Spanish Alterity and the Language of Empire

Petrarchism outside Italy is necessarily different, for Bembo's linguistic prescription—that literary composition should employ the Tuscan dialect of the trecento—cannot be transferred where the adoption of Petrarch as a model necessarily involves a change of language, and where his influence is mediated through a different set of conditions on both literary and extraliterary levels. Spanish alterity arises from just such an interplay of social and literary factors: Spain, the first unified nation-state in Europe and for more than a century the most powerful, early on attained a self-conscious national literature. This process coincided with the completion of the so-called Reconquest of Granada, even as an intimate relationship with Italy brought a perception of Italian cultural superiority. Far from diminishing Petrarch's role as a model, alterity expands the ways in which he can be imitated, as imitators look beyond the linguistic surface that was Bembo's main concern: Petrarch was repeatedly a source of poetic renewal, as poets continuously reread, reinterpreted, and reappropriated his work. The new horizons led to imitations that at their worst fixated on the decorative aspects of Petrarch's style, but at their best looked to the organization of the Rime sparse as a macrotext and, in exceptional cases, tackled the profound issues of love, morality, and individuation that troubled Petrarch himself.

Humanist belatedness, while not unique to Italy, necessarily acquired different characteristics in other countries, resulting in the elevation of different topoi to the status of master tropes. Italians, for example, regarded the Romans as their ancestors, so the death and rebirth of ancient culture, while influenced by external invasions, were viewed as national concerns and expressed through the trope of the tripartite model of history. To scholars such as Curtius, the very idea of the "Middle Ages" is "a coinage of the Italian humanists and only comprehensible from their point of view" (20). The "Renaissance" was a strictly Italian affair, and "the concept that Spain, France, Germany, and so on, experienced 'Renaissances' is to be rejected. It is true, however, that these countries had one or more waves of 'Italianism'—which was the export form of the Italian Renaissance" (34 n. 44). Yet by acknowledging the existence of cultural

rebirth as a trope in fifteenth-century Italy, and its subsequent dissemination abroad, he concedes that a notion of the Renaissance can be grounded in the self-concept of the period, and that as this movement spread it created a problem of priority for humanists outside Italy, where insecurity about the present was compounded by anxiety over national identity and its relation to the classical sources of Western culture.^[9] Curtius illuminates the issue by examining one of the principal topoi used to counter the lack of priority, that of the translatio studii . According to this theory, the center of learning shifts periodically and moves gradually to the west: thus, the origin of civilization was in the ancient Near East, which gradually passed the torch to the Greeks and then to the Romans, and so on.^[10] The trope was of little consequence to the Italian humanists (though, as we have seen, Bembo used it), but it was very important to those outside Italy who sought to show that their efforts were the most important. The Italian revival might be a continuation of Rome, but, viewed from abroad, a Renaissance in France or Spain indicates a new movement farther to the west, so French or Spanish humanists had to posit a translatio studii that lagged behind the translatio imperii , which had already been accomplished. Thus, like the trope of humanist belatedness, that of the translatio serves as much as a sign of hidden worries about the lack of priority, as an effective antidote. Moreover, it prompts an added degree of anxiety, for as a cyclical scheme of history it implies an eventual downfall for the very nations that use it to account for their rise. As Italian humanist ideas spread abroad, they carried with them, as Johan Nordstroem put it, Italian notions about the importance and superiority of Italian civilization, and a disdainful attitude regarding "barbarians" who lived beyond the Alps (15). The result of appropriating such Italian ideas may be termed "displacedness," a geographical sense of national inferiority parallel to the historical sense of belatedness.

In Spain a tradition of classical scholarship existed throughout the late medieval period, particularly in the wake of contacts fostered with Avignon during the reign of the Spaniard Pedro de Luna as Benedict XIII. Ottavio Di Camillo, adapting Ferguson's model to Spain, shows how these efforts remained largely "prehumanistic," for scholars did not conceive of themselves as renewers of antiquity; rather, they viewed the past ahistorically, minimizing the gap that

separated them from ancient times. Only in the wake of Inñigo López de Mendoza, marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), did a more thoroughgoing, but still indigenous, form of humanist belatedness arise. In his "Proemio e carta"—the preface to an anthology of his poetic works, written in the late 1440s—Santillana presents a panoramic history of poetry from the ancients to his own day. The twelve-hundred-year gap he posits between the ancients and the moderns suggests the tripartite division of history that opens the way for the humanist hermeneutic, but by and large his is a chronologically and geographically inclusive list. Though deeply involved in the political events of his day, Santillana does not link the situation of Spanish poetry to military attainments, or view literary history in terms of a translatio studii that would set up an opposition between Spain and Italy. Similarly, Santillana's sonnets, though considerable poetical achievements in their own right, show an eclectic approach to imitation, and while permeated with Petrarchisms as decorative devices, they do not struggle to appropriate Petrarch as a single, privileged model.

