A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe.

Richard Helgerson. A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. xviii + 120 pp. bibl. $34.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4004-7.

This slim, elegant book by Richard Helgerson is an extended essay originally conceived as a chapter for a comparative study on the "new poetry" of sixteenth-century Europe. Helgerson was not able to complete that project, which was to encompass, in addition to Italy, "the Spain of Juan Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, the France of Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, and the England of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser" (ix). He offers us here an engaging reading of the earliest of those "new poets," Garcilaso de la Vega, who has been virtually ignored by non-Hispanists, largely, as the author suggests, because of Spain's "geographical and linguistic marginality" and its "political, military, and economic decline" since the seventeenth century (xiii). But also, I would add, because Garcilaso, like his eminent fellow poet Francisco de Quevedo, does not travel well in translation.

Garcilaso, a soldier in the army of Hapsburg emperor Charles V, achieved canonicity in his own time both in Spain and Italy, not only for his refined, graceful rhymes but also for his splendid reworkings of iconic Greco-Roman and Italian texts. Helgerson singles out for his essay a sonnet written by Garcilaso in 1535, "A Boscan desde la Goleta" ("To Boscan from Goleta"), Goleta being the fortress that Charles V had captured during the Tunis campaign against the Berber pirate Barbarossa near the site of ancient Carthage. In the poem's quatrains, Garcilaso celebrates the triumph of Charles as a new Scipio, but in its tercets, the poet identifies with the victim of empire, the Carthaginian queen Dido, who was betrayed by Aeneas. That tension between imperial ambition and erotic desire is, according to Helgerson, the quintessential element that characterizes the "new poetry," specifically the poetry of those early moderns who, in the mode of Virgil's Aeneid, sought to realize their own imperial mission.

Antonio de Nebrija remarked famously in his Gramatica de la lengua castellana (1492) that "language has always been the companion of empire." A century later, in his introduction to Fernando de Herrera's annotated edition of Garcilaso's works (1580), Francisco de Medina celebrated the poet's artful language, which was as illustrious as that of Greece and Rome, and indeed a fitting companion of empire. But Helgerson, mindful of Garcilaso's constant attention to loss and self-alienation, asks: "Can this be the voice of imperial triumph, the voice of the new Rome?" (13). By way of an answer, Helgerson looks to content rather than style in order to expose, with characteristic sensitivity, the rival impulses between imperial design and desire in Garcilaso and in other sixteenth-century poets: Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Ronsard's Franciade, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Sidney's Arcadia, and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. Helgerson must concede, however, that "the project of erotic poetry and the project of empire" are not always at odds, as in Camoes's Lusiads and, surprisingly, in Giordano Bruno's Heroic Frenzies.

Although Helgerson covers much familiar ground in these pages, the sonnet from Goleta takes on new life, placed as it is in the fullness of its cultural and political contexts and in the "company" of other early modern poems and Garcilaso's own. There are admirable reflections on Charles's victory at Tunis and its commemoration in chronicles, art, and festivals; on Garcilaso's recollections from other poets; on the remembrance of places undone by empire; and on the undoing of the lyric "I" at the end of the poem, which voices abandoned Dido's own and which complicates and problematizes the triumphs of empire. In the second part of the book, Helgerson presents the complete texts of five related poems Garcilaso wrote before and after the Tunis campaign (from October 1534 to the end of 1535), with facing translations: the "Epistle to Boscan," the "Sonnet to Mario," the "Elegy to Boscan," the "Elegy to the Duke of Alba on the Death of His Brother, Don Bernardino de Toledo," and the Latin "Ode to Gines de Sepulveda."

Garcilaso was, with his friend Juan Boscan, the reformer of lyric poetry in Spain and a pioneer in the writing of Renaissance poetry before du Bellay, Sidney, Tasso, and the rest. By using the sonnet "from Carthage," "written by a great poet working at the top of his bent" (67), as a vehicle for his argument, Helgerson has rendered a considerable service in bringing to a wider scholarly audience a preeminent European poet of the "new." In the tradition of the essay form, his study dispenses with notes. It contains, however, a short bibliography, including references to works mentioned in the essay.

MARY E. BARNARD

Pennsylvania State University, University Park