Luis de Góngora

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Portrait of Góngoras by Velázquez

Luis de Góngora y Argote (born July 11, 1561 in Córdoba , † May 24, 1627 in Córdoba) was a Spanish lyric poet and dramatist of the Baroque era , the initiator and main representative of the "dark" style known as culteranismo .

Life

His father, Francisco de Argote, was a judge and a highly educated humanist. The poet took the maiden name of his mother, Leonora de Góngora, who came from an old noble family. When he was fifteen, he enrolled at the University of Salamanca to study law.

Although he largely did not publish his works in print, but rather circulated them mainly in copies, he was known as a poet as early as 1585; Miguel de Cervantes praised him in his first novel " La primera parte de la Galatea ". In the same year he received the minor orders and received a canonical at the Cathedral of Cordoba. He was ordained a priest around 1605/1606 and then lived in Valladolid and Madrid .

Thanks to the intercession of the Duke of Lerma , Philip III. Appointed royal chaplain in 1617 . In the following years a long literary and social feud with Francisco de Quevedo developed in Madrid , in the course of which Góngora was attacked by his adversary for his dissolute lifestyle and, among other things, accused of being homosexual. In 1626 a serious illness, which seriously affected his memory and memory, forced him to withdraw to Córdoba .

In the year of his death, his poems were published by Juan López de Vicuña in print ( Obras en verso del Homero español ), followed in 1633 by Hozes' edition, based on Vicuña and supplemented by other pieces ( Todas las obras de don Luis de Góngora ) which was then reprinted eight times by 1854, and on which virtually all printed editions prior to the first handwritten edition by Foulché-Delbosc were based.

plant

After a classical initial phase, his poetry had increasingly developed from around 1610 into a hermetic poetry of deliberate darkness. It is characterized by the sought-after linguistic difficulty with numerous neologisms, especially Latinisms, and with an artificial syntax characterized by multiple parallelisms and frequent use of the hyperbaton , which imitates the freedom of the Latin word order in Spanish, as well as a bold, difficult to decipher metaphor and allegory , which makes him one of the main representatives of Spanish culteranismo . In the history of literature he is considered to be the initiator of Gongorism or Culteranismo, which can only be distinguished from Conceptismo to a limited extent and which emphasizes linguistic rather than rhetorical difficulties.

Soledades. Title page

title

  • Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (written 1612, published 1627): mythological poem about the legend of Polyphemus and Galatea, based on Ovid's Metamorphoses ; 504 Elf silverware
  • Soledades (created 1613/14, published 1636): Four parts about the loneliness of the fields, banks, forests and the wasteland were planned, only two have appeared, famous for the beautiful descriptions of nature

German

  • Soledad. Góngora's late work , translated, introduced and annotated by Fred Eggarter. Carl Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1962.
  • Soledades . Translated by Erich Arendt. Reclams Universal Library Leipzig 1982, Vol. 878 [bilingual edition].
  • Soledades . Translated from the Spanish by Erich Arendt. Ed. And with an extensive afterword ("Luis de Góngora and the poetic worldview in his" Soledades "") by Karlheinz Barck. With reproductions based on the eleven lithographs by Hermann Naumann , Leipzig: Reclam, 1973. Vol. 878.
  • Sonnets . Translated by Fritz Vogelgsang, introduction by John Russel, illustrations by Pablo Picasso. Frankfurt a. M .: Insel-Verlag, 1985, ISBN 3-458-14304-1 .
  • Sonnets . Transferred and commented by Sigrid Meuer. Berlin: Henssel Verlag, 1960 [bilingual edition].

Secondary literature

  • Hennigfeld, Ursula: The ruined body. Petrarkistic sonnets from a transcultural perspective . Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann 2008.
  • Kapuste, Joachim: The poetic vocabulary in Fernando de Herrera and Luis de Góngora: "Cultismos", neologisms, archaisms . Tübingen, Univ., Department of New Philology, Dissertation 1972.
  • Juan López de Vicuña: TODAS LAS OBRAS DE D. LUIS DE GONGORA EN VARIOS POEMAS. RECOGIDOS POR DON GONZALO de Hozes… Corregido y enmendado en esta vltima impressior. Madrid, en la Imprenta del Reino, Año 1634.
  • Federico García Lorca: The poetic picture in Don Luis de Góngora

reception

Luis de Góngora is one of the role models of the Generación del 27 , which gets its name from the meeting in December 1927 in Seville in honor of the 300th anniversary of his death.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Scientific City Library Mainz, Sign. VI l: 4 ° / 423 ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : Luis de Góngora  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Góngora, Luis de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Góngora y Argote, Luis de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish lyric poet and playwright of the Baroque period, main exponent of the dark style
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1561
PLACE OF BIRTH Cordoba (Spain)
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 1627
Place of death Cordoba (Spain)