your glorious forehead give way to the planted ivy.

Glossing the words el arbol , Herrera declares that the garland on the viceroy's brow must have been the laurel, which in ancient times

had crowned military heroes and epic poets. Thus he opens the note with a quote from Petrarch, "Arbor vittoriosa triunfale, / onor d'imperadori et di poeti" (Victorious triumphal tree, the honor of emperors and of poets, Rime sparse 263.1–2). Yet standing at the head of the note, these lines, from the foremost modern lyric poet and devotee of the laurel, mark the historical transition from epic to lyric. Imitating Garcilaso's instructions to the viceroy (doff the laurel, put on the ivy), Herrera's note proceeds through an account of the poetic attributes of the laurel, the myrtle (used in ancient times by love poets), and finally the ivy, "de los líricos" (of the lyric poets, 477). This plant is also the most appropriate for learned poets, for "es de fuera verde y dentro amarilla; y por eso coronan de ella a los poetas, amarillos del estudio, mas su gloria, y la que celebran, florida y verde mucho tiempo" (it is green on the outside and yellow within; and for this reason it crowned those poets who were pallid from their studies, while their glory, and that of whom they praise, is always green and in bloom, ibid.). Herrera goes on to explain the sacred associations of the ivy: Jupiter wore it after defeating the Titans, and when mixed with wine it leads not to a vile drunkenness but to a near frenzy; the plant is named after a dancer who died in the course of performing for Bacchus, and who was subsequently transformed into a vine. By shifting the topic of a note ostensibly glossing the laurel, from military heroism and the epic to lyric poetry and art, Herrera echoes Garcilaso's advice (shed one garland in favor of another) but also traces, allegorically, what he sees as the course of literary history. In fact, Herrera had ample opportunities to digress on the nature of epic, such as the notes on the second half of the second eclogue, on the rima octava , and on the other poems in which Garcilaso declares a preference for love poetry over epic poetry (such as the fifth canción and the third eclogue). Herrera's avoidance of the topic must therefore be taken as both deliberate and significant.^[34] His most "epic" note is that on "el osado español," discussed in the preceding section; in the context of Herrera's poetic theory as a whole, it becomes clear that the glory that poets will bring to Spain is not just parallel to, but distinct from, that of her military victories. Spaniards must take on Italians not on that military battlefield where they have already been victorious, but on the literary battlefield of the lyric poem.

To Elias Rivers, Herrera represents a retreat from the Garcilasan

ideal of indirect poetics, back to the systematic, Nebrijan mold (see "Some Ideas" and "L'humanisme linguistique"). Undeniably, Herrera's annotations do revel in a demonstration of encyclopedic erudition antithetical to the school of Castiglione, and he rejects the prosaic model of poetry approximating the speech of courtiers. He emphasizes instead what is proper for the heightened language of poetry through his attention to genres, figures, and even phonetic techniques. Yet there is little that is systematic about Herrera's exposition, either in content or in arrangement. Historically, the Anotaciones are a transitional text; and while his descriptions of the formal requirements of the various genres, particularly the sonnet, are unusual for his time, it would be impossible to write a poem merely following his precepts. He presupposes familiarity with the forms, and for more prescriptive definitions one must look in Sánchez de Lima's El arte poética en romance castellano (also 1580) or wait for Díaz Rengifo's Arte poética española , ten years later. Similarly, his aesthetic ideas are more methodically presented in Robles's Culto sevillano , which Herrera influenced. His paratextual dependence on Garcilaso shows Herrera's continued resistance to theory, which places the Anotaciones at the cusp of the transition to the Baroque preceptive and analytical treatises of the following century.

Although the arrangement of Herrera's notes seems chaotic, overall they are governed by a limited set of principles: on the one hand, the need to displace Garcilaso from his position at the center of Spanish poetry; on the other, the nature of that poetry as determined by Garcilaso's example. Above all, he emphasizes the importance of sensual (particularly visual) and intellectual elements in poetic ornamentation, and the continuing delay in the completion of the translatio . Underlying these ideas is the conviction that lyric poetry is the proper successor to the epic, and thus is the ground on which national literary achievements must be judged. The context, both historical and stylistic, in which Herrera places Garcilaso is "Italia y Grecia," the Greco-Roman-Italian tradition whose foremost modern representative is Petrarch. Writing the Anotaciones reenacts the hermeneutic circle: such are the expectations with which Herrera reads Garcilaso, and such is what he subreads in Garcilaso's poems. The same circular process lies behind the creation of Herrera's own poetry, and it is with this method that his poems should be read.

Love and Allusion: Petrarch and Garcilaso in the Poetry of Herrera

The remainder of this chapter examines Herrera's poetry in terms of the related issues of arrangement, intertextuality, and interpretation. These aspects of his poetry have been neglected, in part because critics have been diverted by the textual issues surrounding his work and by attempts to apply narrowly the stylistic categories of the Anotaciones . Moreover, Herrera's poetry is clothed in a nearly seamless garment of conventional Neoplatonism and Petrarchism, which stands in the way of a true intertextual reading. Often Herrera seems either to imitate slavishly, or else to adopt a style, instead of struggling to appropriate and revise particular poems. Yet our emphasis on subreading Herrera's texts and on treating some of them as metapoems is not a generic approach to Petrarchist poetry, but one motivated by Herrera's own allusive technique; the resulting interpretations are meant not to supplant the conventional understanding but to show how intertextual tension competes with the surface unity of the poems. Herrera's adoption of neglected genres and techniques, in an attempt to go beyond Garcilaso, results in hyper-Petrarchan texts that successfully emulate their models.