Yet Santillana's importance to Spanish humanist self-consciousness stems as much from the posthumous praise of his followers as from his own accomplishments. In a letter written after Santillana's death, his nephew the poet Gómez Manrique pictures him as the first to join the cuirass to the gown, and as figuratively tearing ignorance from the fabric of Spain, while Pero Díaz de Toledo commented that more than anyone else in Spain this nobleman exercised himself so as to perpetuate his fame through both his wise writings and his extraordinary acts of chivalry (249–50). Even more interesting, as Di Camillo points out, are the comments of Diego de Burgos (in Schiff, 460–64). By attributing the revival of learning to Santillana, Burgos employs a trope already well established in Italian humanist circles; but Di Camillo is correct in underlining its significance, for Burgos uses it to set up an opposition between Italy and Spain. With language that anticipates later writers, he depicts Santillana as a warrior successfully looting that eloquence which was formerly the property of the Italians and bringing it to Castile, where now it begins to Flourish.^[11] His choice of words legitimizes Santillana's intellectual pursuits, for they result in the same aggrandizement of Castile as the other, more traditional and bellicose occupations of the nobility. Thus as Di Camillo concludes, with the de-

velopment of a tripartite historical conscience, there grew both a sense of humanist belatedness and a turn toward Italy as the model country in which the literary recovery was furthest advanced.

Yet if fifteenth-century humanist belatedness was primarily indigenous, it was transcended at the end of the century by national developments that led to a more complex relationship with Italy. As Di Camillo observed, in humanist rhetoric Antonio de Nebrija (ca. 1441–1522) replaced Santillana as the instigator of the rebirth of learning in Spain; and while in part this move paralleled the Italian humanists' postponement of the Renaissance, with Nebrija's greater classical scholarship allowing him to eclipse Santillana, it also reflected the evolution of Spanish political and cultural institutions. By the end of the fifteenth century, the homogenization of Spain was clearly at hand, as the dynastic union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile presaged the imminent conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews. With it came Castilian hegemony in linguistic as in political matters, but with it too came an internationalist attitude previously associated with Aragon. Late fifteenth-century concepts of Spanish cultural inferiority to Italy, and of the connection between literary achievement and the Spanish empire, can be glimpsed in the Gramática de la lengua castellana by Nebrija and the "Arte de poesía castellana" by his probable student Juan del Encina (1468-ca. 1529). To both Nebrija and Encina, literary history lags behind Spanish political and military achievements, and they contrast cultural shortcomings to Italian achievements. By casting both political and literary history in terms of a translatio , they seek to predict that literary accomplishments will eventually catch up with military ones. But in the process they reveal a rivalry with Italy for cultural legitimacy, based on feelings of belatedness and displacedness, and they burden Spanish culture with fear of eventual decline and extinction.

The year 1492 is a key one for the Spanish Renaissance, not only because of its political events, but also because the first grammar of a modern European vernacular was printed in Salamanca, the Gramática de la lengua castellana by Nebrija.^[12] Although Nebrija had been engaged in its production since at least 1486, when he presented to the queen a sample of his proposed project, its appearance in that historic year was not entirely coincidental, as the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews only culminated long-

standing policies designed to unify and pacify the Iberian peninsula. Castile seemed to be at its political and military peak, ready at last to look outside itself; and the most immediate opportunities lay in Africa and Italy, each in its own way symbolic of Spain's cultural heritage. Ferdinand's Italian policy was to yield, within a decade, the deposition of his Neapolitan cousins and the absorption of southern Italy by the Spanish crown. The new international prominence of Spain and its focus on Italy leave their mark on Nebrija's grammar, which emerges as the first document of Spanish cultural belatedness and thus of the Spanish Renaissance.

It is primarily in the prologue to the Gramática that Nebrija advances the concept of cultural belatedness, by linking the national language to a theory of empire, and presenting both in cyclical terms:

Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caída de entrambos. (97)

Language was always the companion of empire, and followed it such that together they began, together they grew and flourished, and later together they fell.

