Laberinto de Fortuna - Language

Language

The poem is written in "castellano" (Castilian), thus the language is basically an antiquated version of the Spanish spoken throughout the Hispanic world today. The "castellano" or Spanish of Mena’s time is generally understandable to speakers of Spanish today and even to advanced non-native students of Spanish. Mena’s language, however, is considerably more difficult. He uses many archaic words that even in his day had already fallen out of use. Even more often, he uses Latinisms. Some of the Latin words that Mena introduces were later adopted into Spanish, most were not. This linguistic experimentation creates a text that can only be read with great difficulty, and we may assume that Mena’s contemporaries faced a similar difficulty. As medieval Spanish scholar Alan Deyermond states that “the precise meaning of some lines has baffled editors from the late-fifteenth-century…to the present.”