Poems Easily Written in a Hard Life is an English-language translation of Yun Dongju’s 40 poems. This work of literary translation is proceeded by a translator’s preface which seeks to situate the work in its specific social and linguistic context and to render the translator’s work visible.

This is an investigation of the epic poetry produced in and about the Ibero-American world during the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in trilingual perspective: in addition to the more familiar Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts, consideration is also––and, for the purposes of the thesis, above all––given to material in Latin. Latin was the third of the international literary languages of the Iberian imperial world; it is also by far the most neglected, having fallen between the cracks of modern disciplinary boundaries in their current configurations. The thesis seeks to rehabilitate the Latin-language component as a fully-fledged member of the Ibero-American epic tradition, arguing that it demands to be analysed with reference not only to the classical and classicising traditions but to those same themes and concerns––in this case, the centre|periphery binary––as are investigated for counterparts when in Spanish or Portuguese. The crucial difference is that––while the ends may be the same––the means of thematising these issues derive in form and signifying power from interactions with the conceptual vocabularies and frameworks of the Greco-Roman epic tradition. How is America represented and New World space figured––even produced––in a poetic idiom first developed by ancient Mediterranean cultures with no conception whatsoever of the continent of the western hemisphere? At the core is one such long neglected Ibero-American Latin-language epic by a figure who lived across the Iberian imperial world: the 'De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio' (Faenza, 1777) by Catalan-born Jesuit José Manuel Peramás. Peramás’s epic––which has never been the subject of a literary-critical study before––is offered as a test case: an exercise in analysing a Latin-language Hispanic epic qua Hispanic epic and setting it into Ibero-American literary-cultural context. This is to be understood in relation to the field of so-called ‘New World poetics’: an at present emergent zone of inquiry within Iberian colonial studies which until now has been developing almost completely without reference to the Latin-language portion of the corpus.