To substantiate this assertion of connection and cycle, Nebrija proceeds to a historical survey of the great political and linguistic powers of the past, combining military and literary accomplishments. Abraham spoke the Chaldean language of his birthplace, which, mixed with Egyptian, resulted in Hebrew at the same time that the Jews were constituted a nation. Moses was the first to philosophize and write in the language; from there it flourished, reaching its zenith during the peaceful reign of Solomon, after which, with the disintegration of the Jewish state, it declined. After the Jews the Greeks were the next to attain hegemony, a process that began with Orpheus and continued after the Trojan War with Homer and Hesiod, reaching its apogee at the time of Alexander the Great, when poets, orators, and philosophers gave the Greeks mastery of all the arts and sciences. With the dissolution of his empire, the Romans became their masters, and then simultaneously the Greek language began to dissipate and Latin to grow strong (98). Latin had its childhood with the city's foundation, and began to flourish at the time of

Livius Andronicus some five hundred years later. Thence it grew until the pax romana of Augustus, which was also the time of the birth of Christ, in a period of peace foretold by the prophets and prefigured by Solomon's own reign. Then flourished Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, and all the others who followed until the time of Antoninus Pius, when the decline set in that ultimately resulted in the corrupt Latin of Nebrija's own day.

Nebrija employs these cycles from the past to establish a structure that he can apply to the situation of Spain. In view of that motive, the history he provides cannot be taken at face value, for it exists only to substantiate the pattern he wishes to defend. Thus, although his rhetoric is historical rather than metaphysical, the model he employs is essentially typological. He cites literary figures to support his argument of linguistic and cultural domination, and while avoiding theories of divine inspiration (Moses and Orpheus are merely the first writers in their respective traditions), he echoes the trope of the translatio imperii along with its accompanying translatio studii . This echo is particularly evident in his exposition of the transition from Greece to Rome, motivated by the dissipation of Alexander's empire, which in turn made possible the Roman conquest of Greece. At the same time, Nebrija extends the decline forward to his own day, so that the ancient traditions have not totally disappeared, though they have been corrupted. His portrait of contemporary Jews as completely ignorant of Hebrew ("ninguno sabe dar más razón de la lengua de su lei, que de cómo perdieron su reino, y del Ungido que en vano esperan" [none can explain the language of their laws, nor how they lost their kingdom, nor the Anointed One they vainly await], 98) plays an important rhetorical and typological function. On the one hand, as the first nation to decay, they have sunk the farthest, and thus they serve as a warning to the Castilians, appropriate in the year of the expulsion. On the other hand, Nebrija successfully privileges them: the reign of Solomon is the model for the reigns of Alexander and Augustus, and the Hebrew prophets are mentioned not at their pertinent historical moment but during his history of Rome. Contemporary Jews still awaiting a Messiah may not realize it, but the fulfillment of their history occurred precisely at the apogee of Roman military and cultural power.

That moment of universal peace "en que embió Dios a su Unigé-

nito Hijo" (when God sent his Only-Begotten Son, 98) is also typologically related to present-day Castile, for the same organic pattern, with a childhood and then a maturity, is applicable to Castilian, as is the sometimes blurred combination of language, culture, and empire (see Sacks; Piedra). The language had its childhood, associated with the laws of León and Castile, and it showed its strength at the time of Alfonso the Wise, not only because of his General estoria and Siete partidas but also because he fostered the translation of works from Latin and Arabic into Castilian. This support gave it the strength to spread to Aragon and Navarre and even to Italy, "siguiendo la compañía de los infantes que embiamos a imperar en aquellos reinos" (following the company of the princes we sent to rule in those kingdoms, 100). It has reached its fullness in the reign of the present monarchs, through divine generosity but also because their diligent efforts have insured that the parts and members of Spain have been reunited. The subsequent religious purgation of Spain should guarantee its freedom from dissolution for hundreds of years; thus it is time for the arts of peace to flourish.

