This chapter analyzes Lope de Vega’s metaphors for texts and textual production in the opening sonnet of his Rimas.

The poems of Malaye Jaziri (c. 1570-1640 CE) represent the fundamental genesis of Kurdish poetry, because he was the first to deploy Classical Perso-Arabic forms in Kurdish verse. He adopted and adapted the ruba‘i and ghazal, most notably, as forms for poetry in the Kurdish language, thereby establishing a written medium for the Kurdish poetic t…[Read more]

This microcuento, with a corresponding English translation, playfully engages the question of whether “genius” is more attributable to genetics or hard work.

This review assesses José María Merino’s most innovative contribution to Spanish microfiction.

A brief review of José María Merino’s El libro de las horas contadas (2011) serves as an introduction to these translations of his microcuentos, “Maletas agresivas” and “Con retraso.”

The Yazidis of Iraqi Kurdistan resume their Éida Hejya (Pilgrimage Festival) at Lalish in September 2015.

This gently allegorical poem hints at a theodicy on the basis of an Appalachian folk tradition, the “Flying Jenny” (merry-go-round).

This poem is a bleak, sleek atlas of a moonlit rendezvous.

Like La Fontaine, Félix María Samaniego (1745-1801) freely adapted fables from Aesop and Phaedrus in vernacular verse. This is an English translation of Samaniego’s “El herrero y el perro.”

This article tests several of Robert Pring-Mill’s schematic clarifications of “the nature and functioning of the concepto” against examples from Golden-Age
devotional poetry and doctrinal treatises. In particular, it explores ways in which the conceptista conflation of figures for the Incarnation and figures for the poet’s craft can clarify our…[Read more]

As part of a wider research project that documents site-specific oral history associated with caves and cemeteries among the rapidly changing populations of Iraqi Kurdistan, this study analyses oral histories and traditions concerning one particular graveyard. Reputed to be the burial site of seventh century Muslim conquerors, this graveyard is…[Read more]

This essay appeared in The Conversation, 9 May 2014, titled “Probing Cervantes’s pages offers more than his bones
ever will.”

With a particular focus on lines 29–33 and 477–80, this article analyses the motif of the ex-voto or votive offering in Góngora’s Soledad primera. In relation to Golden-Age ex-votos more generally, both in popular practice and in literary convention, it identifies three characteristics that are central to Góngora’s development of the motif. These…[Read more]

This translation of of Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso’s “Nueva York 1987” was commissioned for Belkis Ramirez’s exhibition, In Memoriam: Commemorative Works by Contemporary Artists, University of Saint Joseph Art Museum, Connecticut, January 2019.

Using the diction and format of a newspaper story, this Spanish microrrelato alludes to recognizable elements of Homer’s Odyssey in order to comment on the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

This essay challenges the critical commonplace that Spain’s traditional ballads lack supernatural content.

This chapter offers a close reading of Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnet which begins “¿Miras este gigante corpulento | que con soberbia y gravedad camina?,” in the light of its cultural contexts.

This study considers how European modernism’s preoccupation with nationhood is prefigured in Latin American modernismo. By examining José Martí’s use of the colossus image, this chapter places classical reception at the center of how we define the limits of modernism’s origins.