"Ah de la vida." Nadie me responde....

"Ah de la casa" is what you would say if you you wanted to see if anyone was home. Something you shout out when entering a house. So "Ah de la vida" is saying: "anyone there? life?" Quevedo use of language is thoroughly "modern."

I should have been a scholar of 17th-century Spanish poetry. Somehow I got hung up on the bloody twentieth.

"presentes sucesiones de difuntos" --that's an interesting conception of human life: a sequence of successive individual present moments, each of which is inhabited by a different dead man, a "difunto."

***

Interesting in William Carlos Williams' essay on Lorca (this from '39): that Williams presents Lorca in terms of Spanish literary traditions, in a quite erudite way. The struggle and dialectic between popular and "culto" traditions. WCW brings in the Poema del Mío Cid, the romancero, baroque poetry, etc... but doesn't spend as much time on flamenco or gypsy traditions. Williams was condescended to for years by people vastly inferior to him in critical acumen. He was translating from the Spanish long before the boom in translations of the 60s. He knew of Neruda and Parra, Lorca, and the traditional Spanish cancionero.