Herrera's poetry has not received as much critical or interpretative attention as that of other Spanish Renaissance poets, perhaps because of the textual controversies that cannot be definitively resolved. There are three principal sources for his poetry. The first is the Cisne del Betis , manuscript 10.159 of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, dated 1578 and containing the works of several poets from Seville; the Herrera portion, containing early versions and otherwise unknown poems, was published by Blecua as Herrera's Rimas inéditas in 1948. The second and most authentic source is the 1582 edition Algunas obras de Fernando de Herrera , prepared by the poet himself, dedicated to the marqués de Tarifa, and containing one hundred poems. For the remaining seventeen years of his life, however, the poet published no more poetry, and the next edition of his works, the 1619 Versos de Fernando de Herrera emendados y divididos por él en tres libros , has been controversial from the start. It was prepared (according to Enrique Duarte's prologue) by the painter Francisco Pacheco on the basis of "cuadernos i borradores" (quartos and

drafts) that survived the "naufragio" (shipwreck) after the poet's death, in which was lost a manuscript of his poems, "que él tenía corregidas de última mano, i encuadernadas para darlas a la imprenta" (which he had definitively corrected in his own hand, and bound for printing). Dedicated by Pacheco to Gaspar de Guzmán, count of Olivares (and future privado to Philip IV), it contains 365 poems, including almost the entire contents of the 1582 edition but in new versions and in a new arrangement; the degree to which the emendations and the ordering of the poems reflect Herrera's intentions is much disputed. Thus many poems exist in two or even three versions.^[35]

That Herrera published his own poetry is significant; he was the first major author since Boscán to attempt to bring to print a significant body of work in his own lifetime (and Boscán, of course, died just before seeing the fruits of this effort).^[36] Like Boscán, Herrera takes advantage of print to imitate Petrarch by organizing his poems; in both printed editions, as in the Rime sparse and in Boscán's second book—but in contrast to the Garcilaso editions—poetic genres are intermixed rather than separated. Moreover, although some of his poems celebrate historical events or are addressed to contemporaries, most are about his love for "Luz" (usually identified with Leonor, wife of his patron, the count of Gelves), who thus plays a role analogous to Laura's as both signified (a forbidden love) and signifier (the focal point of the collection). This analogy serves as a sign in its own right, linking the two collections; in view of Laura's identification with the dawn and Luz's with sunlight, it creates overlapping semantic fields which in turn increase the possibilities for intertextual reference. As Hernández Esteban put it,

Creemos que mejor que ningún otro poeta del Renacimiento español, es en la poesía de Herrera donde hay una más profunda comprensión de la fusión Dafne-Laura que lleva a cabo Petrarcha, y su recuperación le permite a Herrera no sólo imitar en una vía de continuidad poética, sino a la vez separarse, diferenciarse del modelo. (405)

We believe that, more than in any other poet of the Spanish Renaissance, in Herrera's poetry there is a profound comprehension of that fusion of Daphne and Laura which Petrarch realizes, and its recovery permits Herrera not only to imitate in a path of poetic continuity, but also to separate and distance himself from the model.

Like Boscán, Herrera expects readers to be familiar with his predecessors' work and takes advantage of the expectations that will thereby have been formed. The process is circular: on a macrotextual level, the very act of arranging the texts serves an allusive function which, in turn, reinforces the allusions that, on the microtextual level of individual poems, create the illusion of a series of "snapshots" constituting a narrative.

The poems in the 1582 edition are undoubtedly authentic and, as the title indicates, it was meant to be a selection of Herrera's works and a demonstration of his poetic ability to an audience of fellow literati. The very act of publishing them, and the fact that the countess of Gelves had died the previous year, mitigate their reading as love poems in a strictly communicative sense. Within the anthology there is an attempt to present them in a sequence, as can be seen in certain groups of poems or "nodes" about a particular theme; yet an autobiographical or even narratological interpretation is difficult. Unlike Boscán, who suggests a fictional autobiography, Herrera uses the opening poems not to describe an enamoramiento but to set the tone for the anthology, and the arrangement of the poems highlights Herrera's use of Petrarch and Garcilaso as models. In the first lines of the opening sonnet,

  Osè, i temi; mas pudo la osadia
tanto, que despreciè el temor cobarde.
subi a do el fuego mas m'enciende i arde,
cuanto mas la esperança se desvia.
  Gastè en error la edad florida mia.
(AO 1.1–5)

I dared and I feared, but my daring proved so great that I despised fearful cowardice; I rose to where fire most ignites me, the more that hope is left behind. I spent in error my florid age.

the verbs are in the preterit, implying actions that are past and completed, upon which the poet looks back from a state of greater wisdom. In this choice of tense, and in the reference to his wasted youth, the verses suggest a connection to the prefatory sonnets of Petrarch and Boscán, an imitatio vitae culminating in conversion and a palinode. Yet in the subsequent lines the poet switches to a present tense, indicative of continuing and cyclical actions. Here the references seem to be more to Garcilaso, particularly sonnet 4, in the

poet's attempts to rise, his subsequent fall, and his determination to persevere.

Considering the poem's apparent prefatory function, one would expect the subsequent sonnets to illuminate or take off from this starting point, but instead they continue in the same vein. Thus the prefatory nature of AO 1 results from the horizon of expectations, conditioned by Petrarch, Bembo (see Cruz, Imitación , 26–33), and Boscán, that the reader brings to it. It is not truly liminal, but an integral part of what is to follow, as is borne out by its displacement, in V , from a prefatory position to the middle of book 3. Yet its function in relation to the rest of AO is as much in the intertextual connections that it signals as in the message it explicitly conveys. With this sonnet Herrera takes advantage of those horizons he knows the reader will bring to the poem and reinforces them; by thus exacerbating them, he lends ambiguity to the poem's reference: his daring, his fear, and his furor may be taken poetically as well as erotically. By invoking his predecessors Herrera attempts, as in the Anotaciones , to locate his own poems as the latest entry in the Petrarchan tradition.