On this note Nebrija connects the current situation of Spain to the situation of those earlier empires at their apogee, with verbal echoes reinforcing the typology: "La monarchía y paz de que gozamos" (the monarchy and peace we enjoy, 100) is related to "aquella paz de que avían hablado los profetas" (that peace of which the prophets spoke [i.e., the time of Christ's birth], 98), and Solomon, in whose time "con la monarchía floreció la paz" (with the monarchy peace flourished, 98). Yet Nebrija also employs this connection to modulate from the history of the rise of Castile to its threatened decline. The first art of peace is language, yet Castilian remains "suelta y fuera de regla, y a esta causa a recebido en pocos siglos muchas mudanças; por que si la queremos cotejar con la de oi a quinientos años, hallaremos tanta diferencia y diversidad cuanta puede ser maior entre dos lenguas" (loose and unregulated, and for this reason it has changed a great deal in just a few centuries; thus if we compare the language of today to that of five hundred years hence, we will see as many differences as exist between two languages, 100). Time is thus spatialized: the language of his Spanish contemporaries could be a foreign tongue to their descendants, and just as the decline of earlier empires had led to linguistic corruption and oblivion, the same thing could happen to Spain if the cycle were

to be repeated. Their majesties' chronicles and histories, written to ensure their immortality, would eventually expire along with the language, or survive weakened in translations.

Yet this decline need not occur, for the language has a champion in Nebrija, who has decided to regulate the Castilian tongue, so that whatever is written from then on may be of one kind, which can extend itself through time. This is how Latin and Greek survived; "fue aquella su gloria" (that was the glory [of the classical grammarians]) "y será nuestra" (and it will be ours [both the monarchs' and Nebrija's], 101) to do the same. The time is right for this endeavor, "por estar ia nuestra lengua tanto en la cumbre, que más se puede temer el decendimiento della que esperar la subida" (for our language is already at its height, so that its decline is to be more feared than its growth to be expected, 101). The grammar will also help those wanting to learn Latin and, more importantly, foreigners wanting to learn Castilian. Nebrija recalls how, when he presented a sample to the queen and she inquired about its utility, the bishop of Avila (Hernando de Talavera, later first archbishop of Granada) answered for him that as she subjected new lands to her yoke, foreigners would need to be able to read the laws she decreed. The extent of the empire Nebrija envisions is clear: not only Muslims in Africa will have to learn the language but also Basques, Navarrese, Frenchmen, and Italians. Thus in imitation of those ancients who dedicated their works to august patrons, Nebrija dedicates his grammar to the sovereigns, removing it from "la sombra y tinieblas escolásticas a la luz de vuestra corte" (the shadow and darkness of the schools to the light of your court, 102).

The key to Nebrija's concept of history is his notion that Castile is at a pivotal instant, which he links typologically to the rule of Solomon in Israel, Alexander in Greece, and Augustus in Rome. Not all nations achieve this moment, and it has literally moved westward and arrived in Spain. It is the time when great empires come into their own, but also when they begin to decline; and while ordinarily political dominance is accompanied by cultural hegemony, in Spain's case the latter feature is lagging. Nebrija's grammar will facilitate the extension of the Spanish empire by allowing foreigners to learn the language, and its perpetuation by insuring that future generations will always be able to read it. Yet although the thrust of Nebrija's argument is clear, his method is subtle in its equivocations.

The nature and the workings of the cycle are ambiguous, for the argument is mythological rather than scientific, and only in the case of Rome's conquest of Greece does he suggest how dominance is passed on. Language change is invoked only in terms of decline, and Nebrija's philological explanation of how Spanish evolved from Latin, present in other parts of the grammar, is absent from the prologue. Moreover, in contrast to the quick succession of Greece and Rome, the fourteen-hundred-year lag between the latter and Spain begs a question about the regularity of the cycle, and the sense of belatedness is implicit in that Spain, supposedly at its peak, has nothing to rival classical and biblical literature.^[13] Indeed, the grammar is intended to jump-start the process of cultural development. Yet while a decline in Spanish fortunes would seem an imminent and inevitable feature of the cycle, Nebrija holds out an uncertain promise for the sovereigns: perhaps his grammar will assure their immortality by allowing future generations to read their history; perhaps it will possess an efficacy allowing the further extension of the Spanish empire, at the cost of the peace that marks the apogee. Although Nebrija never invokes the argument over arms and letters, he implies an ambiguous role for the aristocracy, on the one hand continuing to extend Spain's rule over neighboring countries, on the other, wasting their precious leisure reading novels and stories for lack of better alternatives. The empire can be extended only if Nebrija is successful in regulating the language of all Spaniards, so his function as grammarian will parallel that of the nobility as warriors.

