biography
| name: |
Milà i Fontanals, Manuel
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pronunciation:
[meela ee fontanal
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1818–84)
|
| biography:
| Catalan scholar and poet, born in Villafranca del Panadés, NE Spain. Regarded as the founder of modern Spanish scholarship, he taught at Barcelona University (1846–84) and counted among his most brilliant pupils Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, who edited his Obras completas. A poet in his own right, Milà composed La Cansó del pros Bernat, described as a ‘cantar de gesta en miniatura’. He translated Goethe's Der König in Thule as well as odes of Horace, and Dante. His major contributions to early Romance literary studies are Observaciones sobre la poesía popular con muestras de romances catalanes inéditos (1853), later reprinted as Romancerillo popular catalán (1882), De los trovadores en España (1861; Barcelona, 1966), and De la poesía heroico-popular castellana (1874), which related the oldest Spanish ballads for the first time to mediaeval Spanish epic poetry. His letters are found in Epistolari (2 vols, 1922–32). |
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