A similar exploitation of the reader's horizons takes place at the conclusion of AO; Macrí (591) has seen in this final poem a palinode, although in V this poem too is displaced to the middle of book 3. Yet the preterit in the first quatrain ("en un incendio no acabado / ardi" [in an unfinished fire I burned], 1–2) is no more indicative of perfected action than it was in the first sonnet, as the present indicative of the second quatrain "I aora (ô vano error) en este estado, . . . pierdo en ti lo mejor de mi cuidado" (and now [oh vain error] in this state . . . I lose in you the greatest of my cares, 5, 8) makes clear. Similarly, the final lines, spoken to love as indirect commands to the beloved, do not suggest repentance: "Abra la luz la niebla a tus engaños, / antes qu'el lazo rompa el tiempo, i muerto / sea el fuego del tardo ielo mio" (Let light pierce the fog of your deceits, before time breaks the bonds and the fire by my final ice is killed, AO 78.12–14). These subjunctives do not indicate immediate action; instead, they convey the poet's wishes, as yet unfulfilled. Macrí notes in these lines the use of the fundamental ice-fire antithesis, citing numerous precedents in Petrarch, such as sonnet 220, "che mi cuocono il cor in ghiaccio e 'n foco" (that burn my heart in ice and fire, 14). Yet in Petrarch ice and fire are paradoxically, and oxymoroni-

cally, united, while in Herrera the final stanza sets up a complicated set of oppositions. In the first line of the tercet, luz , with her light and heat, must break through the cold, dark shadows of love itself; while muerto , the final word of the second line, though syntactically independent, suggests that death would be the result of time's broken bonds and that the fire that gives him light will be extinguished by the iciness of fatality. Thus on first reading, it is the poet himself whose death is in question. Yet in Herrera's poetic vocabulary, lazo , bond or knot, is often a metaphor for hair (see Macrí, 223; Kossoff, 180), and as such is a synecdoche for the beloved. She too is consequently in danger of dissolution by time, as her beauty fades and icy indifference comes to replace the fiery passion he once felt. Finally, the loosened bonds are also those of love itself, which will die with him, as will the fire of life and of poetic creation, which creates the light he loves: when he dies, Luz , who exists only as his poetic creation, will die also. Thus Herrera simultaneously fragments his Petrarchan source into an allegory of external opposites (love and the beloved, life and death, fire and ice) operating on him as a unified subject, threatens the beloved with a carpe diem , and internalizes the opposites into a self-centered love song to his own poetic creation.

The opening and closing poems in AO allude to Petrarch and Garcilaso in a general way; as interesting, in terms of specific intertextual competition, is the node that precedes the conclusion (AO 73–75), which recapitulates Garcilaso's theme of love as a journey. The series is introduced by sonnet AO 73, where the poet compares his burden to that of Atlas and Hercules, in that he too has sustained the heavens "do el Amor se cria; / i donde reina eterna la belleza" (where Love is raised and where eternal beauty reigns, 11–12); as in sonnet 1, this burden can be construed poetically as much as erotically. The following sonnet, "Dond'el dolor me lleva, buelvo el passo" (Where pain leads me, I turn my steps, AO 74.1) has the poet retracing footsteps in a repeating cycle of hope and despair which was also Garcilaso's; the word passo recalls the Toledan's "y a ver los passos por dó m'han traýdo" (to see where my steps have brought me, 1.2), while other details suggest connections with Garcilaso's sonnets 6 and 4, and thence to Garcilaso's own sources in Petrarch, Ausías March, and the cancionero tradition. The most specific connections, however, occur in Herrera's next poem:

   Sigo por un desierto no tratado,
sin luz, sin guia, en confusion perdido,
el vano error, que solo m'à traido
a la miseria del mas triste estado.
   Cuanto m'alàrgo mas, voi mas errado,
i a mayores peligros ofrecido.
dexar atras el mal m'es defendido;
qu'el passo del remedio està cerrado.
(AO 75.1–8)

Through an unexplored desert, without light or guide, in confusion lost, I follow vain error, which only has brought me to the misery of the most woeful state. The further I travel, the more I am in error, and to greater perils offered. To leave affliction behind is forbidden, for the path of remedy is closed.

Here, as in the preceding sonnet, a number of details recall various places in Garcilaso, but above all Herrera rewrites the conclusion of Garcilaso's "Estoy contino en lágrimas bañado":

   Y si quiero subir a la alta cumbre,
a cada paso espántanme en la vía
ejemplos tristes de los que han caýdo;
   sobre todo, me falta ya la lumbre
de la esperança, con que andar solía
por la oscura región de vuestro olvido.
(Rivers ed., 38.9–14)

And if I wish to climb to the high summit, at each step I am frightened by the sad examples of those who have fallen; above all, I lack the light of hope, with which I once wandered through the dark regions of your forgetfulness.

Herrera both preserves and intensifies Garcilaso's desert landscape, particularly in rendering more external and objective that which, in his predecessor, is clearly an internal state. This process is clearest in the transformation of the light/hope metaphor; in Garcilaso they are directly identified, but in Herrera the link is left ambivalent. Thus, through Garcilaso, luz (line 2) refers narrowly to hope, but in the context of the collection as a whole all other associations are also brought into play. Similarly, the eleventh line of Garcilaso's poem, about the failure of his predecessors, creates a context for ambiguity

in Herrera. In line 3, solo may mean either that his error has only brought him misery or that it has brought him alone misery; if the latter, then Herrera is pretending to have no predecessors even as the reader recognizes that, if anything, an excess of predecessors and models is more truly the case. The more Herrera perseveres in this path, the more errado , the more Petrarchan, he becomes, and the more subject to the dangers of imitation; surpassing the limitations, in both the erotic and the literary senses, of Petrarchan love is forbidden to him, while for him as for Garcilaso ("si me quiero tornar para hüyros / desmayo, viendo atrás lo que he dexado" [if I wish to turn to flee you, I faint, seeing at my back what I have left behind], 38.7–8) retreat is impossible. There are no alternatives to Petrarchan imitation open to a poet who wishes to challenge and outdo his predecessors; the field of battle has been chosen for him.^[37]

The opening and closing poems of AO are not truly liminal texts, though they are read as such by those who bring to bear on the anthology a horizon of expectations shaped by Petrarch and Boscán. Herrera exploits that horizon, both to obtain such a reading and to underline the allusive links between his anthology and the poetry of his predecessors, particularly Petrarch and Garcilaso, whom he proposes to transcend. In the node immediately preceding the final sonnet, he makes repeated allusions to Garcilaso's journey poems, portraying himself as both surpassing but also limited to the path his predecessors trod. In contrast to AO, V presents a completely different approach to organization, and however much edited by Pacheco, its title asserts that it contains the corpus of Herrera's poetry presented in canonical order. The 365 poems in V are grouped into three books, each of which begins with a truly liminal sonnet about the challenge posed, respectively by the modern love poets (book 1), the Roman elegists (book 2), and the epic poets (book 3).

