Gaspar Gil Polo
(Valencia, c .1530-Barcelona, 1584) Spanish writer.There is very little news of his life.Part of his fame as a poet is that Cervantes dedicated a royal octave to him in La Galatea (1583) and Juan de Timoneda quotes him in his Sarao de amor (1561).His fundamental work is the Diana in love (1564), continuation of the Diana by Jorge de Montemayor.
Illustration of Diana in love , of Gaspar Gil Polo
Born into a family of municipal officials in Valencia, Gaspar Gil Polo became a lawyer and held various administrative positions in the city.Felipe II appointed him commissioner in the principality of Catalonia, so in 1580 he moved to Barcelona.He must have been known as a poet among his contemporaries, since Juan de Timoneda quotes him in a romance of 1561, but at present only some of his loose poems are preserved.
In 1564 he published in Valencia the five books of Diana in love , a pastoral novel that constitutes a continuation of Jorge de Montemayor's Diana , whose plot It was left unfinished when the author died.The protagonists of the play, some of whom are characters taken from their model, undertake a pilgrimage that ends with a general wedding in the palace of the wise Felicia.His main interest, in addition to the beautiful descriptions of the Valencian landscape, came from his conception of jealousy, which is psychologically analyzed to reject love-passion and propose a rational control of the feeling of love.
Of this Thus, if on the one hand Gil Polo continued the work of Montemayor, on the other he carried out a critique of the theories of the writer of Portuguese origin about love, to which he opposed theses based on the work of Pietro Bembo Gli Asolani .For Gil Polo, as for the Italian author, true love is good, serene and moderate, since it is governed by reason.In Diana in love , the emotional changes are the result of a convincing psychological evolution, and the problems are solved not by magical acts, but in a plausible way.
The work lacks the dramatic intensity of its predecessor, but on the contrary, it surpasses it in creating natural environments.While in Montemayor's Diana a description of the conventional landscape predominates, based on classic and Italian literary models, in Gil Polo's the Valencian landscape, lyrically described, becomes a real frame that envelops to the characters.The poems, interspersed in the prose of the novel, constitute essential parts of the narrative and are a logical consequence of the plot development.In them, in a great variety of meters and stanzas, the traditional Castilian meter, typical of medieval literature, is combined with another of a Renaissance character, as shown by the use of the hendecasyllable, of Italian origin, and with the use of Provençal rhymes and French.Both prose and poetry are extremely cultured, although Valencianisms abound.
Despite the praise that Miguel de Cervantes dedicated to her and its dissemination, the Diana in love did not reach a great impact during the 16th and 17th centuries, in which a continuation of Diana written by Alonso Pérez.It was translated into French, English, German and Latin, and was printed in Antwerp (Belgium, 1567) and in Paris (France, 1574).However, from the 18th century on, Gil Polo's work was revalued until it reached current recognition.
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