Thanks very much for your comments, Glenn and Carl. Draft B posted above.
Glenn, Rueda has many of these
coplas, and was actually better known for them than his sonnets (although he also has a fine sonnet
about coplas, in which he compares them to butterflies taking flight on four wings).
Some of them are untranslatable (at least by me) because there are just so few syllables to play with. And yes, as you noticed, there are even fewer syllables at the English translator's disposal than at the Spanish poet's, due to the mandatory elision of adjacent syllables in Spanish poetry. The most infamous example of that is the final line of Luis de Góngora's sonnet "Mientras por competir con tu cabello," in which the final line about time and decay swallowing up beauty is itself swallowed up in elisions: "en t(ie)rr(a, en) hum(o, en) polv(o, en) sombr(a, en) nada" —
in dirt, in smoke, in dust, in shadow, in nothing.
Throughout the Spanish-speaking world there is a tradition of competitions in which poets cap the previous poet's
coplas with their own, on the fly. In May 2023, the San Diego Master Chorale performed a musical setting of a such a wordsmithing contest between a Venezuelan poet and the devil:
https://sandiegostory.com/the-san-di...he-rady-shell/
Here's a recording of that work (though not by us):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re4o8FymThU
There tends to be a preference in these for assonantal feminine rhymes — perhaps to make it a little easier for find rhymes on the fly, but I suspect mainly it's to build surprise in a language in which perfect rhymes are so easy to come by that they must often be predicted by the audience, too.
Carl, I've poked at #1 again. I took a cold, hard look at the apostrophe in 2 but ultimately decided to keep it. The offending commas in 3 are gone, and I'm giving "wipe" a try.