December 15, 2009
Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series
CHRISTMAS IN THE ARTS
Christmas in Spanish literature, with a special look at Navarre
D. Miguel Zugasti.
department Literature-GRISO. University of Navarra
In this lecture the topic of Christmas in Spanish literature is approached under a diachronic perspective: from the Age average to the present day, a sort of pathway is traced to which texts and authors are adjusted to give us a celebratory vision of Christmas; but not only of the Christmas cycle, because intrinsically linked to it is the cycle of Epiphany, which also has a textual weight B . Christmas literature covers the three major genres of lyric, prose and theater, expanding through the twists and turns of tradition, ritual and folklore.
The earliest known medieval manifestations are related to the liturgy, and consist of certain tropes such as the Song of the Sibyl and the Officium pastorum. Within the sacred theater, the following stands out due to its antiquity Representation of the Magi (12th century, only a fragment of 147 verses is preserved). In the 15th and 16th centuries dramatic texts proliferated everywhere, especially eclogues and autos, with plays by Gómez Manrique, Juan del Encina, Lucas Fernández, Gil Vicente, Sánchez de Badajoz, Torres Naharro, etc. In line with this, it did not take long for Christmas songbooks and romanceros to appear, with the collaboration of outstanding writers of the Spanish Golden Age: Fray Íñigo de Mendoza, Fray Ambrosio Montesino, Cristóbal de Castillejo, Gregorio Silvestre, Fray Pedro de Padilla... without forgetting our most outstanding mystical writers: Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint John of the Cross. Top poets such as Lope de Vega (Shepherds of Bethlehem) or Luis de Góngora come promptly to his quotation with the Decembrine verses.
After the eighteenth-century parenthesis, with little literary activity, the novelty of the nineteenth century is that Christmas stories and tales begin to take shape (Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas Clarín...), following the path traced by Charles Dickens in England, although at quite a distance from model. In the 20th and 21st centuries the topic, far from being exhausted, is revitalized and diversified, with works of all genres by authors as relevant as Luis Rosales, Eduardo Marquina, Martínez Sierra, Martín Alonso, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel de Unamuno, Gerardo Diego, Jorge Guillén, Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, etc.
Navarre's literature of yesterday and today is not left out of this tendency, and from The Shepherd of Christmas Eve (1644) by the Fiteran bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, to the recent monographic collections of poems by Víctor Manuel Arbeloa (The Other Christmas1993), a wide range of authors such as Navarro Villoslada, Jesús Górriz Lerga, Martínez Fernández de Bobadilla, Martínez Baigorri, Ángel Gaztelu, María Sagrario Ochoa Medina, etc., are regularly published. It is also worth mentioning the magazine Navidaddirected by María Jesús Valencia, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2009.