Studies in Honor of Elias Rivers (PDF)

Tradition, Voice and Self in thé Love Poetry of Garcilaso (p. 24)

Inès Azar

The origin of thèse thoughts on thé poetry of Garcilaso is a question that for years seemed to me almost trivial, yet unavoidable: why do we assume, as if it were a fact, as something "given," that a single poetic voice, thé same ail throughout, speaks in ail thé poems of Garcilaso or of any other poet?

The question masked, in a sensé, thé suspicion that thé so-called unity of voice, like thé presupposed untty of literary texts, is a sometimes useful, often dangerous, fiction of criticism. Such unity allows us to trace analogies, find cohérence, draw trajectories, construct Systems.

But it may also blind us to différences, to everything that does not fit into a cohérent or systematic order. And in thé case of thé poetry of Garcilaso it may invite us to leave out ail that contradicts or breaks thé canonical unity of "his" single voice. So, I decided to begin at thé other extrême of thé familiar fictions.

The question I started with was, more or less, thé following: what happens if we read thé poems of Garcilaso without assuming any continuity or unity of voice unless it is manifest, visible and audible, in thé poems themselves? Who are thé speakers of those poems? What do they talk about?

How do they talk about it? And to whom? And on what grounds, conditions, circumstances are they thus speaking? The love poems were, almost inevitably, thé ones to start with, because they are lyrical monologues which présent thé most reduced model of speech event (énonciation), although probably also thé most difficult to interpret.

The "love poems" of Garcilaso include most of his sonnets (about thirty out of a total of thirty six) and his four Petrarchan canciones. Like ail literary texts, thé love poems of Garcilaso are fictional représentations of discourse, inscriptions of seemingly unique, seemingly "historical" acts of speech.

Each text represents a

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