Making Luis de Góngora’s work available to contemporary English-language readers without denying his historical context, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora presents him as not only one of the greatest and most complex poets of his time, but also the funniest and most charismatic. From longer works, such as “The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea,” to shorter ballads, songs, and sonnets, John Dent-Young’s free translations capture Góngora’s intensely musical voice and transmit the individuality and self-assuredness of the poet. Substantial introductions and extensive notes provide personal and historical context, explain the ubiquitous puns and erotic innuendo, and discuss translation choices. A significant edition of this seminal and challenging poet, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora will find an eager audience among students of poetry and scholars studying the history and literature of Spain.

Described as one of Spain's foremost Golden-Age poets, Luis de Gongora generated a vast and complex poetic textual tradition through the creation, revision and dissemination of his verse. In later life, he authorized his friend Antonio Chacon to compile an anthology of his poetic works which had been in disarray for many years. Gongora's assistance in identifying the genuine versions of his poems and his participation in the compiling, editing and dating of these poems make the Chacon manuscript (1620) an authoritative collection of the poet's verse. Nevertheless, it includes defective poems and, moreover, the plethora of variants, versions and imitations of his poetry raises questions of authorship and authenticity.

This study of Góngora’s Soledades is intended to summarize and discuss some of the problems which seemed important for a better understanding of these poems. Special attention is paid to the two opposing ‘camps’ that developed over time; one mainly focussing on the form and the other on the content of Soledades. In this volume the authors tries to integrate the methods and results of both of the ‘camps’.

Traces the processes and paradoxes at work in the late parodic poetry of Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega, illuminating correlations and connections.

Góngora's Soledades, the major lyric poem of the Spanish Baroque. Combining philological rigor with a capacity to engage the most contemporary transatlantic and comparatist concerns, this work situates Luis de Góngora's Soledades within the problematic evolution of Hispanic modernity. As well as offering an insightful analysis of the Soledades as an expression of the Baroque crisis in all its facets -epistemological, ontological, cultural and historical - the author reads the fragmented lyric subject of Gongorist poetics back against Renaissance precursors [Rojas' Celestina and the poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso] and in anticipation of the truncated and isolated subject of modernity. The study concludes with an examination of the interaction between the legacies of Gongorism and French Symbolism in the work of selected poets of the Latin American Vanguard [Gorostiza, Paz and Vallejo]. CRYSTAL ANNE CHEMRIS is Visiting Assistant Professorof Spanish at the University of Iowa.

Prince of Darkness or Angel of Light? The pastoral masterpiece the Soledades garnered both titles for its author, Luis de Góngora, one of Spain's premier poets. In The Soledades, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination, Marsha S. Collins focuses on the brilliant seventeenth-century Spanish poet's contentious work of art. The Soledades have sparked controversy since they were first circulated at court in 1612-1614 and continue to do so even now, as Góngora has become for some critics the poster child of postmodernism. These perplexing 2,000-plus line pastoral poems garnered endless debates over the value and meaning of the author's enigmatic, challenging poetry and gave rise to his reputation, causing his very name to become an English term for obscurity. Collins views these controversial poems in a different light, as a literary work that is a product of European court culture.

This book is a critical study placing both Sigüenza and his narrative within the Spanish American baroque era.