On Jorge Manrique’s Coplas

from the Introduction by Geraldine Hazbun

Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique (c.1440–79) is one of the most celebrated poems in the Spanish language. Written shortly before the poet’s death, it is a dignified elegy that speaks not just of a personal loss – that of the poet’s father Rodrigo Manrique (d.1476) – but of the evanescence of all things sub specie aeternitatis. Its popularity is aided by memorable lines, not least the two opening metaphors: man’s life is a river meandering unto the sea of death (st. 3), and this world is the road to the next, the lasting dwelling place (st. 5). The poem replicates these reflections in its wending form. Its forty stanzas each comprise four tercets; each tercet is made up of two longer octosyllabic verses combined with one four-syllable half line known as pie quebrado. These regular broken lines, like beats of a heart, invest the poem with a resonant quality befitting the injunction at the opening of the poem to awaken one’s slumbering soul to the passage of time: ‘Recuerde el alma dormida, | avive el seso e despierte’ (st. 1). The poetic structure is supported by an overarching conceptual one, that of the three lives – the physical life, the life of fama (a posthumous reputation for remarkable deeds), and the eternal life of heaven. To this Christian Neo-Stoic view of life and death, Manrique adds his own touch. Time is entirely relative, everything is precarious and imminent: what is being said is already spoken, what is at its height is already at its point of decline. Throughout the poem we are exposed repeatedly to the conjoined nature of human experience. Manrique’s masterstroke – aided by repetition, antonyms, conjunctions, parallels, and other forms of aesthetic chicanery – is to tread the borderline between life and death precisely, keeping the reader at a point where death constantly intrudes on life and life is a perpetual state of near-death. In Christian tradition this is a widely recognised crossover, not least in the presence of Christ on earth, a fact alluded to in the poem, but also, in the thought of St Augustine, whose vision of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, turned human life into a living pilgrimage towards heaven.

Translator's note by Patrick McGuinness 

When I first read Manrique's Coplas I was drawn to its rhythm, to the universality of its subject, and to its mix of grandeur and plainness. It was as if I was being spoken to from somewhere at once far away and immediately close by. Reading the poem aloud and listening to its movement, I was struck by how well the utterances are shaped to the form they are given, how the longer lines allow a sense of expansion, of élan, while the shorter ones whittle them down, crop them, or cut them off altogether. This patterning makes for great variation amid the poem's overarching regularity, but since the metre, pie quebrado, or broken foot, is familiar to readers of Spanish poetry, and the poem's themes are canonical, there was nothing sophisticated about my response. I was simply noticing the obvious ways in which the poem's form and its content were perfectly aligned.

There's something reassuring in being excited about a poem that is neither new in its propositions nor particularly original in its execution: it reminds us that some works of art inhabit a space in which questions of precedence, or novelty, or originality are irrelevant. It's also a relief to have the burden of coming up with an original response lifted; indeed, that was a large part of the pleasure the poem gave me. I had nothing to offer to it but assent, and this is why I wanted to translate it: not just because I wanted to put it into English, but because translating it felt like a way of climbing inside it and assenting to it for a little longer.

Manrique's words are as plain and unadorned as the feelings they give expression to. Robert Graves wrote that 'a true poem is best spoken in a level, natural voice: slowly or solemnly, and with a suppressed emotion'. This is how I hear Manrique, and how I have tried to convey him. Since the leanness of his lines and the mattness of his diction are so important to the poem, I have resisted the temptation to embellish, or to add, or to turn up the volume with extra adverbs and adjectives. I have also respected the restricted palette of his vocabulary. Where I felt it worked in English and served both the original poem and my translation, I tried to follow Manrique's syntax, which in Spanish allows him to build up lengthy and multi-clausal sentences without losing the thread.  

For a poem about death's universal and levelling dominion, it nonetheless contains a lot of information: people, battles, glories, riches and possessions are paraded before us, only for the poem to sweep them all away. The ubi sunt trope is compelling thanks to the energy of negative accumulation, the going, going, gone-ness of things. Manrique's lists have a deadly relentlessness, mesmeric as well as chillingly deadpan, that relies on the sheer proliferation of examples: Romans, Trojans, Goths, Kings and Queens, Lords, Ladies, rich and poor.... it is the world itself, in all its intricacy and interrelation, that shimmers before us in a dance of death. I have therefore kept the structure of Manrique's lists and their reiterations, though in one or two cases I have modernised and anglicised the names and titles of people.

A comment on metrical form: I have not chosen either to replicate the pie quebrado or to find an equivalent English form. The idea of 'equivalent form', were it even possible, seems to me to create as many problems as it tries to resolve. I preferred to keep, in a diluted but nonetheless perceptible way, a sense of Manrique's original rhythm. I have also sacrificed Manrique's tight rhyme scheme, so punchily effective in the original, but tried to make up for it, in part, through internal rhyme and sound-patterning, albeit in ways that are unsystematic. 

Two Extracts from Coplas por la Muerte de su Padre

Geraldine Hazbun is Professor of Medieval Spanish Literature at Oxford and Ferreras Willetts Fellow in Spanish at St Anne’s College. Recent publications include Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature (2020), Narratives of the Islamic Conquest from Medieval Spain (2015), and Treacherous Foundations: Betrayal and Collective Identity in Early Spanish Epic, Chronicle, and Drama (2009).

Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford, and Sir Win and Lady Bishoff Fellow in French at St Anne's College. His most recent books are a novel, Throw me to the Wolves (2019), and Real Oxford (2021), an exploration of the city behind the dreaming spires. Stanzas for the Death of his Father, by Jorge Manrique, translated by Patrick McGuinness and with an Introduction by Geraldine Hazbun, is published by Shearsman Books.