In rhetoric, style, and ideology the prologue stands apart from the rest of the grammar, for there is something nearly apocalyptic in Nebrija's attitude regarding the translatio , a suggestion that Spain may—perhaps because it is the westernmost European country—be its fulfillment and thus escape the fated decline. It is this suggestion that led Américo Castro to infer a Semitic background for Nebrija's prologue, asserting that "the Hebraico-Islamic . . . lived in the will-be of his hope, in prophecy, in messianism, in a temporal and spatial beyond" (593). Nebrija, instrumental in bringing the press to Salamanca, was surely aware of its capabilities for aiding the exercise of control over the national language. Yet such messianism is absent from the rest of the grammar, even from the special prologue to book 5, devoted to the teaching of Spanish to foreigners. Moreover, throughout the grammar, but particularly in the chapter de-

voted to rhetorical figures, Nebrija cites as examples quotations from earlier fifteenth-century writers without any of the reservations expressed in the opening prologue.^[14] Nebrija's cyclical view of the translatio is problematic, for behind his optimistic view of Spain as the heir to Greece and Rome there lurks the threat of a Spanish decline (see Buceta), while the fourteen-hundred-year gap between Rome and Spain raises the question of modern Italian culture as either a successor to or a continuation of Rome. These issues are taken up and given a more specifically literary refraction in the "Arte de poesía castellana" by Nebrija's probable student Juan del Encina, first printed in Encina's Cancionero (published in Salamanca by the printer of Nebrija's grammar in 1496).^[15]

Encina's 1496 Cancionero is notable in Spanish literary history as the first major published collection of secular poetry by a living author; his close links with Nebrija's circle in Salamanca suggest that Encina himself may have supervised the edition.^[16] In addition to the "Arte," it contains translations of Virgil's eclogues, considerable amounts of religious and secular poetry, and some of the earliest surviving dramatic texts in Spanish. The general prologue dedicates the entire book to the Catholic monarchs:

Dizen los antiguos y fabulosos poetas, que Prometeo, hijo de Japeto, acostumbrado a fabricar cuerpos umanos de barro, subió al cielo con ayuda y favor de Minerva y traxo de una rueda del sol un poco de fuego con que después introduzía vida y ánima en aquellos cuerpos. Y assí yo, desta manera, viéndome con favor del duque y duquesa de Alva, mis señores, subí a la gran altura de la contemplación de vuestras ecelencias por alcançr siquiera una centella de su resplandor, para poder, en mi muerta labor y de barro, introduzir espíritus vitales. (1.2)

The ancient mythological poets say that Prometheus son of Iapetus, accustomed to making human bodies out of mud, rose to heaven with Minerva's help and took from the wheel of the sun some fire with which he gave life and soul to those bodies. And so I, in this way, seeing myself in favor with the duke and duchess of Alba, my lords, rose to the heights of contemplating your excellencies by reaching just a spark of your splendor, so as to introduce vital spirits into my dead labor of mud.

In this opening image, masterfully analyzed by Andrews (85–91), Encina exhibits the combination of obsequiousness and arrogance,

humility and pride, typical of his prose style. The amplificatio , often achieved through doublings ("antiguos y fabulosos," "ayuda y favor"), fails to obscure the keystone of the analogy ("assí yo"), through which Encina identifies himself with Prometheus. By the repetition of the word "favor," his current patrons are reduced to types of Minerva, boosting him up to heaven, with which the monarchs are identified, while he associates his work of poetic creation with Prometheus's divine creation of life. As Andrews notes, "The exaltation of the King and Queen is not 'free,' but is intermeshed with considerations of personal import. As one who has contemplated their excellence, who has tapped the moving force of their effective virtue and who has handled a flash of their brightness, Encina enters the realm of the select servants of their divine magnificence" (87). The message is clear: if they patronize him, only greater glory both for him and for them will ensue. Yet the prologue is also permeated with a fear of rejection, expressed in what Andrews called "a humility almost without modesty" (90), and in warnings about "detratores y maldizientes" (detractors and gossips, 1.3) out to blacken his reputation.

