Juan de Mena

Juan de Mena (Córdoba, 1411 - Torrelaguna, 1456) was a Spanish poet belonging to the allegorical-Dante school of the Castilian pre-Renaissance and known above all for his work Labyrinth of Fortune.

Tomb of the poet Juan de Mena together with the Christ of Cisneros - Villa de Torrelaguna (Madrid) - Church of Santa Maria Magdalena

Tomb of the poet Juan de Mena in the Villa de Torrelaguna (Madrid) - Church of Santa María Magdalena

A tribute to the poet Juan de Mena - Villa de Torrelaguna (Madrid) - Church of Santa Maria Magdalena

Biography

The absence of documentation on his parents suggests that he was of Jewish convert origin. It seems that he was the grandson of the Lord of Almenara Ruy Fernández de Peñalosa and son of Pedrarias, alderman or jury of Córdoba, and was orphaned very soon. After starting studies in his native city, he continued them at the University of Salamanca (1436), where he obtained the degree of Master of Arts. There he came into contact with Cardinal Torquemada, in whose retinue he traveled to Florence in 1443 and later to Rome. In 1444, back in Castile, he entered the service of Juan II as secretary of Latin letters, a position that he made compatible with his office of twenty-four (regidor) of the city of Córdoba. A year later, the monarch named him official chronicler of the kingdom, although his paternity over the Chronicle of John II has been questioned.

Juan de Lucena (through one of his characters in the dialogue De vita beata) describes him as pale and sickly, devoted to study and a hard worker, obsessed with poetry:

You bring the flesh crushed by the great vigils after the book, the pale face, worn out of the study, but not broken and sewn of encounters of spear.

And also, in the same work, he puts into the mouth of Mena himself the great hobby or obsession he found in his trade:

Many times he swore to me by his faith that by so much delecting some vegadas detained enjoys, that, forgotten all afers, transcording the apron and even the supper, one thinks to be in glory.

She maintained a great friendship with the Constable Don Álvaro de Luna, whose Book of Clear and Virtuous Women she prefaced, and also with Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, with whom she shared literary tastes. The hypothesis that Juan de Mena worked in the library of the marquis seems not firmly established, literary prestige soon earned him immense fame and in the XVI the Labyrinth was commented on and glossed as a classic by the humanist Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, the Brocense. Thus, Juan de Valdés, in his Diálogo de la Lengua, affirms: "But, because we say everything, I say that, of those who have written in the meter, they all commonly give the palm to Juan de Mena", although he reproaches him in a purist way for his not very traditional language:

He put certain vocablos, one that by grossers should be cast off and others that by very Latin are not to be understood of all, as they are face jocundo, pole second anchor, cinge the whole sferathat all this puts in a copla, what I see is more scrivir bad Latin than good Spanish.

He died in Torrelaguna, according to some, from pain in his side and, according to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Batallas y quincuagenas, as a result of having fallen and being dragged by a mule. Of the sumptuous sepulcher that the Marquis of Santillana ordered him to build, nothing remains, although Antonio Ponz tells in his Journey to Spain (1781) that in the steps of the Torrelaguna presbytery he found a stone with this inscription in handwriting. gothic:

Happy homeland, good bliss, / death hiding / here I cup it for luck / the poet Juan de Mena.

Poetic work

The most accessible Juan de Mena can be found in the lyrical songbook with a love theme that he cultivated, made up of songs, sayings, questions and answers, games of presence and absence, and flirtations. It is light poetry and full of grace, although at times it is dispassionate and intellectualized:

Your eyes, they looked

with such a discreet look
and they didn't leave

in me nothing to kill.

Where I go in this bed

the greatest pity of me
It's thinking when I left

from my lady's arms.

A large number of these poems are preserved in the main four-century songbooks, as well as in the "General Songbook" by Hernando del Castillo published in 1511.

His later style, however, becomes obsessed with symbolism and scholarship. In the Claroscuro, composed in stanzas of major and minor art, the conceptism and intensity of the most subtle cancioneril lyric is mixed with the most enigmatic darkness, with which he was ahead of his creation by a century and a half. compatriot Luis de Góngora.

