Juan de Mena, Frank A. Domínguez, Ryan D. Giles Labyrinth of Fortune

"The most translated Castilian compositions of the fifteenth century into English deal with love, death, or consolation, themes that are easily understood because we have all experienced them. These poems also tend to be shorter and written in simple lines of eight syllables or less. This is not the case with Juan de Mena's The Labyrinth of Fortune (El Laberinto de Fortuna, 1444). Its length, complexity, and form are the probable reasons it has not been translated until now, even though it is undeniably the most important work of the fifteenth century and has long been considered a classic. The Laberinto is an epic vision poem that is rooted in what has been called the allegorical-dantesque school of poetry. Its 2,400-lines are grouped into three hundredstanzas composed (almost always) of eight 12-syllable verses separated into two equal hemistiches by a caesura. Each hemistich has two stresses and their repetition gives the poem a strange staccato sonority that is now out-of-fashion. In addition, the poem challenges the understanding of the reader at every step, because its interpretation requires a discerning knowledge of classical and medieval texts and cultures. Mena is one of the first Castilian humanist poets to embrace the new spirit of the Renaissance, find inspiration in the classical past, and propose a civic role for poets along the lines of his Florentine counterparts. He belongs to a line of writers that, as with the works of Alfonso X of Castile, approach language as more than a mere vehicle for meaning. We are not as conscious of Mena's surprising inventiveness as we should be, because aspects of his syntax, his borrowings from Latin, and his neologisms have been adopted by Spanish and appear in modern dictionaries; however, their sheer number makes The Labyrinth crucial to our understanding of how the early Spanish humanists created a literary culture in the vernacular by transforming late medieval Castilian into a more learned language worthy of being studied and taught"--