biography
| name: |
Zapata de Chaves, Luis de
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pronunciation:
[thapata thay c
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1526–95)
|
| biography:
| Courtier and page at the court of Felipe II, born in Llerna, SW Spain. He spent thirteen years writing the 22,000 lines in octavas reales that make up the 50 cantos of his panegyric Carlos famoso (Valencia, 1566), a pedestrian chronicle that Cervantes attributed to Luis de Ávila and consigned to the flames in the book-burning scene in Don Quijote. Zapata wrote a verse ‘Libro de cetrería’, still unpublished, and produced a mediocre translation of Horace's Ars poetica (Lisbon, 1592). His burlesque epic between the cats and the rats is the first known in its genre in Spanish. His only memorable book was the diverting Varia historia of court anecdotes, written c. 1590, which was edited as Miscelánea by Pascual de Gayangos in the Memorial Histórico Español, Vol 2 (1859). For Rodríguez Moñino, the Miscelánea is one of the hundred best books in Spanish literature. It is an excellent source for the social history of its time, and was later edited by G Horsman (Amsterdam, 1935). |
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