The liminal status of V 1.1 can be seen in its opening lines. The first quatrain recapitulates several themes from Petrarch's first sonnet, particularly the notions of vain error, hopelessness, and the tyranny the senses exercised over him; these details are greatly accentuated from the earlier version of the poem in CdB and show the adaptation of a preexistent sonnet to fit the requirements of a liminal poem. The second quatrain then describes the poetic process itself:

   Mueve la voz Amor de mi gemido,
i esfuerça'l triste coraçon cansado,
porque, siendo en mis cartas celebrado,
d'el s'aprovéche nunca el ciego Olvido.
(V 1.1.5–8)

Love moves the voice of my cries and gives strength to my tired, sad heart, so that by being celebrated in my writing, blind Oblivion may never overcome him.

Here again the manuscript version of the poem has been revised, replacing canto with gemido , a more extreme word but one which through metonymy retains the same referent, and introducing cartas , an insinuation of writing, thus incorporating both the oral and scriptive components of poetry. Just as Garcilaso in the third eclogue spoke with a voice that belonged to another, so Herrera presents Love as an autonomous force compelling the poet to speak his cries and forcing him to praise Love through his writing, so that its power may never be forgotten. Then in the tercets Herrera invites the reader, who in his rhymes "sabe i vê'l rigor de su tormento" (knows and sees the severity of his torment, V 1.1.9), to rejoice in recognizing their affinity, while those who are ignorant of it should flee, for "para libres almas no es el canto / de quien sus daños cuenta por vitoria" (the song of him who counts his wounds a victory is not for free souls, V 1.1.13–14). In the original version there was no division into two classes of readers, and thus the second major allusion in the poem, to Ausías March's "Qui no és trist de mos dictats no cur" (see Cuevas edition, 501), is—like the Petrarchan references—accentuated in the process of revision. Through these references Herrera locates both his love and his poetic process in the tradition of the modern love lyric. Unlike Petrarch and Boscán, however, who at least pretended to welcome an untutored audience that would stand to profit from the lessons of love, Herrera seeks only sympathetic and thus cultured readers. While Boscán forced the knowledgeable reader to fictionalize himself as both a poetic and an erotic naïf, ignorant of both Petrarchan love and Petrarchist poetry, Herrera only wants an audience that can share his manipulation of the Petrarchist love themes; and while this poem, like AO 1, sets the emotional tone for what is to follow, in thus standing apart from

the poetry and commenting on its origins, and in constituting its audience, it is more truly liminal than "Osè i temi."

In the preceding section we saw how for Herrera the lyric genres come to take the place of the epic as the guarantors of national glory. A similar sentiment is expressed in the liminal sonnet to book 3 of V:

Las armas fieras cánte
. . .
quien en l'Aonia selva ornò su frente,
. . .
Que yo solo (si Amor tal bien consiente)
mi pura Estrella, cánto vuestra lumbre;
que m'afina en las llamas de su gloria.
(V 3.1.1, 9, 12–14)

Let him who on Ionia crowned his brow, sing of fierce arms; I, if love consents, my pure star, will sing only of your light, which refines me in its glory.

Here Herrera connects the transition from epic to lyric to the translatio from Greece to Spain, and from the ancients to the moderns: epic was good enough for Homer but only praise of his beloved will do for Herrera. Yet as many critics have commented, in the process of supplanting the epic, the lyric genres take on many of its characteristics, in diction as well as theme.^[38] As McInnis noted, Herrera directly refers to his choice of genres in AO 49:

  Que bien sè qu'es mayor la insine gloria
de quien Melas bañò i el Mincio frio,
de quien llorò en Tebro sus enojos.
  Mas que hare, si toda mi memoria
ocupa Amor, tirano señor mio?
(AO 49.9–13)

For I well know that the greatest glory belongs to him whom Melas bathed, and the cold Mincio, to him who into the Tiber wept his passion. But what can I do if my entire memory is occupied by Love, my tyrant lord?

Here Herrera employs the names of rivers antonomastically to refer to the poets of antiquity: the Anatolian Melas stands for Homer, the singer of Troy, while Mantua, Virgil's birthplace, is on the banks of the Mincio; the Tiber is thought to refer to Tibullus (see Cuevas's

notes, 419, but also the discussion below). The speaker, in contrast, has been deprived of memory, an essential property of the epic poet, while enslaved by love and his beloved's eyes. Yet the full impact of the poem can only be judged in terms of its "node" and the specific allusions to a similar node also near the center of the Rime sparse . The poem's context, largely preserved in V , is important: it is immediately preceded by the sonnet "Rompio la prora en dura roca abierta" (My open prow was broken by a hard rock) in which, with epic diction that recalls Homer and Virgil, the poet describes his shipwreck and his arrival in an unknown land. Yet the conclusion of that poem reveals that the shipwreck is but an allegory for love, for "en el golfo de Cupido / ninguno navegò, qu'al fin deshecho, / no se perdiesse falto de ventura" (in Cupid's gulf no one navigates who is not at the end unmade, lost for lack of fortune, AO 48. 12–14).^[39] It is followed by a sonnet in which the poet addresses the certain ignominy that awaits him:

  Pierdo, tu culpa Amor, pierdo engañado,
siguiendo tu esperança prometida,
el mas florido tiempo de mi vida,
sin nombre, en ciego olvido sepultado.
(AO 50.1–4)

I lost through your fault, Love, and, deceived while following your promised hope, I spent the most florid period of my life namelessly buried in blind oblivion.

The poet then goes on to assert that he will no longer squander his time in this way, for while he has seen how a captive can twist his hands and free himself from chains binding his feet, he himself could never erase from his heart that which even death cannot remove. All three poems, then, deal with the decision to write lyric poetry instead of epic, a decision Herrera presents in terms of a necessity because of his love; in V , the node is appropriately placed in book 3, dedicated to the contrast between epic and lyric.

Herrera's choice of the lyric over the epic is overdetermined, however; in addition to the demands of love, the choice imitates Garcilaso's, who himself wrote lyrics instead of epics. The conflict between epic and lyric is also the topic of a number of poems by Petrarch, who worried that the attention he devoted to the vernacular lyric was diverting him from completion of his Latin epic, Africa .