These psychological themes, in particular a love-hate relationship with the nobility coupled with a fear of slanderers, pervade many of the works in the 1496 volume. Nebrija, despite a reliance on aristocratic patronage, was ultimately a technocrat, offering philological skills to the monarchs whom he proposed to serve. Encina, by the nature of his artistic talents, was more directly dependent on patronage, so he attempts from the start to coopt the nobility with a theory of ocio , or aristocratic leisure (see Andrews, 71–72; López Estrada). Like Nebrija, Encina proposes to ameliorate the quality of Spanish literature; but while the former had aimed to improve what was available for the nobility's consumption during its moments of leisure, the latter proposes to make poetry an aristocratic activity by regulating that leisure. He opens the "Arte" by providing himself with a classical antecedent, Cicero's description of Scipio the Elder, "que dezía nunca estar menos ocioso que cuando estava ocioso" (who declared he was never less leisured than when he was at leisure, 1.6), and thereby confronts a double paradox: poetry requires otium , an aristocratic neglect of the very duties associated with the position of a nobleman, particularly in Spain, while leisure must be used constructively and in a disciplined way, which negates its sta-

tus as leisure. Poetry requires not just talent but also skills that must be mastered, and which Encina proposes to teach, claiming to have written the treatise "por donde se pueda sentir lo bien o mal trobado, y para enseñar a trobar en nuestra lengua, si enseñar se puede, porque es muy gentil exercicio en el tiempo de ociosidad" (so that good verse may be told from the bad, and to teach how to write verse in our language, if such a thing may be taught, for it is a very gentle exercise for moments of leisure, 1.7). Thus the aristocratic poet must embrace poetic work instead of military and governmental tasks. Yet Encina does not picture this departure as a radical one, for he describes Prince John, the son of the Catholic monarchs to whom the "Arte" is dedicated, as raised in the lap of sweet philosophy, favoring the ingenuity of his subjects, and inciting them to knowledge with himself as the example (1.7). These accomplishments in turn are traced back to the monarchs, "tan poderosos y cristianíssimos príncipes, cue assí artes bélicas como de paz están ya tan puestas en perfeción en estos reynos por su buena governación" (such powerful and Christian princes, that the arts of war as well as of peace are perfected throughout these realms, by their good government, 1.6). Thus Encina links the abundance of ocio back to the typological role of the kings, earlier exploited by Nebrija. With false modesty, Encina promises the prince that if he desires,

estando desocupado de sus arduos negocios, exercitarse en cosas poéticas y trobadas en nuestro castellano estilo, porque lo cue ya su bivo juyzio por natural razón conoce, lo pueda ver puesto en arte, según lo que mi flaco saber alcança. (1.7)

when not occupied in his arduous affairs, [he] can exercise himself in poetry composed in our Castilian style, so that what his lively judgment through natural reason recognizes, he may see regulated, insofar as my slender knowledge allows.^[17]

Having established this didactic aim and connected it to the historical moment, Encina describes yet another reason for writing the work. Specifically recalling Nebrija's attempts to reform the language through a printed set of rules, he presents his own efforts as a parallel:

Creyendo nunca aver estado tan puesta en la cumbre nuestra poesía y manera de trobar, parecióme ser cosa muy provechosa ponerla en

arte y encerrarla debaxo de ciertas leyes y reglas, porque ninguna antigüedad de tiempos le pueda traer olvido. (1.8)

Believing our poetry and manner of verse never to have been at such a height, it seemed to me a useful thing to codify it and place it under rules and laws, so that no passage of time can cause it to be forgotten.

To reinforce the danger of oblivion, Encina declares that while previous Spanish poets may have surpassed his contemporaries, he is ignorant of their work. Instead he offers a history of poetry, beginning with its divine origin as understood by the Greeks and as evidenced in the Bible. The former attributed its origins to Apollo, Mercury, Bacchus, and the Muses, while much of the Old Testament was written in verse, and in view of the anteriority of the Hebrews to the Greeks, Moses can rightly be called the first poet (see Curtius, 241–46, 446–58). Encina also cites generals who exhorted their troops by means of speeches in verse and recalls how Orpheus moved stones with his poetry, how other poets had their lives spared because of their verses, and the high esteem both Greeks and Romans had for their poets.

