Garcilaso de la Vega

Garcilaso de la Vega, probably Florentine school: Old Masters Picture Gallery (Kassel)

Garcilaso de la Vega (* between 1498 and 1503 in Toledo ; † October 14, 1536 in Nice , France ) was a Spanish soldier and well-known poet .

Life

Garcilaso de la Vega came from a noble Castilian Ricohombre family and was born in Toledo between 1498 and 1503 (the most likely year of birth was usually assumed to be 1501, but recently it has also been assumed in 1499) as the third son of Garcilaso de la Vega († September 8, 1512 ), Lord of Arcos and Commander of León of the Order of Santiago , and Sancha de Guzmán, mistress of Batres and Cuerva. In 1520 he entered the service of Charles V (Carlos I of Spain), became a member of the royal guard and fought in the so-called Comuneros uprising in the years 1520–1522 near his hometown . At the end of 1522, accompanied by Juan Boscán Almogávar and Pedro Álvarez de Toledo , the future viceroy of Naples , he was sent on a mission to prevent the fall of Rhodes to the Turks, but this failed. On his return to Spain he was made a Knight of the Order of Santiago. In 1524 he fought against the French during the siege of Fuenterrabía . In the same year, again in Toledo, he married Elena de Zúñiga.

He then held the office of city council in his hometown for some time. Already known as a poet, he participated in Rome in 1529 when Charles V was awarded the imperial dignity. Shortly before, he had written a will in Barcelona , in which he recognized, among other things, the paternity of an illegitimate daughter and left a sum of money for her education.

In 1529 Vega was with the Spanish troops who joined the imperial army against the Turks who were trying to conquer Vienna at the time . After a short stay in France, in 1531 he took part in the wedding celebration of his nephew, a son of his brother Pedro Laso, who was enemies of Emperor Charles. The emperor, disgruntled by Garcilaso's participation in the ceremony, ordered his banishment to an island in the Danube , which the poet processed poetically in his Canción III . On the intercession of Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, who was already viceroy of Naples, the poet was allowed to leave the Danube Island again in 1532 and settled in Naples. He quickly integrated himself into the intellectual life of the city and made friends with poets such as Bernardo Tasso and Luigi Tansillo and writers such as Antonio Sebastiano Minturno . In 1533 he visited Barcelona and gave his friend Juan Boscán the prose epistle Carta I "A la Muy Manífica Señora Doña Jerónima Palova de Almogáver", which served as a foreword to El Cortesano , the Spanish translation of the Italian cult book Il Libro created by Boscán del Cortegiano by Baldassare Castiglione .

Garcilaso de la Vega took part in Charles V's Tunis campaign in 1535 , during which he was seriously wounded. The campaign against France in 1536 was to be his last mission. As a colonel of the cavalry , the poet was seriously injured in the attack on the fortress in Le Muy near Fréjus. There are various reports of his wounding; According to some, he was caught in an ambush that was actually aimed at Charles V. Vega died on October 14, 1536 in Nice. His wife had the body transferred to Toledo in 1538.

The poetic path of Garcilasos de la Vega

According to Rafael Lapesa , Garcilaso's poetic life can be divided into three successive stages: the Castilian stage , in which he wrote his poems in eight-syllable verses; the Italian or Petrarkist stage , in which he wrote most of his sonnets and songs under the strong influence of Francesco Petrarca ; and the classical or Neapolitan stage , in which he wrote elegies , epistles , eclogues and odes , modeled on classical Latin poets and heavily influenced by his new Neapolitan friends .

Vega achieves the impression of complete simplicity and naturalness in his works, even if one can prove Italian and Latin models down to the smallest details of his work. The literary historian Philipp August Becker (1862–1947), one of the best German-speaking experts on Romance poetry, wrote about the poet Garcilaso:

“[He] is considered by the Spaniards to be the prince of their poets, and with a certain justification; because, even if one can follow the traces of the imitations from Tansillo and Sannazaro in his poems , even if it is not personal feelings that he expresses, but the affairs of his friends, and if the rhetorical platitude sometimes spreads, it flows But poetic speech is so easy, so smooth and melodic from his lips, so his elegiac lament has something so melting soft and atmospheric, so what he experiences turns out to be an idealized shepherd's painting that with him the imitation spontaneous, the impersonal personal , the conventional of the eclogue appears natural. What was energy of will with Boscan , is with Garcilaso a gift of nature. "

- Philipp August Becker : History of Spanish Literature (1904), p. 33f.

Works

The preserved works include Vegas

Sonnets
five canzones
an epistle
2 elegies
3 eclogues, which are the most important in terms of content and scope

literature

Stephan Leopold: Con ansia estrema - Petrarkism under the sign of sexuality and violence in Garcilaso de la Vega. In: Marc Föcking, Bernhard Huss (Ed.): Varietas and Ordo. On the dialectic of multiplicity and unity in the Renaissance and Baroque (= text and context, vol. 18). Steiner, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 179-194.
José Morales Saravia (ed.): Garcilaso de la Vega. Work and aftermath. Files from the colloquium in the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, 18. – 20. October 2001 (= Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana, Vol. 94). Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-86527-116-2 .
Stephan Leopold: The death of Daphne as Garcilaso's poetic founding victim. Early modern cultural transmission between fanum and profanum. In: Wolfram Nitsch, Bernhard Teuber (Ed.): Between the sacred and the profane. Religion, Mythology, Secularity in Spanish Literature and Culture of the Early Modern Age. Fink, Munich 2008, pp. 121-140.
Stephan Leopold: Aeneas in Castile. On the typology of nature and politics in Garcilasus II. Eclogue. In: Wolfgang Matzat, Gerhard Poppenberg (Hrsg.): Concept and representation of nature in the Spanish literature of the early modern period (Hispanic Colloquium, Vol. 4). Fink, Munich 2012, pp. 249–272.

Web links

Literature by and about Garcilaso de la Vega in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

^ Eisenmann, Oscar: Album of the Kassel gallery . o. O. 1907 (description of the painting)
^ Alfonso D'Agostino: Art. Garcilaso de la Vega (section “Textos en Prosa”). In: Pablo Jaurande Pou (ed.): Diccionario Filológico de Literatura Española. Vol. I (16th century), Madrid and Barcelona 2009.
↑ Pina Rosa Piras: Las epístolas dedicatorias de Boscán y Garcilaso en el Cortesano: parámetros del reconocimiento de una identidad. In: Christoph Strosetzki (ed.): Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (AISO), Münster 1999, pp. 1026-1037 ( online publication at the Centro Virtual Cervantes of the Cervantes Institute ).

personal data
SURNAME	Vega, Garcilaso de la
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Vega, Garcia's Laso de la
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Spanish general and poet
DATE OF BIRTH	1498 or 1499 or 1501 or 1503
PLACE OF BIRTH	Toledo
DATE OF DEATH	October 14, 1536
Place of death	Nice

[1] Eisenmann, Oscar: Album of the Kassel gallery . o. O. 1907 (description of the painting)

[2] Alfonso D'Agostino: Art. Garcilaso de la Vega (section “Textos en Prosa”). In: Pablo Jaurande Pou (ed.): Diccionario Filológico de Literatura Española. Vol. I (16th century), Madrid and Barcelona 2009.

[3] Pina Rosa Piras: Las epístolas dedicatorias de Boscán y Garcilaso en el Cortesano: parámetros del reconocimiento de una identidad. In: Christoph Strosetzki (ed.): Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (AISO), Münster 1999, pp. 1026-1037 ( online publication at the Centro Virtual Cervantes of the Cervantes Institute ).