Petrarch's sonnets 186–88 thus provide an important context for these poems of Herrera's. In sonnet 186, Petrarch declares Laura to be worthy of epic treatment: Virgil and Homer themselves, had they known her, would have scorned Aeneas, Achilles, and Odysseus, and devoted themselves to praising her instead. He also compares her to Scipio, the subject of the Africa . In 187 he retells the anecdote of Alexander the Great approaching Achilles' tomb and yearning for a poet who might secure for him a comparable immortality; Laura, too, deserves a greater poet:

Ché d'Omero disgnissima e d'Orfeo
o del pastor ch' ancor Mantova onora,
ch' andassen sempre lei sola cantando,
stella difforme et fato sol qui reo
commise a tal che 'l suo bel nome adora
ma forse scema sue lode parlando.
(Rime sparse 187.9–14)

For she is worthy of Homer and Orpheus and of the shepherd whom Mantua still honors, worthy to have them always singing only of her, but a deformed star and her fate, cruel only in this, have entrusted her to one who adores her lovely name but perhaps mars her praise when he speaks.

Thus Petrarch establishes an ideological precedent for the treatment of the beloved as an epic theme; what he declares himself to have failed to accomplish, "l'un stil coll'altro misto" (one style with the other combined, Rime sparse 186.4), Herrera carries out through his epic diction in lyric poems and his use of lyric genres for epic themes (as in the canción dedicated to the Battle of Lepanto). Moreover, where Petrarch predicts that Laura, because of his inadequate poetry, is destined to be forgotten, Herrera asserts that Luz's fame will survive, for his own memory is fully occupied by Love and not distracted by an ongoing epic project.

In reality, of course, quite the opposite is true, as even Herrera would have recognized. Laura was immortalized by Petrarch's lyrics much more effectively than Luz, and Herrera's memory is as full of distractions as any epic poet's. The very process of alluding to predecessors in terms of riverine antonomasias is itself suggested by Petrarch, who in sonnet 247 refers to Demosthenes, Cicero, Homer, and Virgil by the names of their birthplaces. Yet in his imita-

tion, Herrera outdoes Petrarch by mentioning not the well-known cities but the rather less-known rivers; to solve the allusive puzzle of the poem, the reader is forced to resort to compendia of information like the Anotaciones . This poem further cries out for such a commentary, because the allusions tend toward the obscure: Mincio flows past Mantua, and thus clearly refers to Virgil, but Melas, while probably referring to Homer, opens a host of geographical possibilities in Asia Minor. The Tiber in turn is obscure in just the opposite way, for while everyone knows it flows past Rome, no single poet is specified; in that the sonnet refers to epic poets, Ovid or even Ennius (mentioned in Rime sparse 186) is as likely the object as Tibullus.

Herrera thus establishes a link between this node of three sonnets and a similar node in the Rime sparse; the connection is made even stronger by the opening lines of Petrarch's sonnet 189, "Passa la nave mia colma d'oblio / per aspro mare a mezza notte il verno / enfra Scilla et Caribdi" (My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight, in winter, between Scylla and Charybdis, Rime sparse 189.1–3), which have a clear affinity with the closing of Herrera's "Rompio la prora," particularly in its revised version (V 3.48). There are further allusions in this set of poems to subtexts by Petrarch, Boscán, and Garcilaso: the "florido tiempo" of AO 50.3 recalls Petrarch's frequent use of età fiorita , although Petrarch uses it in reference more to Laura's youth than to his own, and the shipwreck theme in "Rompio la prora" likewise invokes one of the key themes in the Rime sparse , which, as we saw in chapter 3, was significantly reworked by Boscán. Behind the conversion implicit in "Pierdo, tu culpa Amor" there lies an allusion to the Pauline figure of the child and the adult, also crucial to Boscán, while the opening line of AO 49, "Esperè un tiempo, i fue esperança vana" (I hoped for a time, but hope was in vain), recalls Garcilaso's "Un rato se levanta mi esperança" (My hope rises for a while, 4.1). Most of all, the prison imagery of AO 50 suggests an imitation and development of Garcilaso's several incarceration poems, including sonnet 2, sonnet 4, and especially the third canción . The allusions to Boscán and Garcilaso, and particularly the link between this node and the similar one in Petrarch's Rime sparse , break down Herrera's preference for lyric over epic as a free choice, showing it instead as the price for entry into the modern lyrical tradition.

In the liminal poems and in related nodes, we examined how

Herrera defines his relationship with Petrarch. Just as these poems have a specific set of poems in the Rime sparse as their principal source, Garcilaso's poetry provides the stimulus for other texts, which moreover allow us to explore the development of conventional Petrarchan metaphor. The opening image of V 1.31,

  Yo vi, a mi dulce Lumbre qu'esparzia
sus crespas ondas d'oro al manso viento,
i con tierno i suave movimiento,
mi duro coraçon enternecia
(V 1.31.1–4)

I saw my sweet Light who spread her golden curls to the tame wind and, with a soft and tender movement, mollified my hard heart

recalls a similar image from one of Garcilaso's most famous sonnets:

  Y en tanto que'l cabello, que'n la vena
del oro s'escogió, con buelo presto
por el hermoso cuello blanco, enhiesto,
el viento mueve, esparze y desordena.
(23.5–8)

And insofar as the wind moves, spreads, and disorders your hair, chosen from a vein of gold, with a quick flight along your handsome white neck.

Common to both poems is the identification of the beloved's hair with gold, the wind's movement, and the key verb esparcir; note, however, that in Herrera's version the woman actively scatters her hair to the wind, while in Garcilaso her hair is a passive object that the wind scatters. The similarities with Garcilaso have actually been strengthened in the revision of the poem. The CdB version's "Sirena dividía" has been replaced by "Lumbre qu'esparzia," and this change in turn influenced line 3, where "i, con tierno" took the place of "y en voz tierna," with its allusion to the Siren's singing; she survives only in the oceanic "crespas ondas" of line 2.^[40] The Siren has much stronger associations with Petrarch than with Garcilaso, and the process of revision, in addition to moving the poem closer to Garcilaso, substitutes Herrera's personal myth (lumbre , a synonym for luz ) for the more public allusion borrowed from Petrarch.