The Coronación del marqués de Santillana o los Calamicleos (1438, published in 1499) was a very famous poem and widely disseminated in its time, taking into account the manuscripts that have been preserved of it. It is a set of 51 double limericks that allegorically develop an argument in which Mena is carried away from Mount Parnassus to contemplate the coronation of his friend and patron Íñigo López de Mendoza as an excellent poet and perfect gentleman. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo said of this poem that it is " a romado sermon..., dry, realistic, inameno, dour, but very Castilian". It is made obscure by the wild allusions to everything divine and human and the bombanries, to the point that the poet himself had to add a commentary in prose "literal, allegorical and anagogical" to a poem that, according to himself, corresponds to the "comic and satirical" genre.

The Labyrinth of Fortune, or Las trezientas, a poem dedicated to King John II, is his masterpiece. Originally it consisted of 297 major art couplets. It is believed that the monarch wanted it to be as many as the number of days in the year and Juan de Mena, to please him, composed 24 more, without reaching the promised end because he died; but the Hispanist Raymond Foulché-Delbosc, nineteenth-century editor of the poem, thinks that these 24, which appear in some editions, which were added to the three that they say were missing from the 300 in the manuscript, constitute a later independent fragmentary poem that severely judges caprice. of the monarch composed of another wit; a courtier like Juan de Mena would never have criticized his king's decision.

The Labyrinth is an allegorical poem inspired by the Paradise by Dante Alighieri; Its true value is not in the symbolism, but in the vigorously described historical episodes, where a genuine reflective patriotism and a vision of national unity are embodied in King Juan II, who assumes the providential destiny of Castile. The plot is simple: Juan de Mena is taken away in the chariot of Bellona, the warrior goddess, pulled by dragons and is taken to the palace of Fortuna. Providence, which comes to receive him in a very large and dark cloud, shows him the machine of the world, made up of "very large three wheels", two immobile (the one from the past and the one from the future, which appears veiled) and one in perpetual and vertiginous revolving, the present. In each wheel there are seven circles: that of Diana, home of the chaste; that of Mercury, of the wicked; that of Venus, the place where sensual sin is punished; Phoebus's, retreat for philosophers, orators, historians and poets; that of Mars, pantheon of heroes killed by the nation; that of Jupiter, the seat of kings and princes, and that of Saturn, sole occupied by Álvaro de Luna, private of the king. The four-accent rhythm of the arte mayor verse is inflexible and monotonous, though solemn; the very elaborate style, full of hyperbaton, cultism, Italianism, rhetoric, symbols and historical and mythological allusions, but the true inspiration is present and the gifts of the true poet shine despite everything. Along with the influence of Dante, Lucan and Virgil are perceived.

The Songs against the Seven Deadly Sins or Reasoning with Death, is the last work he composed, and it remained unfinished. It is inspired by the medieval debates on the same subject and more remotely by the Psychomachy of Prudentius. Gómez Manrique concluded them and Pero Guillén de Segovia and Fray Jerónimo de Olivares also added the disputes of Gluttony, Envy and Laziness.

Prose work

Juan de Mena wrote in prose the Commentary on the Coronation (1438), a gloss on his own poem in honor of the Marquis of Santillana. This prose work became one of his most famous and popular works in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In 1442, Mena translated the version of the Latin Ilías into Spanish, a work in prose that was successful, since he managed to spread it and ended up naming it Homero romanceado, compendium brief from the iliad And he takes sources from the Periochae of Ausonius and of the second Theban Pindar. In this text he highlights the prologue, written in very elaborate artistic prose, and to add a fundamental element, that it is free of prejudice.

Mena had written Latin Ilias dedicated to John II and received good reviews for his subject matter. It also contains some stories in war episodes and these two aspects are the most prominent in the prologue. The version of this work has been edited by Tomás González Rolán and Felisa del Barrio.

The Treatise on the title of the duke was written in 1445. Its laudatory or commendatory content joins one of the favorite subjects for the man of the medieval court. This chivalrous theoretical treatise shows the denomination under which they are integrated and written about genealogy and heraldry, dignities and protocol. This work pays attention to its interior as a whole and contains news about cavalry (referred to as works of this genre) and is known for the challenges that occur.

