But Rodriguez Lobo has no need of such attributions to justify his great and enduring fame.
FOOTNOTES:
[302] Cf. H. Lopes de Mendonça, O Salto Mortal, Act iii: Tanto gostaes d’este livro: É por ser triste?—É por ser verdadeiro.
[303] Eclogue 5 (a qual dizem ser do mesmo autor), which is undoubtedly by Ribeiro, refers to Coimbra in the lines: É lembrarme os sinceiraes De Coimbra que me mata.
[304] As in the case of Gil Vicente, we are vexed with homonyms—a notary, an admiral, &c. Dr. Theophilo Braga, skilfully dovetailing hypotheses, develops his biography fully. Casi todo lo que de él se ha escrito son fábulas sin fundamento alguno, wrote Menéndez y Pelayo in 1905.
[305] Fray Luis de Leon may have remembered this passage in De los Nombres de Cristo, Bk. 3 (1917 ed., t. 1, p. 198; Bib. Aut. Esp., t. 37, p. 182).
[306] Nossos amores contados por um modo que os não entenderá ninguem, Garrett, Um Auto de Gil Vicente.
[307] La Voluntad, Barcelona, 1902. Camillo Castello Branco held similar views.
[308] The word cannot be translated exactly, but corresponds to the Greek πόθος, Latin desiderium, Catalan anyoranza, Galician morriña, German Sehnsucht, Russian тоска (pron. taská). It is the ‘passion for which I can find no name’ (Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft).
[309] Menéndez y Pelayo’s strict division between the ‘subjective’ pt. 1 and pt. 2 as externa y de aventuras is thus somewhat arbitrary.
[310] Pt. 1, cap. 9; pt. 2, cap. 25.
[311] In pt. 2, cap. 9, this is forgotten: outras [cousas] que não são escritas neste livro, a slip which throws no light on the authorship.
[312] It was characteristic of the hot-house air in which Portuguese literature existed that the first publication of a book often consisted in its circulation (correr) in manuscript from courtier to courtier, a special licence being obtained for this apart from the licence to print. Those to whom it appealed made copies. The earliest known edition of Menina e moça is of 1557-8: Primeira & segũda parte do liuro chamado as Saudades de Bernaldim Ribeiro com todas suas obras. Treladado de seu propria original. Nouamente impresso. 1557 (Euora. The date of the colophon is January 30, 1558). An introductory note Aos lectores says: Foram tantos os traduzidores deste liuro & os pareceres em elle tam diuersos que nam he de marauilhar que na primeira impressam desta historia se achassem tantas cousas em contrario de como foram pello auctor delle escriptas ... foy causa de andar este liuro tam vicioso ... conueo tirarse a limpo do propria original, &c., &c.). The edition of 1554, quoted by Brunet, was probably the first in spite of the words com summa diligencia emendada (i.e. corrections of the manuscript). The phrase de nouo tells more against than in favour of an earlier edition (= rather ‘new’ than ‘anew’).
[313] Ribeiro, so far as we know, wrote no line of Spanish. Boscán’s romance Justa fué mi perdición and the romance Ó Belerma have been wrongly ascribed to him.
[314] p. 287: ... so ganz persönlichem Stil, dass sie mit keinem anderen Dichter vor oder nach ihnen, wohl aber untereinander zu verwechseln wären; and p. 292: Bernardim Ribeiro writes ganz im Stile des Falcão. Cf. F. Bouterwek, History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Eng. tr. 1823, ii. 39: ‘A long eclogue by this writer, which forms an appendix to the works of Ribeyro, so completely partakes of the character of the poems which it accompanies that were it not for the separate title it might be mistaken for the production of Ribeyro himself. It therefore proves that Ribeyro’s poetic fancies, his romantic mysticism not excepted, were by no means individual.’
