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Jorge Manrique

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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JORGE MANRIQUE (1440?-1478), Spanish poet and soldier, was born probably at Paredes de Nava. The fourth son of Rodrigo Manrique, count de Paredes, he became like the rest of his family a fervent partisan of Queen Isabel, served with great distinction in many engagements, and was made comendador of Montizon in the order of Santiago. He was killed in a skirmish near the fortress of Garci-Munoz in 1478, and was buried in the church attached to the convent of Ucles. His love-songs, satires, and acrostic verses are merely ingenious compositions in the taste of his age; he owes his imperishable renown to a single poem, the Coplas por la muerte de su padre, an elegy of forty stanzas on the death of his father, which was apparently first printed in the Cancionero llamado de Fray Inigo de Mendoza about the year 1482. There is no foundation for the theory that Manrique drew his inspiration from an Arabic poem by Abu `l-Baka Salih ar-Rundi; the form of the Coplas- is influenced by the Consejos of his uncle, Gomez Manrique, and the matter derives from the Bible, from Boethius and from other sources readily accessible. The great sonorous commonplaces on death are vitalized by the intensely personal grief of the poet, who lent a new solemnity and significance to thoughts which had been for centuries the common property of mankind. It was given to Jorge Manrique to have one single moment of sublime expression, and this isolated achievement has won him a fame undimmed by any change of taste during four centuries_ The best edition of the Coplas is that issued by R. Foulche-Delbosc in the Bibliotheca hispanica; the poem has been admirably translated by Longfellow. Manrique's other verses were mostly printed in Hernando del Castillo's Cancionero general (1511).