The memories of some ancient lineages have been discussed in a single testimony, BNE ms 3,390. The subject dealt with inside is of the same nature as that dealt with in the Treatise on the title of the duke. This work has several mutilated pages and is a late and poor copy. And its particular ceremonial.

The Treatise on Love has initially been attributed to Juan de Mena, but there is no complete certainty that the work is his. This text shows his theoretical interest in love affairs and is also known by another title, “Of love remedies”, since it follows Ovid in his Remedia amoris and is a literary topic where love is He sees it as a disease, which has a cure. In this work he refers to the literary topic Remedia amoris with some different advice on how to overcome and avoid love sickness.

Style

Mena was fumbling around looking for a suitable rhythm, but she failed, choosing for it the inflexible dodecasyllable which, with its four monotonous accents every two unstressed syllables, is too solemn and does not allow for variations; The flexible rhythm will be found by Garcilaso, Boscán and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in the Italian hendecasyllable, around three accents of which only two are obligatory, the axis or rhythmic axis of the sixth syllable and that of the tenth, being able to substitute that of the sixth syllable by two (in the fourth and eighth).

He is the first Castilian poet who considers creating a poetically elevated language, different from the vulgar language. He himself warned that this effort would win him detractors among the supporters of a more common and vulgar elocution, and he declared it so in a "Protest" which he included in stanza 33 of his Labyrinth:

If coplas, or parts, or long dictions / non bien sonaren d'aquello que fablo / look to the brain, mas non al vocablo / if my sayings remain according to my reasons, / which includes the corrections / of the understood ones, to whom only they fear, / but not of grossers that always blaspheme / according to the rudeness of their opinions

Mena did not know how to see the fundamental problem of rhythm because he was concerned above all with creating a serious poetic dialect in Spanish, a poetics of greater art. As María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, the main scholar of the formal aspects of the language and style of the great Córdoba poet, has shown, Castilian Spanish owes Mena a profound renovation, energizing syntax through hyperbaton and calques of Latin structures, for example through the use of present participles, absolute and infinitive constructions, incorporating new elements and neologisms: for this, it takes words directly from Latin without changes (cultisms) and replaces existing words of the popular language with them. Thus, for example, vulto for "rostro", exile for "banishment", poluto for 'dirty'. He also liked to use esdrújulos ( diaphanous , sulphurous ), with which he achieves a peculiar sonority.

On the other hand, it is also inspired by old Castilian to renew the poetic language and uses frequent archaisms to adjust the metric; some are phonic, such as apocopes ("nol'", "grand'") and prosthesis (atan, amátanse); others are lexical (aína, desque, vegadas), and there are also morphological ones, for example in verbal conjugation (answer, vido, veredes). He even resorts to the epic epithet at the end of some verses (Phoenicia the beautiful, Vandalia the well-liked one). The rhetorical charge of the composition is also evident; It deals above all with topos of amplificatio or amplification: periphrasis, epanalepsis, anaphoras, chiasms, doublets, polyptoton... He likes to link series of two (a certain subtle and pure spirit), three (when love is fictitious, vaniloquious, pigro) and up to four elements (It is the brave, unfortunate, / very virtuous, outstanding count). Such an accumulation of expressive resources gives Mena's poetry a baroque and ornate form, as well as great sonority and expressive force. His innovations, introduced in a still rude language, were still far from the maturity that would be reached during the Baroque period, but Mena is undoubtedly an essential precedent that facilitated the poetic lines later developed in Castilian literature and the most prominent poet who used the resounding and solemn verse of arte mayor and its corresponding couplet.

Font

• Lida, Maria Rosa Juan de Mena: poet of Spanish prerevival. Mexico: Colegio de México, 1950.
• Gericke, Philip O.: "John of Mena (1411-1456). " Castilian Writers1400-1500. Edited by Frank A. Domínguez and George D. Greenia. Vol. 286. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2004. 109-126.
• Street, Florence: “The Life of Juan de Mena. ” Bulletin hispanique 55 (1953): 149-173.
• Mena, Juan de: Complete works. [Ed. and prologue by Ángel Gómez Moreno]. Barcelona: Turner, 1994. ISBN 84-7506-407-8