ESPRONCEDA

EL ESTUDIANTE
DE SALAMANCA
AND OTHER SELECTIONS

EDITED BY

GEORGE TYLER NORTHUP, PH.D.

PROFESSOR OF SPANISH LITERATURE
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

PREFACE

The selections from Espronceda included in this volume have been edited for the benefit of advanced Spanish classes in schools and universities. The study of Espronceda, Spain's greatest Romantic poet, offers the best possible approach to the whole subject of Romanticism. He is Spain's "representative man" in that movement. Furthermore, the wealth of meters he uses is such that no other poet provides so good a text for an introduction to the study of Spanish versification. The editor has therefore treated the biography of Espronceda with some degree of completeness, studying his career as one fully representative of the historical and literary movements of the period. A treatment of the main principles of Spanish versification was also considered indispensable. It is assumed that the text will be used only in classes where the students are thoroughly familiar with the rudiments of Spanish grammar. Therefore only the more difficult points of grammar are dealt with in the notes, and little help, outside of the vocabulary, is given the student in the translating of difficult passages.

The editor makes no pretense to having established critical texts of the poems here printed, although he hopes that some improvement will be noted over previous editions. A critical edition of Espronceda's works has never been printed. Espronceda himself gave little attention to their publication. Hartzenbusch and others intervened as editors in some of the earliest editions. Their arbitrary changes have been repeated in all subsequent editions. The text of "El Estudiante de Salamanca" has been based upon the "Poesías de D. José de Espronceda," Madrid, 1840, the so-called editio princeps. This edition, however, cannot be regarded as wholly authoritative. It was not prepared for the press by the poet himself, but by his friend José García de Villalta. Though far more authentic in its readings than later editions, it abounds in inaccuracies. I have not followed its capricious punctuation, and have studied it constantly in connection with other editions, notably the edition of 1884 ("Obras Poéticas y Escritos en Prosa," Madrid, 1884). To provide a really critical text some future editor must collate the 1840 text with that version of the poem which appeared in La Alhambra, an obscure Granada review, for the year 1839. "El Mendigo" and "El Canto del Cosaco" I also base upon the 1840 edition, although the former first appeared in La Revista Española, Sept. 6, 1834. I base the "Canción del Pirata" upon the original version published in El Artista, Vol. I, 1835, p. 43. I take the "Soneto" from "El Liceo Artístico y Literario Español," 1838. For "A Teresa, Descansa en Paz," I follow the Madrid edition of 1884. The text of this, as for the whole of "El Diablo Mundo," is more reliable than that of the earlier poems.

I desire to thank Professors Rudolph Schevill, Karl Pietsch, and Milton A. Buchanan for helpful suggestions, and the latter more particularly for the loan of rare books. The vocabulary is almost entirely the work of my wife Emily Cox Northup, whose collaboration is by no means restricted to this portion of the book. More than to any other one person I am indebted to Mr. Steven T. Byington of the staff of Ginn and Company, by whose acute and scholarly observations I have often profited.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE LIFE OF ESPRONCEDA

Don José de Espronceda y Lara, Spain's foremost lyric poet of the nineteenth century, was born on the 25th of March, 1808, the year of his country's heroic revolt against the tyranny of Napoleon. His parents were Lieutenant-Colonel Don Juan de Espronceda y Pimentel and Doña María del Carmen Delgado y Lara. Both were Andalusians of noble stock, and, as we learn from official documents, were held to be Christians of clean blood "without taint of Jews, heretics, Moors, or persons punished by the Holy Inquisition, and who neither were nor had been engaged in mean or low occupations, but in highly honorable ones." This couple of such highly satisfactory antecedents had been married four years previously. In 1804 Don Juan, a mature widower of fifty-three, was still mourning his first wife when he obtained the hand of Doña María, a young widow whose first husband, a lieutenant in the same regiment, was recently deceased. The marriage was satisfactory in a worldly way, for Doña María brought as a dower four hundred thousand reales to be added to the two hundred thousand which Don Juan already possessed. By his first marriage Don Juan had had a son, Don José de Espronceda y Ramos, who became ensign in his father's regiment, then studied in the Artillery School at Segovia, and later entered the fashionable Guardia de Corps regiment. He died in 1793 at the early age of twenty-one, soon after joining this regiment. By the second marriage there were two other