[315] According to Dr. Theophilo Braga, he was born in 1515; married in 1529 Maria Brandão (aged eleven); was profoundly influenced by Ribeiro’s Trovas de dous pastores (1536) but did not plagiarize it in the Trovas de Crisfal (1536-41), similar passages being due to the situação quasi similar (i.e. quasi identica) of the two friends; went to Italy on a diplomatic mission in 1541; spent the year 1543 in Rome and returned to Portugal in the winter of 1543-4; was factor of the fortress of Arguim from 1545 to 1548; and died in 1577.
[316] The whole question at issue is whether the de of Trovas de Crisfal = ‘by’ or ‘about’ (cf. O Livro das Trovas d’ El Rei = rather ‘belonging to’ than ‘by’ the king), and protests against a illusão de pretender identificar em um mesmo poeta o apaixonado de Aonia e o de Maria (Obras, 1915 ed., p. 10) or o intuito de converterem Christovam Falcão em um mytho (ibid., p. 42) are beside the point.
[317] That one of the figures is identical in the woodcuts of these two folhas volantes is not significant: it appears also in an anonymous edition of the Pranto de Maria Parda.
[318] In the 1559 ed. the words hũa muy nomeada e agradauel Egloga chamada Crisfal ... que dizem ser de Cristouam Falcam, ho que parece alludir ho nome da mesma Egloga may legitimately be held to imply merely that some persons, misled by the anagram, attributed the poem to Falcão.
[319] Decada 8, cap. 34 (1786 ed., p. 322).
[320] The licença of the 1632 edition says, Este livrinho ... muitas vezes se imprimio.
[321] Cf. 1885 ed., No. 109:
Cf. Boscán ap. Menéndez y Pelayo, Antología, tom. xiii (Juan Boscán), p. 165: En tiempo de Dante y un poco antes florecieron los Proenzales, cuyas obras por culpa de los tiempos andan en pocas manos. Menéndez y Pelayo also (ibid., p. 174) gives a reference by Faria e Sousa to King Dinis: El rey don Dionis de Portugal nació primero que el Dante tres ó quatro años y escrivió mucho deste propio género endecasílabo, coma consta de los manuscritos.
[322] Cf. 1885 ed., No. 112:
[324] He must often have repeated Nuno Pereira’s lines, which may have influenced him when he read them in the Cancioneiro Geral: Privar em cas da Rainha Deos vollo deixe fazer, E a mi hũa vinha E regar hũa almoinha Em que tenho mor prazer ... Lavro, cavo quanta posso ... O gingrar de meu caseiro, &c.
[325] His complaint in the second elegy (1885 ed., No. 147, l. 17) shows how far he was in advance of his age in Portugal: Um vilancete brando ou seja um chiste, Letras ás invenções, motes ás damas, Hũa pregunta escura, esparsa triste, Tudo bom, quem o nega? Mas porque, Se alguem descobre mais, se lhe resiste?
[326] Often he combines several in the same poem. Thus the long (533 lines) eclogue on the death of Garci Lasso (Nemoroso) begins in tercetos, proceeds with rima encadeada (internal rhyme), and ends with Petrarcan stanzas.
[327] Cf. the sonnet (1885 ed., No. 126) Esprito que voaste with Alma minha gentil.
[328] The autograph manuscript of this and of other poems, discovered in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional by Snr. Delfim Guimarães in 1908, has been reproduced in facsimile by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in the Boletim of the Lisbon Ac. das Sciencias, vol. v (1912), pp. 187-220. See infra, p. 164.
[329] Leonel da Costa, the translator of Virgil and Terence, later wrote a poem in seven cantos of redondilhas on the same subject: A Conversão miraculosa da felice egypcia penitente Santa Maria (1627).
[330] Faria e Sousa even makes him the first Portuguese poet to write hendecasyllabics, setting aside those of Sá de Miranda as unreadable: son incapaces de ser leidos! (Varias Rimas, pt. ii, p. 162).
[331] He was Moço da camara in 1566. He was appointed a knight of the Order of Christ in 1582. He married apparently after his return from Africa in 1581. He was alive in 1596 (although in one of his poems he refers to a premature old age) and dead in 1605. On the other hand, he was apparently over twenty-five in 1558. It is thought that the right of passing on his official posts to his children (sobrevivencia), granted to his father in 1532, may indicate the date of the birth of the eldest of his eleven children: Diogo Bernardez (who did not, like some of his brothers, use his father’s second name, Pimenta).
