In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat
the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a
deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from
the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in
order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students
are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and
period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the
study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this
approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its
creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way
the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers.
With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from
thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the
three main languages--Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish--and lyrical
styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of
canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never
before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential
details of the poets' lives, and a general introduction by the volume
editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With
helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography
containing the most important editions and translations from all three
of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool
for both specialists and students in comparative literature.
