Jorge Manrique

Jorge Manrique (c. 1440 – 24 April 1479) was a major Castilian poet, whose main work, the Coplas por la muerte de su padre ('Verses on the death of Don Rodrigo Manrique, his Father'), is still read today.

Quotes

• Nuestras vidas son los ríos
  Que van a dar en Ia mar,
  Que es el morir.
  • Our lives are rivers, gliding free,
    To that unfathomed, boundless sea,
    The silent grave!
  • Coplas por la Muerte de su Padre (c. 1460) — Tr. Longfellow (1833)

Quotes about Manrique

• The great poet of the fifteenth century was Jorge Manrique, famous for his Ode on the Death of His Father, generally referred to as his Coplas (verses), written in 1478. A solemn and majestic elegy, it is perhaps the best-known poem in Spanish literature and has been beautifully translated into English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
  • John A. Crow, Introduction to An Anthology of Spanish Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. xxx

• There is nothing new or original in either the thoughts or the images of this poem. Like Gray's Elegy, it consists of a string of commonplaces. [...] Why then are these Coplas so good? The answer is simple—because under the stress of a strong emotion they condensed a great deal of floating sentiment and rhetoric into impeccable verse.
  • Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 98

External links

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique (Boston: Allen & Ticknor, 1833)