Language and Space: the Ruins Motif in Spanish Poetry

Abstract

The article deals with the evolution of ruins motif and ruin perception in Spanish poetry, from the Golden Age to contemporary poets. The starting point of the research is the perception of the ruins, after M.M. Bakhtin, as a chronotop, the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. The ruins became an aesthetic category, whose reflection in the form and the content of a poetic work agreed with the ideology of a particular period – Renaissance, Barocco, Enlightenment, Romanticism, or Postmodernism. Studying the ruins topos in the context of Iberian mentality allows us to see the local tendencies in the perception of the ruins. The Renaissance poets were the first to draw attention to the ancient remnants, from Carthage later refocusing towards the Roman ruins and the Iberian space. Thus, in Renaissance Spanish poetry Garcilaso de La Vega and Gutierre de Cetina were the first to devote the sonnets to the Carthaginian ruins, while the 16th century Seville poets took a broader view, both geographically and historically. The two functions of the ruins established in the early poetic tradition emerged in the later works both individually and in their inseparable unity, to be interpreted in the 20th century poetry by Aníbal Núñez (1944–1987).

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