Love and its attendant passions has been the favorite subject of Spanish poetry since the time of the troubadours, medieval poets who earned their keep by singing for the people at the village square or for the nobility during royal gatherings at the palace. Composers in their own right, these court poets sang about courtly love and the bittersweet pain of unattained love for an idealized woman using the jarchas, a form of love song that was actually poetry written in very short stanzas.

It is important in the study of Spanish love poems to differentiate between poems that originated from countries outside of Spain including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, The Philippines, Puerto Rico, The United States, Uruguay and Venezuela which were written in Spanish but whose authors were not from Spain. All these poets and their respective poems have contributed in some way to the development of Spanish Poetry as a genre because they all wrote their work in Spanish albeit in the form of Spanish common to their country of origin. Although some of them wrote patriotic poems about their motherland, most of them utilized images of love to depict the sorrow of a country that has lost its freedom.

Some of these well-known Spanish poets and their popular poems are:

Carlos Alberto Garcia - Amor
Que soy
Quisiera
Yo te conozco
Olvidarte
Nestor Oscar Morris - Quiero decirte algo
Pienso solo en ti
Jorge E. Diaz Leyton - Tu
Manuel M. Mendez - Pertenencia

Focusing attention on Spanish poets who trace their origins to Spain, however; poets who lived, loved and wrote their best work within the Spanish Peninsula or the so-called ‘Poetas de España’, we come up with a list of illustrious writers whose works contributed to the development of Spanish Literature as it is today.

* Rafael Alberti - La Amante
* Vicente Aleixandre ( Nobel Laureate 1977) - Destruction of Love
* Dámaso Alonso - Hijos de la Ira
* Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - Rimas y leyendas
* Saint John of the Cross - Dark Night of the Soul
* Luis Cernuda - La realidad y el deseo
* Francisco Domene - Arrabalías
* León Felipe - Drop a Star
* Federico García Lorca - Sonetos del amor oscuro
* Luis de Góngora - Soledades
* Jorge Guillén - Cántico
* Miguel Hernández - Nanas de cebolla
* Santa Teresa de Jesús - Laughter Came From Every Brick
* Juan Ramón Jiménez (Nobel Laureate 1956) - La Poetica
* Antonio Machado - Nuevas canciones
* Jorge Manrique - Coplas por la muerte de su padre
* Emilio Prados - Veinte poemas en verso
* Francisco de Quevedo - Flores de poetas ilustres
* Ana Rossetti - Where is My Man
* Pedro Salinas - Ayer Te Besé en los Labios
* Garcilaso de la Vega - Hora de Nuestra Señora
* Lope de Vega - La Arcadia
* Esteban Manuel de Villegas - Las Eróticas
* Leopoldo María Panero - Dedicatoria

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As every Spanish translator knows, Spanish is a diverse language and can vary among speakers, depending on the region where it is spoken. There are many different regions in the world where Spanish is spoken and translators have to know how to deal with these regional varieties in their translations.

For example, Spanish spoken in Cuba is slightly different than Spanish spoken in Spain, which is slightly different from the Spanish spoken in Mexico or the Dominican Republic.

Because of the differences that exist in the Spanish of different regions of the world, Spanish translators have to know what audience their translation is intended for. However, as good as translators can be in understanding these differences, they might not know them right off the bat all the time, and therefore rely on help and translation aids to clear up any confusion they might have. This is especially true when translating slang terms and terminology.

One of the best translation aids to have is people who are from different regions so that you can ask them their advice and opinion on word usage or terms you might run across. However, sometimes translators are unable to find someone to help them out and have to use dictionaries or other written aids to help them out.

In the case where a translator has to go to a dictionary for answers, it’s good to have a series of dictionaries with regional words in them. One of the more well-known (Chicano) Mexican Spanish dictionaries available is The Dictionary of Chicano Spanish.

This dictionary, according to the preface written by a former governor of New Mexico, “contains the special colloquial, euphemistic, slang, and commonplace expressions of the speech of Mexican-American citizens in the United States, along with the spelling and pronunciation variants common to Chicano Spanish.”

While it doesn’t contain all slang terminology specific to Mexico, it does have over 9,000 “words and expressions not usually found in standard references” and it also has variant spelling for these Chicano words and phrases. The author has also included a very useful appendix listing 650 common proverbs and sayings, as well as a bibliography that you can use to find even more resources on the topic.

The book is less than 250 pages and while the latest edition was published over 10 years ago (1995), it’s still a great book to have in your Mexican Spanish dictionary collection. Also, you can find used ones for fairly cheap on Amazon.com, which make it a bargain dictionary to have.

Clint Tustison is a Spanish <--> English translator interested in helping businesses and translators better understand the translation industry. If you’re interested in how to improve your translation business or your relationship with translation companies, check out his website at http://www.spanish-translation-help.com

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Sun-Sentinel.com, FL - 10 hours ago
Dear June: Spanish is my first language and I am teaching my children to speak it. My husband is American. He knows very little Spanish except what my …

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