Julia Hernández (Washington and Lee University)
The 1609 Anacreón castellano of Francisco de Quevedo, iconic poet of the Spanish Baroque, is recognized among Hispanists for cementing the author’s Hellenist reputation among his contemporaries. This work, however, has been less studied within the transnational humanist tradition of translating and imitating the poetry of Anacreon—or at least the imagined Anacreon Henri “Stephanus” Estienne had “rediscovered.” Selectively editing the Palatine Anthology and spuriously attributing its anacreontizing poems to the poet himself, Stephanus’s notorious 1554 Carmina Anacreontea conjured a new Renaissance “Anacreon” and kicked off a long-lived international humanist craze for Anacreontic poetry.
An early-career Quevedo threw his hat into this ring, creating the loose rendition of Stephanus’s Anacreontic corpus best remembered today as the target of his poetic rival, Luis de Góngora, who lambasts Quevedo’s Greek proficiency. Today’s scholarship echoes Góngora’spreoccupation, with the continuing question of Quevedo’s proficiency, his status as true helenista or not, perpetuating a long-standing and limiting fixation on the adequacy of Spanish Hellenism.
The proposed paper maintains that the Anacreón castellano poses a more pressing question: how does Quevedo present himself to readers as being a proficient Greek translator, that is, how does he assure them of his textual authority to undertake this project? My analysis of Quevedo’s extensive commentary suggests he does so by positioning himself as textual critic in dialogue with the ultimate philological authority on all things Anacreon: Stephanus himself. Quevedo subtly conjures an imagined Stephanus as shadow interlocutor, with indirect textual strategies evoking Quevedo’s philological forebear as a strawman in matters of not only translation, but also emendation. Whereas Stephanus’s edition had constructed an imaginary Anacreon, thus bolstering his international humanist profile, Quevedo’s translation constructs an imaginary Stephanus, thus making a case for his own. This analysis suggests a new model for re-evaluating Quevedo’s—and more broadly Spain’s—engagements with transnational Renaissance Hellenism, thus challenging conventional narratives of Spanish insularity and exceptionalism that even today continue to shape much anglophone scholarship on early modern Iberia.