Enrique de Villena - Literary Accomplishments

Literary Accomplishments

Don Enrique de Villena’s literary achievements are quite diverse. Perhaps Villena’s most successful work among Spanish readers was his interpretation of Los doce Trabajos de Hércules (The Twelve Works of Hercules). Twelve Works draws on Greek mythology for its subject matter and Christian literary traditions for its allegorical significance, a synthesis that Villena makes throughout the work. First translated into Catalan and then Castilian, the work contains obvious and didactic moral messages which Villena found applicable and important within the framework of contemporary Spain. Twelve Works is divided into twelve chapters, and each of those into four parts. Villena justifies his adaptation of foreign myth through the common idea that good fiction is able to both delight the reader and, through that delight, lead the reader to virtuous action. Written in 1417, Twelve Works of Hercules made Villena’s literary reputation, perhaps because it lacks the erudition and theoretical complexity of the later treatises.

Villena’s Arte de Trovar is ironically valued least for its literary merit. Described as “frustrating and sterile” (85), Arte de Trovar is a treatise on the rules and proper prosody of troubadour poetry. The work, like Villena’s other treatises, is erudite and difficult, concerning itself with complex laws of meter and versification, which were laid down as a result of lesser poets violating the structures of the “gay science” of Troubadour poetry. These poetic structures were viewed by Villena as a “true and immutable order of things,” and the genius of the poet was to make his words or stories conform to the laws of this order. As expected, the treatise does not hold the attention of many modern readers. Arte de Trovar does attest, however, to the important cultural exchange between Catalonia and the Provençal region of southern France (the home of troubadour lyric poetry), and conveys a sense of nostalgia on Villena’s part for the chivalric and highly decorous world of troubadour subject matter. Arte de Trovar was completed between 1417 and 1428.

Also of importance are Villena’s translations of Virgil’s The Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy into both Catalan and Castilian. Villena was the first translator of Virgil into a Romance language, and Villena was faced with the difficulty of maintaining the subtlety and depth of The Aeneid while appealing to a largely unlearned audience that was used to easily decipherable allegorical stories. Along with an initial section of “advice for the beginning reader,” the text comments as to how the examples of the ancient text may still be practically applied to contemporary Castilian society. Along with his interest in Virgil, Villena’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy reflects, perhaps, a shifting interest from the courtly poets discussed in Arte de Trovar to a divinely inspired Christian poet based on Roman models. Villena also translated Petrarch’s sonnets. These translations of classical literature were widely read by a growing community of literary nobility, a social circle in which Villena was among the most important members.