espani
Poems

Renacimiento·c. 1530·completo (soneto)

Soneto X

Garcilaso de la Vega

¡Oh dulces prendas, por mi mal halladas,

dulces y alegres cuando Dios quería!

Juntas estáis en la memoria mía

y con ella en mi muerte conjuradas.

 

¿Quién me dijera, cuando las pasadas

horas que en tanto bien por vos me vía,

que me habíades de ser en algún día

con tan grave dolor representadas?

 

Pues en una hora junto me llevastes

todo el bien que por términos me distes,

llevadme junto el mal que me dejastes;

 

si no, sospecharé que me pusistes

en tantos bienes porque deseastes

verme morir entre memorias tristes.

Context

Garcilaso (1501-1536) and Juan Boscán imported the Italian eleven-syllable line into Spanish poetry, replacing the medieval octosílabo as the high-cultural verse form. This sonnet, addressing the objects ('prendas') left by a lost love, is the most famous of Garcilaso's forty-odd sonnets. The shift in tone between the octave (memory) and the sestet (grief) is the structural move every Spanish-language sonnet that followed had to navigate.

In plain English prose

Oh sweet keepsakes found, found by my misfortune, sweet and joyful when God willed it: you are joined in my memory and there conspire to bring my death. Who would have told me when, in the happy hours I once had with you, in such weighty grief I would now meet you? Since in one hour you took from me all the good you so slowly gave me, take this evil too along with it; if not, I will suspect that you placed so much good in me only to see me die between memories of sadness.

Read it out loud at least once.

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