El uso de la "translatio studii" y de la épica de Dante en 'El payador' de Leopoldo Lugones

MARIANO PÉREZ CARRASCO

Buenos Aires

Jornada; Pensar el Renacimiento desde América Latina; 2015

Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies - Cátedra de Literatura del Renacimiento (UBA) - Departamento de Letras (FFyL, UBA)

This paper examines a hardly studied case of the reception of Renaissance authors and ideas in early twentieth century Argentine literature. In 1916 Leopoldo Lugones, a poet and erudite who was at the pinnacle of his fame, published a long essay entitled El payador (Argentine Spanish for ?troubadour?) which principal aim was to give a historic and philosophical rationale for the existence of an Argentine race?understood in a nineteenth-century positivistic way as the ontological bearer of the nation?that was seen as the final result of the European civilization. Lugones wanted to show that Argentine was not just another South American republic stemmed a century earlier from the declining Spanish empire, but due to a long series of translationes both studiorum and imperii the new nation was called to be among the leaders of the nascent century. The main reason was, according to Lugones? arguments, that during the Conquista the civilization began a slow migration from Europe to America that ended in the creation of a new race which prototype was the Argentine ?gaucho?. From the standpoint of the theory of translatio built by Lugones, the ?gauchos? belonged to a series formed by the Greek aoidoi, the Roman imperial epic, and?after a gap caused by the rise of Christendom and the chaos produced by the barbarian invasions, both events perceived as negative by the author, a radical liberal at the time?by the Provençal and early Italian poets, especially by Dante?s Christian epic (El payador traces a parallel between Dante?s defense of the Italian vernacular as a language able to philosophical development and Argentine language, which was considered by Lugones «another Spanish, such as Spanish was at the beginning another Latin»). El payador is, thus, the first attempt to think the Renaissance in Argentine, not from a scholarly perspective, but in a vital and very creative way. In his ?uvre, Lugones picked up, from medieval and Renaissance cultural heritage, the theory of translatio and a Dantean inspired concept of epic.The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to show that the whole argumentative structure of El payador explicitly bears on the medieval and Renaissance historiographical concept of translatio, adapted to explain the cultural identity of the new country, heir to the civilization of the Renaissance; second, to analyze the central place Lugones attributes to Dante?s ideas of poetry within the epic theory developed in El payador.