Yet the poem, even in its 1619 version, still has strong Petrarchan

resonances. The traditional source for Garcilaso's poem, cited by El Brocense (269), is a sonnet by Bernardo Tasso that opens "Mentre che l'aureo crin v'ondeggia intorno / a l'ampia fronte con leggiadro errore" (while golden curls with light disorder wave about your wide forehead); although that may be true for the poem as a whole, both Garcilaso's and Herrera's descriptions of the wind-tussled hair are more reminiscent of several places in Petrarch, such as sonnet 90,

Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi
che 'n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea,
e 'l vague lume oltra misura ardea
di quei begli occhi, ch' or ne son sì scarsi
(Rime sparse 90.1–4)

Her golden hair was loosed to the breeze, which turned it in a thousand sweet knots, and the lovely light burned without measure in her eyes, which are now so stingy of it

and in Herrera's case even sonnet 156, "I' vidi in terra angelici costumi" (I saw on earth angelic qualities, Rime sparse 156.1). Petrarch's sonnet 90 is in turn closely modeled on the description of Venus. in the first book of the Aeneid . Thus through his imitation Herrera subreads in Garcilaso not only the well-known source in Bernardo Tasso but an entire poetic tradition, and brings it to the fore. The subreading of Garcilaso's sources thus encapsulates literary history, including the shift from epic to lyric as Petrarch takes the image from Virgil, the translatio from Rome/Italy as Garcilaso imitates the Italians, and culminates with Herrera's own place at the end of the tradition, in a position to draw upon its riches for his own copia .

In this poem we saw Herrera heightening the affinity with Garcilaso. Yet another poem based on Garcilaso's twenty-third sonnet shows a different kind of transformation process:

  A ora, que cubrio de blanco ielo
el oro la hermosa Aurora mia;
blanco es el puro Sol, i blanco el dia,
i blanco el color lucido d'el cielo.
  Blancas todas tus viras; que recelo,
es blanco el arco i rayos d'alegria,
Amor; con que me hieres aporfia,
blanco tu ardiente fuego i frio ielo.
  Mas que puedo esperar d'esta blancura;

pues tiene'n blanca nieve'l pecho tierno
contra mi fiera llama defendido?
  O beldad sin amor! ô mi Ventura!
qu'abrasado en vigor de fuego eterno,
muero en un blanco ielo convertido.
(V 1.75)

Now that the gold of my handsome dawn is covered with white ice, the pure sun is white, the day is white, and white is the lucent color of the sky. White are your darts that I distrust, white is the bow and the rays of joy with which, Love, you wound me repeatedly, white your burning fire and your cold ice. But what can I hope for from this whiteness, for it has her tender breast defended with white snow from my fierce flame? Oh loveless beauty, oh my fortune, that while blazing in an eternal fire, I die into white ice converted.

The transformations from the CdB to the 1619 version have been masterfully analyzed by Pepe Sarno: as she notes, the word blanco and its variants, occurring ten times in the course of the sonnet, assume the role of key words in the semantic system of the sonnet ("Bianco il ghiaccio," 461). Opposing its semantic supremacy, however, are words containing the phonemes /r/ and /o/; this pattern, established by the initial word of the sonnet, is associated with the key concept of oro , symbol of light as well as the color of the beloved's hair. This feature is common to both versions of the poem; however, Pepe Sarno also stresses how in the revision the final word of the first line is changed from velo to ielo , thus creating an identical rhyme with line 8, and how Herrera reinforces the repetition by changing "nieve fria" to "blanco ielo" in line 14.^[41] As she notes,

Se fonicamente la variante velo/ielo si rivela in P fattore unificante delle rime, semanticamente la sua presenza è molto piú incisiva. Velo e ielo definiscono ambiti semantici diversissimi: il primo, il velo di B, rientra nel campo dell'abbigliamento femminile e mobilita valori connotativi di impalpabile morbidezza, leggerezza, delicatezza ecc.; il secondo, il ielo di P, rimane completamente estraneo a questa sfera semantica ed acquista una connotazione di rigida freddezza. (ibid., 463)

If phonetically the variants velo/ielo are revealed in P [i.e., V ] as a unifying factor in the rhyme, semantically their presence is much more incisive. Velo and ielo define very different semantic fields: the first, the veil in B [CdB ], directs us to the field of women's dress and allows connotations of impalpable morbidity, lightness, delicacy, etc.;

the second, the ice in P , remains completely extraneous to this semantic sphere and acquires a connotation of rigid cold.

Similarly, "el color del claro cielo" becomes "el color lúcido del cielo": lúcido , in addition to its semantic connection to Luz , is more proper to ice than to the veil, with its connotations of brilliant transparency (ibid., 464). Other transformations in the quatrains include the change from "blancas tus flechas son" to "blancas todas tus viras" resulting in the diminution of soft ells and greater concentration in syntax. The same effect is achieved in the tercet through strengthening the enjambment and hyperbaton in lines 10–11, and by the substitution of "contra mi fiera llama" for "tiene contra mi alma" (line 11) because of the former's opposition, in terms of temperature and color, to the "blanco ielo" and the threat it poses to the "pecho tierno" of the preceding line. The tercets also contain a shift of focus from the beloved (to whom the first "blanco ielo" refers) to the poet (himself converted to ice in the final line).

