Luis de Góngora

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

Life

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

Although predominantly not published his works in print, but these were circulated mainly in transcripts, in 1585 he was already known as a poet; Miguel de Cervantes praised him in his first novel " La primera parte de la Galatea ". In the same year he received the Low ordinations and received a canonry in the cathedral of Córdoba. To 1605/1606 he was ordained a priest and then lived in Valladolid and Madrid.

Thanks to the intercession of the Duke of Lerma, he was of Philip III. 1617 appointed royal chaplain honor. In the following period ensued in Madrid a long literary and social feud with Francisco de Quevedo, was attacked in the course of Góngora of his adversary because of his dissolute life change and accused among other things of homosexuality. 1626 made ​​him a serious illness that is hard attack his memory and memory to retreat to Cordoba.

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

Work

His poetry had evolved according to a classical initial phase from 1610 about becoming a hermetic poetry deliberate darkness. It distinguishes itself by looking for linguistic difficulty with numerous neologisms, especially Latinisms, and with an artificial, dominated by multi-unit parallelism and frequent use of Hyper Batons syntax that mimics freedoms of Latin word order in Spanish, also a bold, heavy enträtselbare metaphor and allegory, which makes it one of the main representatives of the Spanish Culteranismo. In the history of literature he is regarded as the initiator of Gongorism or Culteranismo, which is to be distinguished from Conceptismo limited and more stressed the linguistic and rhetorical difficulty.

Title

• Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (formed in 1612, released 1627 ): mythological poem on the legend of Polyphemus and Galatea, after Ovid's Metamorphoses; 504 endecasillabo
• Soledades (formed 1613/14, published 1636): Four parts about the solitude of the fields, shores, forests and wastelands were planned, only two have been published, famous for the beautiful descriptions of nature

German

• Soledad. The late work Gongora, transmit, introduced and annotated by Fred Eggarter. Carl Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1962.
• Soledades. Translated by Erich Arendt. Hg Karlheinz Barck, Leipzig: Reclam, 1982 ( Loeb Classical Library, Vol 878 ) [ bilingual edition ].
• Sonnets. Translated by Fritz Vogelgsang, introduction by John Russell, Illustrations by Pablo Picasso. Frankfurt: Insel- Verlag, 1985, ISBN 3-458-14304-1.
• Sonnets. Transferring and commented by Sigrid Meuer. Berlin: Henssel Verlag, 1960 [ bilingual edition ].

Secondary literature

• Kapuste, Joachim: The poetic vocabulary at Fernando de Herrera and Luis de Góngora: " Cultismos ", neologisms, archaisms. Tübingen, Univ., Department of Modern Languages ​​, Diss 1972.
• Juan López de Vicuña: TODAS LAS OBRAS DE LUIS D. de Gongora EN VARIOS Poemas. Recogidos POR DON GONZALO de Hozes ... Corregido y en esta enmendado vltima impressior. Madrid, en la Imprenta del Reino, Año to 1634.

Reception

Luis de Góngora is one of the models of the Generación del 27, which takes its name from the meeting in honor of his 300.Todestages in December 1927 in Seville.