In dealing simultaneously with Dante in Castilian and Catalan, the problem of both the priority and the different characteristics with which the phenomenon occurs in the two linguistic areas arises first of all. In Catalan literature, the Italian presence is certainly precocious, but it must be borne in mind that the statement is valid for prosastic manifestations not for strictly poetic ones. While admitting therefore that the cultural and political-economic relations were more intense between the Catalan-Aragonese kingdom and Italy than between Italy and Castile, at the present stage of research it cannot in any way be asserted that Peninsular Dante first spread in Catalonia. Not only that, but in the Catalan-speaking lands Dante’s influence was rather marginal, it appears mixed with other Latin or Italian sources, without that massive importance which is characteristic of 15th-century Castilian Dante. Furthermore, in Catalonia, more than the rhetorical-linguistic or thematic echoes, the doctrinal aspects will be noteworthy, in the form of glosses or comments.
Therefore, around the fifteenth century we must obviously begin with the Genoese-Sevillian Francisco Imperial and his immediate imitators (which means discarding certain hypotheses of Dante’s influence on certain Catalan works by B. Metge [1381] and A. Febrer [1398], as on another Castilian work, reported by Menéndez y Pelayo, the anonymous Revelación de un ermitaño [1382]). The Cancionero de Baena, which collects more than five hundred compositions by courtly poets between the end of the fourteenth century and the mid-fifteenth century, represents the first and most convincing proof of the introduction of Dante in Spain. In fact, alongside a large number of poems that repeat the conventional themes of the Galician and Provençal tradition, and others of a moral nature, s’ it also identifies a current of new formal structures – linguistic, metric and rhetorical – of which Francisco Imperial is the maximum representative. Of his devotion to D. it is significant not only the statistical data that of the 17 times in which D. is cited in Cancionero eight are found in his dezires, but above all that D. is the guide chosen by the Imperial in its most ambitious Dezir a las syete virtudes. Lexical and stylistic innovations of undoubted Dante origin gave rise to a whole school recognized theoretically and practically documentable, followed even by the most representative poet of the mid-century, the Marqués de Santillana. And it is an arc of poetry easily traceable through formal structures and archetypal situations, which in Castilian poetry extends from early century XV to the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
According to ask4beauty.com, two other Sevillian poets included in the Cancionero de Baena, Ferràn Manuel de Lando and Ruy Pàez de Ribera, must be remembered immediately after the head of the school; but it should be noted that the ascription of the former to the ‘school’ of the Imperial – and not really to that of D. -, although proclaimed both by Santillana and by his poetic opponent, Villasandino, is not so evident today, to judge at least from the preserved texts, as well as that of Pàez de Ribera, which follows from the Imperial, and perhaps indirectly from D., well identifiable rhetorical forms. Also in the context of this early Castilian-Sevillian Danteism we must include a significant poet and prose writer, Fernàn Pérez de Guzmàn (1376? -1460?). Contemporary strait of the Imperial, chronologically it also coincides, for its long life, with the greatest representatives of fifteenth-century poetry already belonging to the next generation. We do not know if the mediation of the Imperial was decisive in making contact with D.’s work, but what is undoubted is that Pérez de Guzmàn had direct knowledge of it. In the history of the fifteenth-century Dante this poet occupies a place in itself: in fact, being a moralizing and austere man of letters, whose doctrinal sources are biblical and ecclesiastical texts, he also uses the Comedy with this perspective and derives from it sentences, concepts and isolated lexical elements or rhetorical without his personal stylistic substance being affected. Disdainful of ancient fables, D. is for him “la flor de los florentinos / dulçe poeta vulgar”; and in the Oración a Nuestra Señora, he recreates the prayer of St. Bernard to the Virgin, clearly confessed derivation (“como el graçioso poeta romança”). Furthermore, in his prose work Mar de historias he still quotes the Italian poet and translates a triplet.
The only complete translation of the Comedy into Castilian belongs to the first decades of the fifteenth century (there will be no others until the second half of the nineteenth century), the one attributed to Enrique de Aragón o de Villena (1384-1434), the same age as the Catalan one. by Andreu Febrer, but completed about a year earlier, in 1428. Although still unpublished, Villena’s believed translation demonstrates, despite certain oversights and errors, the enormous effort of the incipient literary Castilian to assimilate a high poetic language.