The shifts thus intensify the poem's central conceit, the transformation of the beloved from warm gold to cold ice. The imitation that underlies the poem is of the notion of the beloved's hair covered with snow, as expressed by Garcilaso, "antes que'l tiempo ayrado / cubra de nieve la hermosa cumbre" (before angry time covers with snow the beautiful summit, 23.10–11); just as the phonic pattern shines from beneath the semantic one, so too Garcilaso's poem hovers just beneath the surface. Yet instead of drawing out the lesson of that poem, that youth should be enjoyed before it fades, Herrera turns it on its head: if the beloved's gold is turned white, then it follows that everything associated with her must turn white as well. In the revision of the poem, Herrera intensifies his own association with fire, here representative of passion; the ice-fire antithesis thus becomes the motivation for the tercets, in the last line of which he too must surrender to ice and death. In this way he turns the moral of Garcilaso's poem, "todo lo mudará la edad ligera / por no hazer mudança en su costumbre" (fickle age will change everything so as not to change its custom, 23.13–14), inward against himself: by being changed into ice, he becomes what the beloved already is, and the sonnet thus embodies what Rico considers the fundamental trope of Spanish Petrarchism, "el amante en amada transformado" (lover into beloved transformed). In contrast

to V 1.31 where, in the course of revising the poem, Herrera brought out the affinities to Garcilaso, here he disguises them, thus eliminating the veil that would fall lightly upon the beloved's golden hair (which has strong Petrarchan connotations as well), as well as the snow in the closing line. Instead, he closes the revised poem with an image of hard ice, water made mineral, akin to Petrarch's "l'indurato ghiaccio" (the hardened ice, Rime sparse 66.29). This semantic emphasis on concentration and hardening is mirrored stylistically in the revisions to the poem, through such details as the increased complexity of the hyperbaton and the use of the more erudite vira instead of flecha .

Herrera's allusions to Petrarch are not only structural and semantic but generic as well. As noted at the beginning of this section, Herrera uses the very act of organizing his collection as a sign through which he asserts a relationship with his predecessors. He also does so through his choice of genres: while most of his poems are sonnets, canciones , elegies, epistles, eclogues, and octaves—the genres made canonical in Spanish by Garcilaso—Herrera tries to outdo his predecessor by naturalizing one of the most distinctive of Petrarchan genres, the sestina. Herrera's sestinas, by their form, call attention to themselves as self-consciously Petrarchan productions, and not surprisingly Herrera often uses them to thematize his relation to the poetic tradition. One such poem is the first sestina of book 1, "Vn verde Lauro, en mi dichoso tiempo."^[42] Cuevas, in his notes (520), connects the poem to Petrarch's "Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro" (Rime sparse 30), while Hernández Esteban (405) links it through the coincidence of some rhyme words to "A la dolce ombra de le belle frondi" (Rime sparse 142). Herrera's poem shares with both of these others a sense of nostalgia for time past but, as will be shown, its link to "A la dolce ombra" goes beyond identity of rhyme words.

Herrera's poem is unusual in that here the poet virtually forsakes his usual repertoire of visual images associated with light (gold, fire, stars, the sun) and instead adopts an equally visual and equally Petrarchan set of images associated with trees, rivers, and forests. As Hernández Esteban noted, the word Lauro recurs in each stanza, always in the middle of a line, and thus it forms a vertical axis linking the stanzas that competes with the self-contained cycle of the

rhyme words, all of which are directly or indirectly related to it. The first stanzas describe the poet's fall from grace:

  Vn verde Lauro, en mi dichoso tiempo,
solia darme sombra, i con sus hojas
mi frente coronava junto a Betis:
entonces yo en su gloria alçava el canto,
i resonava como el blanco Cisne;
la Soledad testigo fue, i el bosque.
  Despues que al bien me dio principio el bosque,
i en la sombra gozé d'el dulce tiempo,
i canté como cuando muere'l Cisne,
el Lauro me negò sus verdes hojas.
i en triste se trocó el alegre canto,
i se admirò de mi lamento Betis.
(V , sest. 1.1.1–12)

A green Laurel, in my happy time, used to give me shade, and with its leaves crown my forehead by the Betis: then I raised my song to its glory, and it resounded like the white Swan; Solitude and the forest were witnesses. But after the forest gave me my start in virtue, and in the shade I enjoyed the sweet time and sang as when the Swan dies, the Laurel denied me its green leaves, and my happy song became sad, and the Betis was astonished at my lament.

In the first stanza, all of the disparate elements are in unity: the laurel shaded him and crowned his brow, so that he sang in the forest like a swan.^[43] The result was a truly blessed time, captured by the phrase "dichoso tiempo" which also echoes the first line of Petrarch's canzone 23, "Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade." As in canzone 23 and in the sestine , the primal state comes to a quick end, and the rest of the poem is taken up with the consequences of his exclusion. The succeeding stanzas repeat the narrative of his alienation: the forest has closed in and barred him from the laurel, which consequently no longer crowns him; he seeks it but is reduced to crying his lament like a swan along the river's bank, which alone hears his song.

At first reading it seems as if this poem restates one more time the Herreran theme of hope followed by despair, with the complete and successful appropriation of Petrarch's imagery resulting in an identification of Luz with Laura on the levels of both the signifieds (the beloveds that the poems are about) and the signifiers (the su-

perstructure of associations based on their names).^[44] A second look at the poem, however, reveals the presence of a word sharing sememes with Herrera's usual repertory: sombra , used twice in the opening stanzas to describe the nature of his prelapsarian state. Ordinarily Herrera uses the word in tandem with terms like olvido (see Macrí, 317; also Kossoff, 308) to indicate the state of being isolated from the beloved; the poet's intimacy with the green laurel, then, effectively protected him but also cut him off from the sun. At that time he was also covered with the laurel leaves; we know from the Anotaciones that these are associated with poetry, and Petrarch himself used the word fronde to mean both leaf and page. Thus when Herrera states that in his solitude he sang its praises, he is referring not just to a tree, or to a woman, but to a state of being in communion with poetry itself. In the second stanza, however, as the tree denies him its shade, his song becomes like that of a dying swan, and the Betis—symbolic of Seville and by extension of all Spain—admires his cry. His exclusion from the laurel is consequently compensated by the development of his own poetry, of a proper voice which is that of the lament.