This historical discussion of the origins of ancient poetry ends with an account of meter and rhyme in ancient Christian hymnody, which Encina sees as the genesis of modern vernacular poetry; but he asserts that the Spanish received it only through the mediation of the Italians:

Quanto más que claramente parece, en la lengua ytaliana aver avido muy más antiguos poetas que en la nuestra, assí como el Dante y Francisco Petrarca y otros notables varones que fueron antes y después, de donde muchos de los nuestros hurtaron gran copia de singulares sentencias, el cual hurto, como dize Virgilio, no deve ser vituperado, mas dino de mucho loor, quando de una lengua en otra se sabe galanamente cometer. . . . Assí que, concluyamos luego el trobar aver cobrado sus fuerças en Ytalia, y de allí esparzídolas por nuestra España, adonde creo que ya florece más que en otra ninguna parte. (1.14–15)

Moreover, it seems clear that in the Italian language were poets much more ancient than those in our own, such as Dante and Francis Petrarch and other notable men who came before and after, from whom many of ours took a great quantity of singular ideas, which theft, as

Virgil says, should not be criticized but is worthy of much praise, when it is gallantly made from one language into another. . . . Thus we may conclude that verse drew its strength in Italy, and from there was broadcast and sown in Spain, where I now believe it flourishes more than in any other place.

With this transition to the modern Italians, who pass the art of poetizing on to the Spanish, Encina also modulates into the notions of belatedness and of the translatio . Once again there is a gap between ancient Rome and Spain, only this time it is partly filled with Christian hymns and with Dante and Petrarch. As in Nebrija, culture is linked to empire, and to effect the translatio Spanish poets literally have to sack or rob their Italian predecessors, carrying the booty back to Spain. This action is justified with an indirect (and pseudo-) Virgilian quotation, which also reinforces the link between Rome and Spain first established through the allusion to Cicero that opened the "Arte." By citing only Romans and Italians, Encina preserves the westward movement dictated by the translatio , but at the cost of ignoring not only the Provençal troubadours and the eastward movement of poetry into Italy (recognized by Santillana and other fifteenth-century writers; see Andrews, 75–76) but all Spanish poetry before his own day (see Weiss, 237); only Nebrija is praised for his earlier effort at codification of the Spanish language. This selectivity allows Encina to employ the same historical scheme as Nebrija and to present Spain as the true heir of Greece and Rome, an aspect he highlights by referring to Quintilian as "nuestro Quintiliano" because of his birth on the Iberian peninsula, and by emphasizing that the Spanish language is descended from Latin (see López Estrada, 157).^[18] Yet Encina's use of the translatio has its inescapable drawbacks, for it polarizes literary history into a decline/ascent dichotomy. Italy was the source of Spanish poetry, but by fertilizing Spain, Italy lost potency. Now it is the Spanish who are on the ascent, but they must compete with the prior Italian achievement in order to surpass it and at the same time regulate their own art in order to assure its comprehension by future generations.^[19]

Having justified the work in terms of a larger historical vision, Encina now turns to more immediate didactic ends, and here the discussion of poetry changes from the mythical accounts of its origin to more familiar Horatian precepts. He defends, by appealing to the examples of Horace and Quintilian, the need for an arte , a

technical handbook to instruct poets, for natural talent is not enough. Indeed, drawing on the contrast between composer and performer, geometer and stonemason, he argues for a distinction between the poeta and the trobador: the former term is reserved only for those who have studied and are conscious of the quantitative rules of poetry (on this distinction see Weiss, 190). Ever aware of his royal audience, Encina even here attempts to couch his argument in ways that would appeal to the nobility, extending the analogy to include lord and slave, captain and soldier. He warns that the distinction is not much observed in Spain, and while he himself sometimes neglects it, the point is an important one, for in contrast to the confidence in the opening chapter about the position of Spanish letters, we now get a sense of confusion, of the need for rules and, even more, for the public recognition of rules. They must be acknowledged by the talented, and are best nurtured by reading:

Deve exercitarse en leer no solamente poetas y estorias en nuestra lengua, mas tan bien en lengua latina; y no solamente leerlos como dize Quintiliano, mas discutirlos en los estilos y sentencias y en las licencias, que no leerá cosa el poeta en ninguna facultad de que no se aproveche para la copia que le es muy necessaria. (1.20)

He should exercise himself by reading poets and historians not only in our language but also in Latin; and, as Quintilian says, not only read them but discuss their style and ideas and figures, for there is nothing the poet will read that he will not take advantage of for that abundance which is necessary to him.

These passages reinforce the earlier ones asserting the need for poetic work.

