ABSTRACT
Scholarship on Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Ode ad florem Gnidi” has yet to examine the poem’s register through the lens of sixteenth-century erotica, favoring instead sanitized readings of one of Spain’s canonical, foundational poets. Through the methodology of close reading, this chapter reveals that risqué ambiguities permeate the poem’s verses, transacting meaning via euphemism and double entendre. For Garcilaso’s contemporaries in Renaissance Spain, even seemingly innocent words routinely served to communicate what can be productively framed as pornographic double meanings. In the “Ode ad florem Gnidi,” the poetic voice evokes a lovesick prisoner, a galley slave whose tortuous plight is cast in terms rife with sexually explicit imagery. By revisiting the graphically sexual language found in Garcilaso’s poetic corpus, this study foregrounds new possibilities for interpretation, rooted in the transparent ambiguities of humanist Iberian spheres.