The succeeding stanzas emphasize the interposition of the forest between him and the laurel: "Yo busco el Lauro . . . / i està cerrado en el espesso bosque" (I seek the Laurel . . . and it is closed off in the dense forest, 13–14); "el Lauro, i verdes hojas, / que m'impiden tratar el duro bosque" (the Laurel and the green leaves that the forest impedes me from treating, 21–22); and "aquel bosque / que del Lauro defiendeme las hojas" (that forest that bars me from the Laurel's green leaves, 29–30). In the closing stanzas, however, the power relationship is reversed:

  Pues ya no me corono de las hojas
enmudesca de oi mas el tierno canto;
assi vea desnudo al triste bosque,
i llore mi dolor el blanco Cisne,
que tiende'l lecho en el sobervio Betis;
pues el Lauro me falta, i dexa el tiempo.
  Entristeceme'l tiempo, el Lauro, i hojas,
el canto no me agrada, el blanco Cisne
lamente'n Betis, i arda en fuego el bosque.
(31–39)

For as I no longer crown myself with the leaves, from now on may the tender song be silenced; let me see the sad forest denuded, and

let the white Swan weep my pain, that makes his bed in the proud Betis; for the Laurel is denied to me, and time allows it. Time, the Laurel, and the leaves sadden me, and the song no longer pleases me; let the white Swan lament on the Betis, and let fire consume the forest.

Here Herrera rejects the tone of nostalgia that governed the rest of the poem and asserts an independence from his prior mode. If the crown of laurel is to be no longer his, then he will renounce the tender mode and allow the trees to lose their leaves; this image is intensified in the final line of the poem, when he predicts the trees' conflagration. Fuego is yet again from Herrera's own repertoire of images; as an antonomasia for Luz, its consuming of the forest indicates not an association with Laura but an antagonism to, and an ultimate destruction of, the original.

The residual presence of these items from Herrera's standard vocabulary, then, works against the identification of Laura and Luz and sets them up as opposites. In this context, Herrera's model is worth reviewing. Petrarch too set up an opposition between the tree and the light:

A la dolce ombra de le belle frondi
corsi fuggendo un dispietato lume
che 'n fin qua giù m'ardea dal terzo cielo;
et disgombrava già di neve i poggi
l'aura amorosa che rinova il tempo,
et fiorian per le piagge l'erbe e i rami.
Non vide il mondo sì leggiadri rami
né mosse il vento mai sì verdi frondi
come a me si mostrar quel primo tempo,
tal che temendo de l'ardente lume
non volsi al mio refugio ombra di poggi,
ma da la pianta più gradita in cielo.
(Rime sparse 142.1–12)

To the sweet shade of those beautiful leaves I ran, fleeing a pitiless light that was burning down upon me from the third heaven; and already the snow was disappearing from the hills thanks to the loving breeze that renews the season, and through the meadows the grass bloomed and the branches. The world never saw such graceful branches nor did the wind ever move such green leaves as showed themselves to me in that first season; so that, fearing the burning light, I chose for my refuge no shade of hills but that of the tree most favored in Heaven.

On a narrative level, for Petrarch the laurel tree functions as a source of protection from a burning sun that beats down on the poet, and whose shade creates a veritable locus amoenus with a fresh breeze, melting snow, and flowers. At the same time, the light that torments Petrarch comes from the third heaven, that of Venus, and so on an allegorical level the shade that the tree offers is in some sense a respite from the pangs of lust. Borrowing the motif of the lost laurel from "Giovene donna," Herrera combines the two poems to offer a vision of a lost paradise in which there was plenitude and fulfillment, both erotic and poetic. Yet notably absent from Herrera's poem is any sense of divine salvation, which comes into play at the conclusion to "A la dolce ombra," when Petrarch declares he must substitute another tree if he is to obtain permanent rest: "Altr'amor, altre frondi, et altro lume, / altro salir al ciel per altri poggi / cerco (che n'è ben tempo), et altri rami" (Another love, other leaves, and another light, another climbing to Heaven by other hills I seek [for it is indeed time], and other branches, Rime sparse 142.37–39). Unlike Petrarch, Herrera does not offer himself a transcendent escape from his obsessions.

Through his use of the form and of thematic material from Petrarch, Herrera turns the sestina into the site of a struggle for supremacy signaled by his transferring the laurel to the banks of the Betis. His initial enjoyment of the shady bower was also a time of nurturing and apprenticeship, when he freely took from the tree's leaves, but his song went unheard; his satisfaction with the source precluded any frustration that could be displaced to poetry of his own. This situation lasted until he began to sing like a dying swan, which is to say in a sacred and immortal way; then, as a response to his song, the laurel forsook him, but the Betis was astonished at his song. Whatever the source for the image of the swan, it is a proclamation of the poet's own strength, his transformation from the youthful status of reader into a rival poet. Yet if the laurel represents the source of poetry, and as such Petrarch, the trees that closed in, cutting him off from his onetime source, are the intervening generations of poets, the realization of his lack of priority even as an imitator. Instead of intimidating him, however, they only led him to sing even more, and to declare war on the forest. Ultimately, Herrera takes comfort in a vision of surpassing his model, his ardor threatening to destroy it. This vision, however, remains on the level of a

fantasy, as the subjunctive verbs of lines 31–39 indicate. Moreover, the central axis of the Lauro is stronger than the rotating cycle of the rhyme words. Herrera's appropriation of the genre thus proves to be but a dream of priority, in which the poetic fathers are killed and the orphan reigns in their place. As a fantasy, it reinforces its opposite fiction, which thus assumes the mantle of "reality": necessarily cut off from Petrarch by time and the intervening achievements of rival poets, Herrera is truly an orphan, yet one attempting to renew the fecundity of the line.

The poem stands thus in marked contrast to Garcilaso's confident assertion of his own metalepsis in the third eclogue, for through his generic, stylistic, and thematic choices Herrera reveals a dependency on his predecessors, particularly Garcilaso and Petrarch. Dependency is not the same thing as identity, however, and in the best of his poems Herrera displays a seriousness and a mad intensity that, on its own terms (for instance, the metaphorization of the beloved's body, the emanation of sememes from the beloved's name), nearly raises him above even these predecessors. Moreover, if Herrera's poetry was insufficiently strong to overcome Garcilaso's, as a poet-critic he certainly overcame his predecessors, and in spite of the rejection by his contemporaries he has come to be regarded as the father of literary criticism in Spain. Throughout both his poetry and his criticism he shows himself a powerful reader, embellishing his material with wide erudition and stylistic imagination. Himself a literary connoisseur, he appeals to the same, and his achievements would shine brighter were it not for Góngora, whose work he seems not to have known.