Most of the rest of the treatise is taken up with technical matters, such as meter, line lengths, and the like. The fundamental unit of verse is the line, or pie , composed of either eight or twelve syllables (respectively, arte real and arte mayor ). Encina also discusses the division of arte mayor into hemistichs, the use of pies quebrados (four-syllable half-lines), and the rules for consonant and assonant rhyme. He admits the possibility of rhyming proverbio with sobervio (rhyme is based on sound, not orthography), and advises against internal and repetitious rhymes. Lines of verse may be gathered into units of two, three, or more; only those units with at least four lines may

properly be called coplas .^[20] Throughout this section of the "Arte," Encina cites poems by earlier fifteenth-century poets, particularly Juan de Mena. Thus here, as in Nebrija's grammar, there is a distinction between the visionary rhetoric of the preface and the body of the work itself. Encina's rules, centered on syllable count, reflect an aural conception of poetry, but also an attempt to apply to poetry those mathematical forms of analysis which make music and geometry part of the quadrivium. The examples from Mena justify Encina's rules (see Andrews, 172–73, nn. 12–13), but those rules more accurately reflect Encina's own poetic practice (see Clarke, "On Juan"). As such, study of the "Arte" trains not only poets but also readers who will be properly appreciative of Encina's own work. The chapter on poetic colors is mostly concerned with rules for adapting words to fit the meter, and with complex rhyme schemes. Encina thus emphasizes melopoeic devices, while figures such as metonymy and metaphor are scarcely mentioned, for as they are not unique to poetry, they belong to the more general fields of rhetoric and grammar.^[21] The last, brief chapter includes instructions on breathing during oral performance, perhaps a reflection of Encina's double role as musician and poet; but it concludes with a discussion of how a poem should look on a page, reflecting the luxuries introduced by the mass production of paper and printing.

Encina is not ambivalent about the social status of poetry: he regards it as an aristocratic activity, a talent that only the man of leisure can afford to cultivate. Yet the very notion of devoting leisure time exclusively to literary pursuits reflects Encina's professional situation and is antithetical to the Spanish nobleman's concept of himself. Moreover, he never seems quite convinced of the superiority of Spanish letters. Spaniards may be, via the Italians, the heirs to Greece and Rome, but they are not really as accomplished; and just as the Romans, at the height of their powers, needed handbooks of poetry and rhetoric, so too the Spanish must have them. In the treatise Encina attempts to come to terms with the legacy of the past, both antiquity and, more immediately, the Italians. He thus stands at a crux, on the one hand ignoring (save for Juan de Mena) the poetical accomplishments of medieval Spain, much of them already in print, on the other hand citing Dante and Petrarch as poets from whom the Spanish have learned a great deal. Yet Encina does not slight traditional Spanish forms, and whatever the influence of Dante and Petrarch may have been, he makes no mention of sonnets

or hendecasyllabic verse. Indeed, as Rico has shown, the traces of Petrarch in fifteenth-century Spanish poetry are primarily linguistic and decorative, while only Santillana wrote sonnets.

Spanish belatedness as a national cultural problem thus arises toward the end of the fifteenth century, and its appearance at that time is related to a number of roughly coinciding developments, including the introduction of printing, national unification and purgation, and greater Spanish intervention in Italy The basic text for Spanish belatedness and alterity is the prologue to Nebrija's Spanish grammar; employing the trope of the translatio , Nebrija demonstrates how the great civilizations of the past attained their apogee at a moment of peace, when culture also flourished. He finds contemporary Spain at that point in its military history, but culture lags and deterioration threatens to set in: if it does, the achievements of his day will be forgotten. With his grammar he hopes to redress that lag and perhaps even deliver Spain from the previously inevitable decline. Nebrija's program is refracted in Encina's "Arte de poesía castellana," in which Encina makes the translatio more pointed by combining it with Greco-Roman and Christian poetics: poetry began with the Jews and was practiced successively by the Greeks, the Romans, and their latter-day descendants Dante and Petrarch. By responding to the formation of the nation-state and identifying the fate of the empire with that of its poetry, Nebrija and Encina codify Spanish belatedness and alterity, and ultimately prepare the way for the poetical innovations of Boscán and Garcilaso forty years later. As each successive generation continues to perceive a cultural inferiority to Italy, the translatio , which Encina saw occurring in his own day, is successively postponed, and Petrarch's status—for Encina merely proverbial—becomes ever more significant. Encina tries to elevate the status of poetry by tying it to a theory of aristocratic leisure and associating it with the quantitative study of the quadrivium; while his rules for poets are primarily melopoeic, his conception of literary history opens the way for the transformations of the next 150 years.