Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique

Description

Jorge Manrique wrote the Coplas on the death of his father around 1476, and they became the poem every educated Spaniard could quote: a meditation on mortality whose plainness is exactly its power. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated them as a young professor at Bowdoin, and this Boston printing of 1833 was his first published book — before Hiawatha, before Evangeline, before he was Longfellow. His introductory essay on the moral and devotional poetry of Spain is the first sustained treatment of the subject in English. The volume is thus two things at once: a fifteenth-century Castilian classic, and the beginning of the American career that would carry Spanish literature into English. This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1833 Boston edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.