[332] Carta 12: Confesso dever tudo áquella rara Doutrina tua.
[333] The succeeding generation was also distinguished, one of the poet’s nephews becoming Bishop of Angra, another Governor of Angola, a third Professor at Coimbra University.
[334] Bernardez’ letters in verse contain many such references to everyday life, e. g. the Lisbon negress selling fried fish in the Betesga.
[335] A confident sonnet by him in this capacity is extant: Pois armarse por Christo não duvida Sebastião.
[336] O doce estillo teu tomo por guia and Escrevo, leio e risco he writes to Miranda, but his muse was far more spontaneous than Miranda’s, and it appears from another passage (in Elegia 5) that his alterations were less of style than of matter.
[337] Carta 32 is an exception, and consists of seventy-two oitavas.
[338] He introduces Italian lines (Cartas 23, 27, 30) and wrote a sonnet in Italian.
[339] Cf. Carta 4: Foge inda o dia ao muito diligente, although whether this is due to his work or to the number of his friends is not clear.
[340] Com cujo [Miranda’s] exemplo meu pai, que entam estaua nos estudos, pretendeo com a variedade destes sens manifestar como a lingua Portugueza assi em copia de palauras como em grauidade de estylo a nenhuma he inferior (Miguel Leite Ferreira, Preface to Poemas Lvsitanos, 1598).
[341] To take an example not from the eclogues but from one of his sonnets, the words
correspond but ill to their peaceful sense.
[342] Cf. Carta 2. Bernardez (in an elegy on Ferreira’s death addressed to Andrade Caminha) records that among all Ferreira’s verses not a line was written in a foreign tongue: um só nunca lhe deu em lingua alhea.
[343] Thirteen times the same subject is treated by Camões and Caminha, sometimes exclusively by them (C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Pero de Andrade Caminha (1901), p. 55).
[344] Obras, ed. Priebsch, p. 361.
[345] All that he wrote in Portuguese is contained in two pages (389-91) of Garcia Peres’ Catálogo (1890).
[346] Fray Bartolomé Ponce, Primera Parte de la Clara Diana a lo divino (1582?): Me dijeron como un muy amigo suyo le habia muerto por ciertos zelos ó amores (quoted by Ticknor, iii. 536, and by T. Braga (omitting ciertos), Bernardim Ribeiro (1872), p. 80).
[347] Argumento desta obra.
[348] e.g.
[349] Que estes se chamem poetas! rightly exclaims Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina (Seram Politico (1704), p. 146) of those who revel in the use of esdruxulos.
[350] The whole of Canto XIV is given to a vigorous account of the battle of Aljubarrota, already described more vividly in fewer stanzas by Camões. Another poem in oitavas by Rodriguez Lobo, Historia da Arvore Triste, was published in Fenix Renascida, vol. iv.
[351] In Spanish also are the fifty-six romances which make up the poem La Jornada, &c. (1623), written on the coming of Philip III to Portugal in 1619. In the eclogues, written chiefly in redondilhas, he sings with spontaneous charm as praticas humildes e os cuidados Não por arte fingidos e enfeitados of the rusticos vaqueiros, as he says in the prefatory sonnet. Many of the words are pleasantly indigenous: milho, boroa, salgueiraes, rafeiro, charneca, chocalho, abegões, ovelheiros.
[352] For instance, when the Angel has announced in Spanish las alegres nuevas, the goatherd, ratinho, Mendo, says: A din Rey, a din Rey ay! Que estou amorrinhentado, Acudame algum Cristom ou Sancristom. Laureano, the shepherd, speaks Portuguese and Spanish, and Silvia says: Porque o que sinto quisera Dizelo em bom Portugues. An Auto e Colloquio do Nascimento de Christo (1646) attributed to Francisco Lopes was reprinted in 1676.